The Expanse: Osiris Reborn Interview: Just How Mass Effect Is It?
The Expanse: Osiris Reborn looks
so Mass Effect that some are already calling it Mass Effect: The Expanse. Based on the debut trailer and
what we know about how the game works, it’s easy to see why. And to be fair to the developers at Owlcat Games, they’re wearing their inspiration on their sleeves.
In an interview with IGN, creative director Alexander Mishulin and head of publishing Andrey Tsvetkov are up-front about the influence BioWare’s sci-fi series has had on The Expanse: Osiris Reborn. But, they insist, it’s more than just a carbon copy.
As for fans of The Expanse itself, Osiris Reborn is an exciting project as it offers a new story that sees some of the actors from the much-loved Prime Video series reprise their roles. Owlcat won’t say who exactly (I tried!), but at least we know there’s more The Expanse coming for fans still missing the show after it ended in 2022.
In fact, for me, there’s even more to be excited about when it comes to The Expanse: Osiris Reborn. I’m a big Mass Effect fan, I love The Expanse, and I love Owlcat’s Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, which is not just one of the best Warhammer 40,000 games of recent years, but one of the best cRPGs around.
Is Osiris Reborn the sweet spot in the middle of a venn diagram of Mass Effect, The Expanse, and Warhammer 40,000? Read on to find out just how Mass Effect The Expanse: Osiris Reborn really is.
IGN: This sounds a lot like Mass Effect to me, even down to the mechanics and gameplay. Is that fair to say?
Alexander Mishulin: Of course Mass Effect is a huge inspiration for the team. It was one of the biggest games of that time, of Xbox 360. It was played from cover to cover by many team members. Being game developers, it's part of our dream to build something like the thing we experienced while we were kids and that made a great impression on us.
So in part yes, but while still having Mass Effect as an inspiration, it's still very much an Owlcat game. It's our story with choices and consequences. It's more grounded and realistic. It's also mechanically more modern. And while it still has a similar target in the audience, we are providing more choices and we are more focused on a modern approach where you can make your own playstyle, make your own experience through the game, which separates us in many ways from the mechanical decisions of Mass Effect.
In terms of companions, we love companions. We love the companions in Mass Effect, and we want to give them more spotlight. We want to provide you with more opportunities to see them in action, not only in a Suicide Mission, but in most of the missions to see how they can help you go through, or maybe experience some stroke of bad luck and you will go and help them. So they’re a bigger part of the story and, in our opinion, a bigger part of our team.
We cannot deny it's [Mass Effect] an inspiration, but it's still our own game and our own dream to make a game with similar feelings and bring it to our modern audience.
IGN: Who do you play as?
Alexander Mishulin: You play as a mercenary, and there is a twist to that. When you are creating a character, you are creating a character with a sibling. As in real life, while you are similar to your brother or sister, you’re still very much different. So when you're creating a character, you start as a mercenary. I can't talk a lot about the story, but you will get in a not really great situation and will start to try to get over that.
And also mechanically speaking, when you're creating your own character, you can start creating your own playstyle. You can choose from more pre-generated characters that are thematic to various parts, like being a sniper for example. You can also mix and match everything and create something of your own that is more fitting to your character, or just more fitting to the way you play the game.
IGN: And is it like Mass Effect where you can create a male or female character who is fully voiced?
Alexander Mishulin: Yeah, the game is fully voiced, also with the main characters. You can create male and females. There is a very robust and expansive character creation with a lot of options to choose from. Nice hairstyles, nice features, everything you would expect from modern character creation.
IGN: You’ve said you will meet some of the characters people know from the show. Can you say which characters from the show people can expect to meet? Have you got any of the actors? Are they based on the likenesses of the actors from the show with voice work?
Alexander Mishulin: We can confirm that there will be actors from the show. But at this time I can't say the name of the characters or the name of the actors. I'm sorry.
IGN: But that's really exciting because they're reprising their roles, aren't they? Which given the show has ended will be exciting for fans to see them again.
Andrey Tsvetkov: Absolutely. As Alex has mentioned, some of the actors will be returning to their iconic roles and you will see them in the game.
IGN: One of the things that Mass Effect was famous for was being able to romance your party members with sex scenes. Is that something you have in your game?
Alexander Mishulin: Of course. Companions are a huge part of our games. And in all of our games we had various interactions, including romances, and there will be romances in this game too. I can't go into the specifics of which particular characters, or which particular romances of course. But such interactions will be present.
As for companions, as I already said, your sibling, either brother or sister because this character will have the same gender as your character — so it's either two brothers or two sisters — you can think about this character as your first companion and most loyal companion from the start.
As for other companions, we are not going into details on them, but they represent specialists and professionals from different fields of knowledge. And of course you'll be meeting Martian characters, Earth characters, and Belter characters. All of them will be part of your team, and this will add additional dynamic inter-relations. Because as you know, a lot of events in The Expanse are politically charged, so you can expect some of your companions to have strong opinions about your decisions regarding the politics and allegiances to particular factions.
