I've previously mentioned how The Expanse: Osiris Reborn was among the most exciting Summer Game Fest 2025 announcements as far as I'm concerned, being a huge fan of Mass Effect, The Expanse, and Owlcat's roleplaying games.
Checking out a hands-off mission presentation at Gamescom 2025 only amplified all those feelings. The Mass Effect inspiration is clear and even confirmed in my subsequent chat with Game Design Director Leonid Rastorguev and Game Design Producer Yuliya Chernenko. Furthermore, the team is also paying justice to this amazing hard sci-fi IP. They're collaborating closely with the license holders at Alcon Interactive, who are reportedly checking and approving every major story beat.
Of course, the game's story is fully original, but it unfolds in parallel with the story of James Holden and his crew on the Rocinante. Players will see the same major events in the solar system, impacting everyone and therefore the player character and his companions as well, but they will not participate in most of the stuff. They have their own enemies and challenges. For example, they also fight with the ProtoGen private corporation, but it's a different branch from those encountered by Holden and the others from the books and TV show.
That aside, it helps that The Expanse: Osiris Reborn is already looking solid. The developers said it was a recent Pre-Alpha build from no more than two weeks before the German convention, and yet I did not notice any major glitches or even frame rate slowdowns. Combat looked fairly tight, too, with a mix of third-person shooting basics (cover system included) and various abilities that can be triggered to disrupt enemies, including some environmental 'opportunities' that are only available to companions.
There were no announcements regarding the release window, but I'm fairly confident The Expanse: Osiris Reborn isn't coming out in 2026, given its current Pre-Alpha status. There's no rush, though. The next Mass Effect likely isn't coming before 2029 or thereabouts. Anyway, below you'll find the transcribed conversation with Leonid and Yuliya.
Leonid Rastorguev: In the demo, we already have two playstyles. There will be many more in the final game than those two, and those starting playstyles do not limit how you're going to develop your character, so you can go wherever you want after that. So you can switch to shortgun, maybe, or go fully into hacking or something else. It's a pretty open system. It's not like a restrictive one.
Do you have a skill system in The Expanse: Osiris Reborn?
Yuliya Chernenko: Something like that, yeah. However, we cannot discuss that because it's still in some iteration.
Leonid Rastorguev: This demo is a mission on Pinkwater Station. You've just escaped Eros Station with your identical sibling Jay and you returned to your home base office to report to your chief regarding the incident and what has happened to you and your team on Eros.
Your character will be fully customizable; you will be able to go through different appearances, and also, you will be able to choose between the Martian origin, the Belter Origin, and the Earther origin. They are all humans, but they have different physical appearances. Belters are born into low gravity: they are tall, but their bones are brittle, so they are slim and tall. Earthers are the shortest due to the Earth's high gravity, and Martians are somewhere in between. They are also very bulky because they train a lot. Of course, you can choose to be a male or female, and Jay will also reflect this option because they are your biological twin. So, if you choose to play as a girl, Jay will also be female.
Yuliya Chernenko: They will even have similar facial features. Maybe just the hair will be a little bit different.
Leonid Rastorguev: There's a lot of stuff going on in the station. There are some minor scenes, like someone discussing Holden and the Canterbury.
Yuliya Chernenko: You can explore the area and learn more about the daily life of the officers and the mercenaries you work with. Some conversations will be started by our companions, and some conversations can be triggered by our actions. Let's talk to Larry here. This dialogue is entirely optional. You can skip it to go straight to the main objective if you want. You can see he's a Belter, he's thin and tall. He's using unique gestures that are predominantly used by Belters because they live in space and to communicate, they use those a lot.
They also speak differently, like in the books and TV show, I assume.
Leonid Rastorguev: Yes. Larry does not use their Creole here because he works in a space where all the races come together. He works a lot with Earthers and Martians, so he uses their standard English, but some characters on Ceres station will use a lot of Creole.
Yuliya Chernenko: Unlike the TV series, we are trying to show cultures closer to the books.
