Ground battle: Ulfar's grid move and the combat log

About this game

Developer: Owlcat Games · Publisher: Owlcat Games · Platform: PC (Steam) · Art style: Realistic 3D · Screen type: Battle / Tactics

More Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader screens in the Gallery

What to study

This frame shows the two systems the flamer shot hides: space and record. Space is a green light-grid poured over the arena, in a game whose ground fights are about cover, range bands and movement points, the reachable world is drawn onto the floor itself, priced ('5 MP') at the cursor. The record is the parchment combat log, and its prose is the design tell: damage, criticals, experience and the party's shared Momentum are all narrated as sentences with the actors' names coloured, so the fight can be re-read as a story, appropriate for a game adapted from a tabletop RPG, where the log is the dice made visible. That Momentum (raised by 40 to 190 on one kill) exists only as log text and portrait pips, never as a headline meter, is Owlcat trusting the reader over the dashboard. Frame at about 0:58 in the 1st release trailer (Steam; manual extraction at 58.0s, the dense 0.5 fps scan of the same seconds shows Idira's Lightning Arc resolving with the same log panel; the trailer cuts between turns of this one Drukhari-arena fight, and the scene-change survivor of the beat is an earlier frame of it).

Patterns

How the screen is arranged.

combat-log grid-overlay portrait-bar ability-grid

Components

Parts on screen.

Grid Log Portrait Character model Nameplate Marker Gauge Pips Build queue

Screen inventory

• a translucent green grid is projected across the whole Drukhari arena floor, the movement and targeting area made visible as light on the ground, its edge running past the bone-white architecture, with red bars over the Incubi enemies and a '5 MP' cost marker floating at the cursor's destination
• the active character is Ulfar, the Space Marine: nameplate and 45 wounds over the model at centre, his bearded portrait in the bottom frame at 45/40 with -5 and 3 counters either side, and the left queue's hover plate repeating 'Ulfar 45/40', the same fact stated on the model, in the queue and in the portrait bar
• the combat log is a parchment panel pinned at lower right and it narrates in sentences, names colour-coded: 'Ulfar deals 19 damage [reduced] to Incubus. CRITICAL HIT of Ulfar hits the Incubus with Basic for 19. Gained experience: 14. Momentum raised by 40 to 190. Incubus dies!', Momentum, the party-wide resource, is tracked in the log rather than on a meter
• the top portrait row carries small status pips beside each face, and the bottom ability grid is fully populated here, weapon icons numbered 1-6 at left, archetype abilities with Shift/Ctrl hotkey labels at right, a late-fight contrast to the emptier bar in the Release trailer's earlier battle

Top 3 colors

#030d11 23%#28443d 22%#3a6553 17%

Top three palette colors by share. The remaining colors make up the rest.

Source and credit

© Owlcat Games, Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader screenshot: Steam trailers (Release trailer / 1st release trailer), Owlcat Games, shown for design study and commentary. PlayCraft is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Owlcat Games.

Source tier 2 (publisher-released) · screenshot: Steam store page · Steam page

Source details

Fetched 2026-10-26. verified 2026-10-26: manual extraction manual-battle-58.png @ 58.0s in the 1st release trailer, MD5 892c6acad47cd4c963d4933e2c12ca5a, from the stock Steam download (101,010,018 B, MD5 5b68e624db783c46e84324eb7bd6c86b; full decode to null with -xerror exit 0, zero error lines, decode-evidence/decode-v1-full.err and decode-v1-full2.err, two independent full decodes), inspected visually at full resolution (1920x1080 native); the green grid overlay, Ulfar's nameplate and 45/40 portrait, the 5 MP marker and every line of the combat log legible; no trailer text or marketing overlay in frame

no published policy found (checked 2026-10-26); fair-use study use, takedown honored within 48h

Rights holders: see Copyright & takedown.