WH40K: Rogue Trader's "first major update" is out, and everyone gets a free respec

A colossal new update for Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader launched last night, hitting the grimdark space-aristocrat RPG with so many changes that the patch notes are almost 17,000 words long. Fitting for a game that our Rogue Trader review called "engrossing, obscure and absolutely exhausting". It adds loads of new voiced lines, fixes everything from wonky abilities to broken quests, reworks balance, improves performance, and so much more. Enough is changed that developers Owlcat are giving everyone in your party a free respec to adjust to what the game has become.

See the Rogue Trader v1.1.28 patch notes for oh so much more, including changes affecting spoiler-y things. Here's what the developers flag as the highlights:

• Brand new full voiceover for the Prologue and companion chatter across the game;
• New visual effects and icons;
• Narrative tweaks and new reactivity options;
• Fixes for broken quests and dialogues (including the long-anticipated Price of Humanity quest fix);
• Fixes for incorrect and inconsistent epilogues;
• A massive amount of fixes for incorrectly functioning abilities and items, including those that led to silly damage multiplication;
• Balance updates, including survivability and damage buffs to Space Marines, nerfs for Officers, weapon balance, encounter balance, and changes to calculations of many stats, bonuses and difficulty modifiers, resulting in an overall smoother game experience;
• A lot of performance improvements and optimization;
• Reputation thresholds for vendors being lowered by about 20%;
• Improvements for NPC AI, reducing the cases of friendly fire and unnecessary triggering of Attacks of Opportunity;
• Co-op desync fixes and possibility to hire mercenaries during multiplayer sessions;
• QoL UI improvements, including ability sorting, recommended skills and visibility of quests and extractums on the map;
• Marazhai and Yrliet gaining access to many previously human-restricted items;

The combined changes are so major that you'll likely want (and need) to rebuild your party, so all current party members in existing saves are getting one free respec to reassign their everything. If you haven't yet reached the point in the game where respecs unlock, your party will have a special ability to get a free one-time respec. If you have, hey, you can claim a bonus free respec in the usual High Factotum way.

Though the blurb on Steam calls this the "first major update", they did previously call a December patch the "third major patch". I don't know if this is some fuzzy difference of implication between "update" and "patch" or simply if this one is so giant that it requires a full readjustment of scale. This is the new major; all previous majors are now minor.