Leonid Rastorguev: Larry told us he wants us to deliver his paintings to his mom on Ceres. It's a side quest, nothing too big, so your choices here won't have much effect, but still, it's a quest. Depending on how you do it, there are still some differences.
Yuliya Chernenko: This is our ship. You will learn later in the dialogue that we appropriated it - I wouldn't say stole - while escaping from Eros. It will be an important part of our story.
Leonid Rastorguev: In The Expanse, there is a thing called the right of salvage. If you get the ship and kill everyone who owned it before, it's technically yours now, but you need to change the transponder. Before the start of this demo, we actually met our companion Zafar, who agreed to help us change the ship's transponder. He's currently on the ship doing the technical stuff while we explore and debrief the chief of Pinkwater Station.
This is also one of the side characters; she's basically the merchant on the station. You can talk with her about a lot of stuff that's happening. It's just a chit chat and nothing major, but you can learn about some guys from the station and their habits. You can actually use her as a vendor and buy some stuff. We will buy this shotgun here. Those materials are used for crafting, which is basically upgrading your weapons, armor, and gadgets. We haven't shown it yet because it's still in progress.
Yuliya Chernenko: This is our Pre-Alpha version, so everything you see can change.
Leonid Rastorguev: Now, we're going to meet the chief of this Pinkwater security station, and we're getting to the real choice of this mission. We can either try to convince the chief to take one for us, defend the station, and help us fight back against ProtoGen, or we can say that we will find our way out ourselves to avoid risking the lives of the station inhabitants.
Do you need a talent to do the convincing?
Leonid Rastorguev: Yeah, it says persuasion, and we have enough to talk him into doing that.
Yuliya Chernenko: If we didn't, we would fail to persuade.
Leonid Rastorguev: It's not a dice roll; it's more like a flat check. If you have it, you have it. So, he has decided to fight back with us. Now, we need to get to the ship and run away. We are the threats. If we're not there, they will not kill everyone.
Yuliya Chernenko: You will see that ProtoGen is fighting. Because we decided to resist, our guys from Pinkwater will help. This is basically our combat. You can see we have shooting and a range of abilities. The enemies have different patterns. Jay, as our sibling, is helping us, though it's not our usual mission because we have only Jay in the party. Usually, you will have two active companions.
Leonid Rastorguev: Here, you can see we have a destruction system. You can actually demolish a lot of stuff, and it's not entirely cosmetic because some of the covers can also be demolished, exposing characters to damage.
Yuliya Chernenko: This works both ways, so your enemies can also destroy your cover.
Do you have friendly fire in The Expanse: Osiris Reborn?
Leonid Rastorguev: We are still working on the decision about friendly fire. We are still iterating on that part. It might be related to the difficulty level.
Yuliya Chernenko: This is kind of a teaser of our main idea on how to use all the companions. You will have two in the party, but we also wanted the others to help. 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.
Leonid Rastorguev: 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. 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.
Kind of like in Mass Effect 2's iconic suicide mission.
Leonid Rastorguev: That was the inspiration, yes.
Yuliya Chernenko: Basically, the idea is that we wanted you to feel like a team, and it's weird when the team is sitting on the ship and you're risking your life on the mission. They are helping, working together.
Leonid Rastorguev: Here, you can see we didn't have the science skill, so we can't use this one. There's a failed skill check. Depending on how you level your character and your companions, you will have different skills, and with different depths in the skill. You might be able to use some of these skills and skill checks. You can't block yourself out of the story missions if you fail some skill checks. Still, sometimes it might be something very simple, like a chest locker, or it might be that it unlocks a whole new area of the map with some optional content.
Now, we can ambush the next group of enemies. We could have chosen the most straightforward approach, but we decided to ambush, and so now we have the opportunity to use this mechanic. This is what we call combat opportunities: exploiting structural weaknesses to our advantage. We can ask Jay to do it.
Yuliya Chernenko: It is a unique feature to companions, basically. Because you'll have different companions, the kind of opportunities they might be able to use might differ. But what's important is how we emphasize companions during combat scenarios.
