Through this summer’s deluge of game announcements, nothing made me sit up quite so fast as Owlcat revealing it’s making an Expanse RPG. One that seems, from its initial trailer at least, heavily inspired by Mass Effect. Much as I’ve enjoyed PC gaming’s recent return to highly complex CRPGs, watching the trailer made me realise how much I miss a bit of BioWare-style guns & conversation. The Expanse: Osiris Reborn seems to channel that era of roleplaying in all the right ways.
Now, Osiris Reborn’s creative director Alexander Mishulin has addressed the comparisons directly. Speaking to Polygon, Mishulin said that he was “humbled” by players aligning Owlcat’s latest with BioWare’s beloved sci-fi series. “Mass Effect is a great inspiration for us because it’s an iconic game for [the] Xbox 360 generation, and a lot of [Owlcat] team members played it in their youth,” he explained. “It would be impossible to deny that Mass Effect has [had] a lot of impact on us as game developers.”
That said, Mishulin stressed Osiris Reborn won’t completely mimic Mass Effect’s design. This is particularly the case with branching narrative. “We make our story a little bit differently. We’re making more choices and consequences, and we want to make sure that this game still has a lot of them provided with a lot of agency,” Mishulin said.
One example Mishilin cited is how players can choose a different planetary origin for their character, and the way this plays into how other characters perceive you. “If you happen to be playing a character of Mars origin or Earth origin—and you will be able to select your origin from the start—you will not be very welcomed on Ceres,” Mishulin said.” But if you will be playing Belter origin, you will be much more welcomed, and you will have more opportunities, more places to visit, probably some new side quests.”
Finally, Mishulin stated that Owlcat is looking to streamline Mass Effect’s template, observing that players are now “accustomed to a lot more convenient user interfaces, convenient approaches to gameplay”. Apart from making me feel astonishingly old, I genuinely don’t know how you can make an RPG more streamlined than, say, Mass Effect 2, the whole point of which was to sand down the edges of the original.
In any case, I’m glad someone is picking up Mass Effect’s baton. It’s going to be a while until we get a new entry in the series from BioWare itself, and that’s assuming it ever comes out at all. Given how severely EA cut back the studio following the underperformance of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, another game from BioWare is by no means guaranteed.