Owlcat Games’ upcoming The Expanse: Osiris Reborn is an upcoming sci-fi RPG that looks like the Mass Effect experience we’ve all been missing. Developed by the studio behind Pathfinder and Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, the new RPG is already looking extremely impressive.
Over the last decade-plus of developing classic-style CRPGs, Owlcat Games has been celebrated for its fantastic parties of characters and how involved they can be in the narrative. For The Expanse, the studio is continuing this trend, looking specifically at the ending of Mass Effect 2.
In the ending of Mass Effect 2—spoilers for a 15-year-old game—the entire party goes on a suicide mission that could result in the deaths of your closest companions. Even characters that aren’t in your boarding party during the mission have their own objectives that they can pass or fail depending on choices you’ve made across the game.
Speaking to WCCFTech, this level of complexity and urgency to engage with your companions to keep them safe is an inspiration for The Expanse: Osiris Reborn. In one mission, compansions that aren’t in your active party end up helping you from the ship and their effectiveness changes depending on how you treat them.
“You will have two [companions] in the party, but we also wanted the others to help,” explained game design producer Yuliya Chernenko. “So, we are ensuring that even though companions might not be in your squad, they’re still engaged in the story and the mission. In this case, our companions on the ship are guiding us and helping us escape ProtoGen.”
Chernenko explains that other RPGs have a disconnect when you’re playing as team members rarely engage in activities when you’re not directly commanding them to. “It’s weird when the team is sitting on the ship and you’re risking your life on the mission,” they said.
Game design director Leonid Rastorguev explains that the suicide mission from Mass Effect 2 “was the inspiration, yes”, but it’s not just one mission. This style of game design will thread throughout the entire game, making sure that no matter what you’re doing, every companion is useful and has something to provide. While BioWare may have started it for the finale of ME2, Owlcat wants to do it across an entire, sprawling RPG.
“That’s where we want to differ from the other games in the same genre, because even if you take two companions with you, the others don’t just sit idly on the ship,” he said. “They try to be useful. They contact you over the radio to give you some advice. They might even appear in the mission in a particular place, or they might have a particular role in the mission. You need to assign them to this role so that they will have other stuff to do during the mission.”
As someone who played Mass Effect 2 on release, the final Suicide Mission was one of the highest points of gaming. Unfortunately, very few games have managed to hit that high—including BioWare themselves—and it’s great to see someone finally looking to best what the studio did a decade-and-a-half ago.