Leonid Rastorguev: You can also see that different enemies have different mechanics. There was a guy with a shield, which can be destroyed. Now, Zafar is actually advising us to go outside, on the outer surface of the station, to avoid fighting in the corridors, which are already filled with soldiers, and we are trying to go around.
Yuliya Chernenko: That means we're actually going into space, which is an integral part of The Expanse. We have these zero-G space segments. We put a lot of effort into our zero-G space experience and are still putting a lot of effort into it.
Leonid Rastorguev: You still hear the sound because you're actually touching the station's surface, so you're getting all the vibration through your boots. You can also walk on any surface. If you are walking on a surface that is different at a different angle, the camera will adjust slightly to make it easier for you.
You can also see that the locomotion is slightly different because we're running in big sliding jumps. It's easier to do it this way in a low-gravity environment.
Yuliya Chernenko: Because it's a The Expanse game, we also have magnetic boots, which are essential to staying alive in zero-G.
Leonid Rastorguev: The sounds are different and the visuals of the blood is different because not only is there no gravity, but it is also a vacuum. By the way, here's an ability to show the enemies behind the covers and with my other ability that adds armor-piercing bullets, I can actually shoot them through the cover, because I see where they are.
There's no melee combat build, though, right?
Leonid Rastorguev: No, we will have a close combat build, but mostly with the shotgun or stuff like that.
Can you take down enemies stealthily from behind?
Leonid Rastorguev: No.
Yuliya Chernenko: In zero-G combat, you have different angles. Sometimes it might make your life easier, sometimes it might make your life a little more challenging. Now Leonid's character got downed, but he didn't die and asked Jay to revive him.
Leonid Rastorguev: You can also see that the grenade I used is not ballistic. It doesn't use gravity to go down. It has its own thrusters because otherwise, I wouldn't be able to use it in space.
What we're doing now in The Expanse: Osiris Reborn is extremely dangerous because the maneuvering thrusters are quite weak. If you miscalculate and go off course, you'll be lost in space forever and die.
Yuliya Chernenko: We're trying to be as hard sci-fi as possible, so we have the Coriolis force. That's why physics is dragging the character to the side, because the station rotates to the right. Space is a dangerous place.
Leonid Rastorguev: Obviously, we are skipping parts of this mission's exploration and some additional loot just because we don't have time to show everything. Now we have another choice: Zafar is saying they will help us from the ship, but Jay also spotted a hatch nearby. We can choose either to wait for Zafar to do something or just to escape now. But we will trust Zafar. He will actually appreciate it later, because if you don't trust him, he will be disappointed.
Is there a relationship system with the other companions in The Expanse: Osiris Reborn?
Leonid Rastorguev: It's not like a mechanical system, but the game has a lot of choices and consequences that affect your companions, yes. We don't have 'this guy will remember it.' It's more organic.
Yuliya Chernenko: And we're still in the development with companions, so we cannot talk too much into details.
Leonid Rastorguev: We can see the consequence of our earlier choice here. The station tried to fight back against ProtoGen soldiers, and that led to some Pinkwater soldiers dying. If choosing otherwise, there wouldn't be destruction and death here; they would survive. There is a lot of environmental storytelling and some notes to read, just to see how the station worked before, how they lived, and how they trained.
You can read some notes, but some are encrypted. If we had the hacking skills, we would hack the computer and get some more information, maybe even something valuable. But there are still some other things to be found in this area. For example, we can find the code for the armory and grab something useful there. However, it's kind of empty now because our colleagues were collecting weapons to defend themselves, but there is still some stuff left.
Would it be more stocked if you made the other choice?
Leonid Rastorguev: Yes, absolutely. Now, ProtoGen is irritated that we're getting away and their leader sends their best troops. Those are highly advanced guys with lasers and a protomolecule armor which we cannot penetrate with bullets, so they are basically unkillable for us. But Larry came to our help and closed the blast doors, so they can't reach us.
Are there many weapons in The Expanse: Osiris Reborn?