IGN: You’ve said the game will have zero-g sections where you go out on the hull of spacecraft. Some of the best moments of The Expanse show were the zero-g scenes. It’s a grounded, hard sci-fi universe, an adult show with gore, nudity, and sex. Will the game be similar in tone to the TV show?
Alexander Mishulin: Yeah, The Expanse is very much an adult game with all of those themes, with difficult and tragic moments. Being a cover shooter, you can expect that there is a lot of graphic violence. So yeah, it's very much on par with the show.
But in terms of tone, we are exploring The Expanse from a little bit of a different side. You will be seeing dark moments, but you sometimes will be seeing light moments too, because it's not only doom and gloom everywhere. So you can expect to see the more ordinary life of the people of the various factions. Even in the hard situations there are times when people just rise up and become successful. And so you can expect to see the hardship of the Belt characters, but you can also see some of the Belt characters who become very successful and rather powerful.
It's our understanding of The Expanse universe. And it's also — sorry for the tautology — it's expanding the setting itself, allowing you to see some of the locations you know from the shows or from the books in different states or in a different light.
IGN: This game sounds very ambitious and a step up from what I know Owlcat for. It’s described as a AAA action RPG, Unreal Engine 5. When you have comparisons to Mass Effect, people will think of this as a flashy, big budget sci-fi adventure game, which is on a level we've not seen from you as a studio before. It would be great to get some insight into the scope of the project. How have you gone about changing the way the company works to be able to do something like this and meet expectations, which will be high? I know it's hard to say how long the game is, but is this a shorter, tightly constructed linear game?
Alexander Mishulin: Yeah, it's a huge step up and a big change to everything in the way we make a game, because all of our processes are really reimagined for this game. But in a lot of fields our expertise allows us to make the step, to take those risks. For example, we are pretty sure about our storytelling, about how we depict characters, depict choices, and provide you with those choices and consequences. When you have this basis, building up on that to make dialogues more cinematographic, make more cutscenes that involve the player and immerse them into the atmosphere, is far easier because you already know how to tell the story, you already know how to present those characters. So we are building up on our strong sides and expanding them to allow us to build this kind of game.
And also we of course expanded our own team as well. We hired a lot of professionals, including the people who were working on other AAA titles similar to those, especially on Cyberpunk. So we are building up on their experience as well.
In terms of scope of the project, of course it will be smaller than, say, Rogue Trader, which is an immense adventure. But you can still expect most of our staples. So it's not a linear adventure. You will be traveling through the solar system and you will be able to select whoever you want to go on that mission, or do you want to go and help your companion or continue along the story? Time is sometimes also a factor, like if you go into the location earlier or later, something will change and your previous decision will affect the location as well.
So all this intricate storytelling is very much in place and you can expect us to deliver on that. It especially works well with the politics, because there are three factions and there is a political game you will be slowly dragged into, and as you start to realize it you understand you can go with it and champion some of the factions, or you can betray them and be a double agent and learn the secrets and sell those secrets to other side.
So all this dynamic is in place, but in a shorter adventure. And this adventure is far more cinematographic. That is one part of the reason it is a little bit shorter, because we are trying to bring more action to life, more choices to life. We are not telling it like it was in a book where you read a lot, but you will see a lot of the things that were previously just written with your own eyes, and that requires a lot of effort.
IGN: Do you have a release window in mind? How far along is the project?
Andrey Tsvetkov: Obviously we have a release window in mind, but we won't be sharing it today unfortunately, just because there still might be room for wiggling a little bit, and we will be saving this one for later.
What we can say is that we've been working on this project for quite a while now. We started pre-production in 2022. We are not rushing this, right? We are taking our time to do this in the proper manner and we are very excited about how it's actually shaping up. But we will take our time to finish it and we'll be sharing the information about the release window when we are absolutely ready and we are absolutely confident that we can deliver the experience we want in this specific time window.
IGN: I've got one last question. In the world of The Expanse, humans struggle in space and space travel is difficult. Do you have any mechanics that challenge the player to cope with being in space or space travel in the same way we see in the books and the show?
Alexander Mishulin: We actually thought about adding that to the game and even designed some of those. But we decided that we will show those things, we will tell you about those things, but we will not let you play them or manage them because it leads to additional tediousness and draws your attention away from the story and characters. And we want our focus to be very much on the story and the characters.
So you will be seeing them, seeing all those elements in cutscenes. You will be seeing the moments when the Juice is coming in and the chairs go into the flat positions. You will be seeing ships that either accelerate or decelerate. You will be seeing all the somersault maneuvers and everything. But you will not be driving the ship by yourself. Of course all the trajectories for space travel will be realistic, not like going straight but taking into account gravity and gravity wells and going around the planets and everything.
We are in The Expanse so we're very much grounded and bound by realism, but we don't want realism to take a lot of fun from you. Just sometimes a little bit of fun, but not a lot of fun! But you can expect some of the flesh physics to be in play. Just an example, of course when you're having a shootout in a zero-g environment, the blood will perform in the correct way, not just splattering on the ground. There are a lot of such small details everywhere.
