Owlcat Games

Owlcat Games

Owlcat Games is a video game development studio founded in 2016 by Oleg Shpilchevskiy and Alexander Mishulin. Before The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, the studio built its reputation on complex, narrative-rich CRPGs that earned a dedicated fanbase and strong critical reception. Osiris Reborn represents a major strategic shift: their first action RPG, their first console-first title, and their first game built on Unreal Engine 5.

Founders and Early History

The studio's two founders brought decades of combined experience to Owlcat. Before founding the studio, Shpilchevskiy and Mishulin worked on several notable titles in the Russian and international game development scene, including Heroes of Might and Magic V, Silent Storm, Etherlords, Allods Online, and Skyforge. This background in both turn-based strategy and online RPGs informed Owlcat's approach to their debut title, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, which blended isometric CRPG combat with a kingdom management metagame.

Previous Titles

Each successive title showed growth in scope, polish, and commercial performance. Kingmaker was a promising but rough debut. Wrath of the Righteous was a major success, crossing the million-copies-sold threshold. Rogue Trader expanded the studio's reach into one of the largest IP universes in gaming. The trajectory from niche CRPG studio to a team capable of tackling a AAA-adjacent action RPG is a story of deliberate, sustained growth.

The Transition to Action RPG

The Expanse: Osiris Reborn is a departure from everything Owlcat has made before. The studio's three previous titles were all isometric CRPGs with party-based combat, deep character builds, and hundreds of hours of content. Osiris Reborn is a third-person action RPG with real-time cover-based combat, console-first design, and a 20-to-30-hour main story. The genres share some DNA (narrative choice, character progression, companion management) but the moment-to-moment gameplay is different.

Development on Osiris Reborn started in 2021, with nearly a full year spent on prototyping. The team built six separate combat prototypes before settling on the final model. This extended prototyping period reflects the reality that Owlcat was learning a new genre from scratch and needed to iterate extensively before they found the right feel.

Team Size and Growth

The team working on Osiris Reborn is three to four times larger than any previous Owlcat project, with over 280 people dedicated to the game. The studio as a whole has grown to more than 450 employees. For context, Pathfinder: Kingmaker was made by roughly 100 people. Scaling a studio from 100 to 450 while simultaneously changing engines, genres, and platform targets is an enormous organizational challenge.

Owlcat is also developing Warhammer 40,000: Dark Heresy simultaneously on a separate team. Running two major projects in parallel with 450+ employees is a significant step up from the studio's earlier days of shipping one CRPG at a time.

Key Personnel

Hiring and External Talent

To build a game in a genre they had never worked in before, Owlcat invested heavily in hiring experienced developers from other studios. Notably, the studio brought on developers from CD Projekt Red, the studio behind The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077. These hires brought experience with third-person action games, open-world design, and cinematic presentation. The hiring push extended broadly across the industry, targeting developers with experience in third-person shooters, console development, and Unreal Engine 5.

NASA astronaut Leroy Chiao was brought on as a consultant for the zero-gravity mechanics. Chiao provided detailed feedback on movement, breathing, eating, pressure changes, and the psychology of spacewalks based on his 229 days in space across four missions.

Engine Transition

Owlcat's previous titles were all built on Unity. The switch to Unreal Engine 5 for Osiris Reborn was driven by the demands of the project. UE5's Nanite and Lumen technologies enable the level of visual fidelity that a modern third-person action game requires. The transition involved a significant learning curve, but it also opened up capabilities that would have been difficult or impossible in their previous engine.

The most technically demanding aspect was rewriting UE5's physics and character movement systems to support full six-degrees-of-freedom movement in zero-g. UE5 assumes a flat plane with consistent gravity; making zero-g work required Drobyshevsky's team to rethink fundamental engine assumptions. Owlcat also rebuilt their proprietary "etude system" for UE5. The etude system is a narrative state-tracking tool created during the Pathfinder games that tracks thousands of variables representing the game's narrative state, quest progress, companion attitudes, and world conditions.

Partnership with Alcon Interactive Group

The Expanse IP is owned by Alcon Entertainment through its Alcon Interactive Group division, founded in 2016 by Scott Parish and Dan Offner. Alcon produced The Expanse television series and manages the IP's game rights. They previously published Telltale's The Expanse: A Telltale Series (2023) and Blade Runner interactive titles. For Osiris Reborn, Alcon approves major story beats while Owlcat retains creative control over gameplay.

Development Timeline

Development started in 2021 with a nearly year-long prototyping phase. The game was officially announced on June 7, 2025 at the Future Games Show. A behind-closed-doors pre-alpha demo was shown at Gamescom 2025. The release window is 2026, with multiple sources suggesting a 2026-2027 window. Both the Miller's Pack and Collector's Edition pre-orders include beta access, suggesting a beta period before the final release.

The Expanse: Osiris Reborn At Beta

Studio Scale For This Project

The development team assembled for The Expanse: Osiris Reborn has grown to roughly 450 people. The studio's developer-reacted beta overview explicitly framed that headcount as several times larger than the crews that shipped its prior titles. In other words, the Pathfinder and Rogue Trader generation of Owlcat is a much smaller reference point for what Osiris Reborn looks like behind the scenes, and the project is the first time the studio has worked at this scale.

From Isometric CRPGs To A Third-Person Action RPG

Owlcat's public identity was built on deeply tactical isometric role-playing games: Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, and Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader. Those titles are party-based, top-down, dice-driven systems games with long runtimes measured in hundreds of hours. Osiris Reborn is a different kind of product in almost every dimension. It is the studio's first third-person cover-based action RPG, its first combat loop built around real-time shooting rather than turn order, and the first game the studio has shipped on Unreal Engine 5 rather than its long-time Unity stack.