Leonid Rastorguev: A couple dozen, maybe more.
Yuliya Chernenko: Definitely enough to find something that suits you and your play style, taking into account different builds. By the way, cover works usually really well because your health regenerates after a while, but if you sit too long, it may be dangerous because enemies move through the combat arenas and try to flank you.
Do you already have different difficulties?
Yuliya Chernenko: Yes, we have Normal and Hard even now in this demo. We are playing on Normal.
Leonid Rastorguev: There will also be a Story mode.
Yuliya Chernenko: Some of these decisions will have long-lasting impacts on the game. You never know which one, though.
Leonid Rastorguev: This is our ship; Zafar is on it. We need to get on the ship, and we're trying to undock it. We tried to release the clamps holding it, but one malfunctioned and had to be rebooted manually. We'll go down to manually reboot the clamp, and then we will be free to run into the ship and escape the station. Zafar is helping us clear the way from the spaceship with a PDC (point defense cannon).
Yuliya Chernenko: This is another example of how companions not in the party might influence what's happening during the mission.
Do you know if the book's original authors (Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham) are aware of The Expanse: Osiris Reborn and if so, are you getting some feedback from them?
Yuliya Chernenko: We can say that we're working closely with Alcon at this point and they are quite satisfied with what's happening for now.
How old is this The Expanse: Osiris Reborn build you're showing at Gamescom 2025? Is it recent?
Leonid Rastorguev: It's recent, yeah. I think we finished it two weeks ago.
Yuliya Chernenko: Since we moved from cRPG games to triple-A ARPG, development takes longer. If you want to make any change, you need several days, maybe weeks, so any change takes much longer now. We have to be more cautious about the decisions we're making.
Did you work on Owlcat's previous cRPG projects?
Leonid Rastorguev: I did not. I came for The Expanse.
Yuliya Chernenko: I worked on Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. I started as a game designer there.
What kind of the differences did you find in the switch?
Yuliya Chernenko: Everything, actually. It's very similar and a lot of our previous experience is helping us, but at the same time, sometimes what you think was working in a cRPG game and you think should still work in this type of game, it doesn't. It could be different reasons, just because of the budget, as everything is more expensive, or just because the way the storytelling is done is different. We've added cinematics, which have become a huge part of our storytelling. We had to learn new tricks to do that via cinematics and not this big book-style text.
Leonid Rastorguev: In terms of process, it's a totally different team and different tech because we are doing an Unreal Engine game and our previous games were in Unity.
Yuliya Chernenko: And it's console first for instance, now, so that's why we're showcasing it with the gamepad. Our previous games were mostly PC games, so there was also a mentality shift.
Can you share the estimated length of The Expanse: Osiris Reborn?
Leonid Rastorguev: Last time I checked, it was about the length of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. So you can expect 20, 30 hours of gameplay.
Yuliya Chernenko: It's definitely not as long as our previous games, but it will still be emotion-packed.
There's also going to be some side content, right?
Leonid Rastorguev: Sure, The Expanse: Osiris Reborn is not a linear story-driven game. There is a lot of side content. This mission is still very early in the game, so you cannot skip it. It will be right after the Eros mission, but after that, you will have a solar system to explore. You can go to Earth, Luna, Mars, Ceres Station, Ganymede, and IO; there is a lot of stuff.
Is any of that side content companion-specific?
Leonid Rastorguev: I think it's safe to say there will be some companion-specific content, yeah.
Yuliya Chernenko: Companions are our main focus in general.
I previously spoke with Alexander Mishulin in a remote interview and he told me that there is also romance in The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, right?
Yuliya Chernenko: Yes, definitely. We can't say who, with whom, and how, but romance is a must-have.
Leonid Rastorguev: We can say that not every companion will be romanceable.
Speaking of companions, can you upgrade them in some way?
Leonid Rastorguev: You can change some of their equipment, including weapons. They have their own abilities, and you can also level them up and give them skill points.
Yuliya Chernenko: It will be less versatile in comparison to your main character's progression, though.
Thank you so much for your time.
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