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#62403163 · 18 Dec 2025, 11:19 · · პროფილი · პირადი მიმოწერა · ჩატი
[B]The Expanse: Osiris Reborn developers are pushing fidelity and scale to the next level[/B ]
The developers at Owlcat Games have proven themselves when it comes to creating deep and engaging RPGs we can sink dozens of hours into. However, the upcoming third-person action role-playing game (ARPG) The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, based on the famous TV show, represents new territory for the studio.
Following the game’s explosive reveal earlier this year, Game Design Director Leonid Rastorguev and CTO Alexey Drobyshevsky sat down with us to discuss the process of making the jump to Unreal Engine and creating a new type of role-playing experience after huge classical RPG hits like Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous and Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader.
“It’s about narrative,” Rastorguev answers when asked about what’s been carried over from the studio’s past games. “We still make an RPG, and choices matter. We had a kind of tech on our previous game that was responsible for keeping track of every decision players make and picking them up to make a proper reaction—choices and consequences systems, basically. We’re still primarily an RPG. We decided to carry the idea of the same tech into a new project. We, of course, had to adapt it to new tech.”
At first glance, veteran RPG players (or fans of the show who aren’t familiar with the genre) might assume The Expanse: Osiris Reborn is more of a cinematic action game, but Owlcat isn’t suddenly leaving its roots behind. Drobyshevsky adds, “Our dialogue editor in our previous games is basically the same as in The Expanse, except here we just rerolled it for Unreal Engine. We also have this thing that Leonid would call internally a ‘tube system’ that keeps track of all the narrative states. That’s like a big thing we took from our previous projects.”
Unreal Engine has been commonly associated over the years with more action-oriented games, but we’ve seen all kinds of projects across a variety of genres use it and flourish in recent times. Going into The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, did this engine offer a number of advantages from the get-go for the type of RPG they wanted to make?
“The sequencer in Unreal Engine is a really, really advanced system for cutscenes, and we use it a lot. The whole MetaHuman system…it’s not just the engine, it’s the whole setup with art creation tools and importers and all that. A funny thing, when we chose the engine, was that it’s also very good at networking. But then we decided our game isn’t really working that well as multiplayer, so we scrapped it,” Drobyshevsky says.
Rastorguev agrees that "it’s very well suited" for third-person shooters. He also adds: "Unreal offers a lot of mechanics and solutions out of the box (built-in), which allowed us to quickly put together a third-person shooter prototype to test our hypotheses. Later on, we replaced some of those solutions with our own implementations."
By and large, both developers agree the biggest change for them was the larger scale of the project and the higher level of visual fidelity rather than the engine switch. Most of the challenge has come from working on more assets, which are far more complex. “It goes through more different stages now than before, so it’s kinda hard to manage. That doesn’t depend on the engine. Going to a project several times the size will bring these kinds of problems,” Drobyshevsky says.
For Rastorguev, it’s also “about production value” after Owlcat’s previous games had a more “book-like approach,” which made the entire process easier. “We could write a lot of stuff and just leave it, like emotions, comments, dialogues. In The Expanse, you need to show every emotion, every object passed from one character to another. That’s a lot of details to actually produce; they change the scale and development cycle.” Needless to say, this also altered the size of the team of developers behind the game. "It’s about three or four times bigger than the teams behind previous games were," he continues. "Bearing in mind this, it’s still about production quality." Osiris Reborn is a level-up in terms of presentation, but the developer confirms it's shorter in terms of "overall playtime" compared to previous projects.
Taking on a grounded science fiction property set in the 24th century also means very specific combat scenarios arise as groups of mercenaries clash inside space stations. The Expanse provides several unique opportunities to play with the technology and game design, so we asked both developers about the part of the game they’re the most proud of so far. They both agree it’s “the whole zero-gravity thing,” which is quite present on the trailers and previews released so far.
“It was really hard for the game designers,” Drobyshevsky confirms. “And it was also really hard for the programmers. Unreal Engine, and every single engine, assumes that there’s a plane that you work on, and when you have the zero-gravity segments where everything then comes from any direction, where you can stand on different surfaces... It took a lot of work and rewriting major parts of the engine to make this work. It was a significant achievement for us.”
Rastorguev adds the original plan was to make the zero-gravity sections a “side feature” and not a core part of the experience, but the team decided to spend more time with missions and environments that put all of that hard work to good use. “Disorientation and motion sickness are two challenges we had to overcome.”
The solutions? “Magnetic boots instead of the freedom of free flight in 3D space; it was too uncomfortable for the player. And to fight the motion sickness, we had to iterate the camera several times. We developed this approach that negates all the motion sickness effects even though you can change the perspective quite often.” Fans of the original Dead Space might notice some common gameplay elements in this one as they walk into the void.
The design director also highlights how The Expanse: Osiris Reborn’s RPG system is built. Though we haven’t learned about the specifics yet, he confirms they decided to “turn from the class system to a more open approach where you can shape your build freely on the go.” As for companions, it’s less about taking control of them and more about their impact on the combat through orders (think of Mass Effect). More on that will be revealed in the future.
Expanding on the matter of the higher level of fidelity the team has been able to achieve with Unreal Engine, Drobyshevsky confirms a lot of it is going into cinematics, but also underlines the importance of geometry and lighting technology like Nanite, Lumen, etc. “It comes with a lot of challenges, but it does give us a final image that’s a lot better and gives us a lot of interesting options,” he says.
Going more focused and pushing for a far more detailed and cinematic game typically means the scope is tighter, but Rastorguev teases the game does open up more than players might expect. “We’ve shown at Gamescom a mission on the Pinkwater Security space station, and that’s part of the first couple of hours of the game, which are quite linear. Right after that, you get freedom of choice. You can actually explore the solar system and decide where to go next, visit various planets, and missions. There’ll be side content that’s optional to your story. That’s mostly what I can say at the moment.”
At this point, we haven’t seen much of these planets as presented in the game. Those who have watched The Expanse might have a whole wishlist of worlds and locations they’d like to visit in-game with their crew of specialists. It’s been confirmed we’re going to Ganymede, Ceres, Mars, and Luna at least. But we’ll have to wait before seeing them in all their glory. About how they were brought to life, Drobyshevsky teases the team “had enough tools in the engine” to fully set up the lighting, the environment, and most of the post-processing. “We had to add some stuff, but not much.”
The footage shown so far promises a great-looking ARPG, and all the systems described to us sound similarly ambitious, but getting there wasn’t a smooth ride. “Managing a project of this size, the amount of files... Unreal actually is very opinionated about what source controls you can use and how you use them. It’s not very compatible with our internal processes. That added a lot of challenges. It’s not directly visible in the game in any way.”
Regardless, the team has pushed through, with Rastorguev also pointing out the work done around art assets and loading: “Filling the locations with final graphics makes it very heavy in terms of computing speed, and so we had to adapt the workflows to keep developers able to iterate on the location within reasonable times because... if you just load the whole locations with final graphics, it takes loads of time.” So far, it’s looking like all that work is paying off. We can’t wait to blast off into the unknown with a new group of misfits.
The Expanse: Osiris Reborn doesn’t have a release date yet, but you can wishlist it on the Epic Games Store.
This post has been edited by 4L3X on 18 Dec 2025, 11:21
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The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, Owlcat Games