Because the target genre was new to the studio, the team made a point of pulling in outside talent with prior shipping experience on third-person action games at other studios. Not every person currently working on Osiris Reborn was at Owlcat during the Pathfinder years. Developers whose backgrounds sit firmly in action-game systems, console development, and Unreal Engine 5 tooling were specifically hired so that the studio was not relying only on its isometric-era muscle memory for cover combat, animation, camera, and traversal.

Open-Development Culture And The Closed Beta

Owlcat has historically run long, feedback-heavy beta cycles on its games and has been comfortable letting players see rough-edged builds early. Osiris Reborn follows that same pattern. The closed beta is deliberately positioned as a feedback vehicle rather than a store-page demo. Game Design Director Leonid Rastorguev and Lead Game Designer Grigory Ponomarev co-presented a beta-mechanics overview directly to founders, walking through exploration, skill-check systems, workbench upgrades, weapon categories, gadget customization, squad commands, and cover-based combat, and explicitly inviting players to experiment with different builds, dialogue choices, and play styles and then report back. The pair also framed combat philosophy directly: every weapon is intended to be effective in either the rifle-sized or the short hip slot, with no main-gun versus sidearm distinction, and gadgets are meant to create openings or disrupt enemy ranks rather than just trade damage.

Developers covering the beta have been clear that its current state does not reflect the finished game. Rough run animations, placeholder voice-over, UI that the team already flags as a work in progress, micro-stutter when moving through dense areas, texture-streaming hitches, and occasional pathing glitches are acknowledged as normal beta symptoms rather than final-game behavior. The beta window is being used specifically to collect feedback on combat feel, squad-command ergonomics, narrative pacing, interface design, and control schemes while there is still time to change them before launch.

Publishing Model For Osiris Reborn

The studio is both developing and publishing The Expanse: Osiris Reborn itself. Part of the funding for the final push of development flows directly from founders through the game's pre-order tiers. The Standard Pack and Deluxe Edition cover the base game and progressively larger cosmetic bonuses. The Miller's Pack and Collector's Edition sit above them, include additional in-game content, and are the two tiers that additionally grant access to the closed beta, which is why almost all current hands-on impressions of the game come from founders at those tiers rather than from general press builds.

• Standard Pack: base game only.

• Deluxe Edition: positioned between the Standard Pack and the Miller's Pack with extra armor, weapons, and similar cosmetic bonuses.

• Miller's Pack: priced at $80 during the beta period. Bundles a Miller outfit and closed-beta access.

• Collector's Edition: priced at $290 during the beta period. Includes all lower-tier bonuses plus physical goods (artbook, collector's box, faction patches, a ship figurine, stickers) and closed-beta access.

On top of the paid tiers, Osiris Reborn is confirmed as an Xbox Game Pass day-one title, meaning subscribers will be able to launch it without a separate purchase on the day the game releases.

Publishing Model At A Glance

Track Record For Backer Trust

Because the game is sold in part as a founder pre-order with higher-priced physical tiers, trust matters. Across Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, and Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, the studio has a reputation for delivering on crowdfunding promises and continuing to patch, expand, and support each title well after launch. Impressions from the Osiris Reborn closed beta routinely cite that track record as a reason backers are willing to trust the model again, even at the Collector's Edition price point.

Recognized Osiris Reborn Team Members

Two Owlcat developers have been publicly named as presenters of the beta-mechanics overview shown to founders:

• Leonid: game design director on Osiris Reborn. Leads the beta-mechanics overview, frames the purpose of the closed beta, and is the face of the design team in public-facing developer material.

• Grigory Ponomarev, Lead Game Designer on Osiris Reborn. Co-presents the beta-mechanics overview and walks through in-game examples of weapon categories, gadget slots, the workbench, squad commands, and enemy encounters.

Both developers directly invite players to experiment with different builds, try different dialogue options, and send feedback during the beta period rather than treat the build as a finished slice.

Tooling And Engine Choices

Osiris Reborn is a studio-first in its engine: it is the first Owlcat game built in Unreal Engine 5. The closed beta surfaces the usual set of Unreal Engine 5 growing pains: micro-stutters when traversing dense stations, brief texture-streaming hitches when loading into a new area, and localized frame dips during combat setpieces where cover, props, and effects are being destroyed at once. The studio is treating the beta period as a profiling and hardening window, which is one reason the build was opened to players at this stage rather than withheld until closer to launch.

On top of the usual Unreal Engine 5 surface, the project has required unusual engine work for its zero-gravity and EVA sections, for destructible cover, for squad-command AI used in the Engage system and environmental exploits, and for the fleet of weapons and gadgets shown in the beta build. Those systems also benefit from the extended beta period, because they are the areas most likely to surface feel problems that only show up once players hit them from angles the internal team has stopped noticing.

Interface Languages At Beta

The closed beta ships with six interface languages. The studio has treated localization as in-scope from the beta onward rather than gating it behind a final-game release.

Connected Topics

• Closed beta: beta access, build scope, player character presets, difficulty levels, and typical playthrough length.

• Development history: the longer arc of the studio, engine transition, prototyping phase, and milestone reveals.

• Pre-order editions: how the Standard, Deluxe, Miller's, and Collector's tiers differ and which unlock beta access.

• Character creation and progression: backgrounds, personal passives, and the crew-level XP model shown in the beta presentation.

• Companions: squad roles that are customized alongside the player character during the beta build.

• The Gemini: the player's ship and shared call sign with their twin.

• Pinkwater Security: the mercenary company the player works for during the beta story mission.

• Story and setting: how the beta fits into the larger Osiris Reborn narrative.