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Owlcat Games
March 18, 2026 at 02:36 AM
Major expansion: added founders (Shpilchevskiy/Mishulin), pre-Owlcat credits, Dark Heresy mention, full key personnel table, etude system, development start date, six prototypes
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.
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.
Title | Year | Engine | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
Pathfinder: Kingmaker | 2018 | Unity | Studio debut. Isometric CRPG based on the Pathfinder tabletop RPG. Featured kingdom management alongside party-based combat. Launched in a rough state but was significantly improved through post-launch patches and DLC. |
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous | 2021 | Unity | Sequel to Kingmaker. Featured a mythic progression system. Sold over one million copies. Widely regarded as one of the best CRPGs of its generation and the game that established Owlcat as a top-tier CRPG developer. |
Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader | 2023 | Unity | First game outside the Pathfinder universe. Set in the Warhammer 40,000 setting. Expanded the studio's audience and demonstrated their ability to work with established IPs from other companies. |
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 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 fundamentally 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.
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.
Name | Role | Background |
|---|---|---|
Oleg Shpilchevskiy | Co-Founder | Co-founded Owlcat in 2016. Background in Heroes of Might and Magic V, Silent Storm, Etherlords, Allods Online, and Skyforge. |
Alexander Mishulin | Co-Founder / Creative Director | Leads the creative vision for Osiris Reborn. Background in the same titles as Shpilchevskiy. Has compared the game's build philosophy to Dark Souls. |
Leonid Rastorguev | Game Design Director | Oversees mechanics, systems, and progression design. Responsible for translating CRPG design into action RPG format. Cited Mass Effect 2's suicide mission as companion permadeath inspiration. |
Yuliya Chernenko | Producer | Manages the production pipeline for Osiris Reborn across the 280+ person team. |
Alexey Drobyshevsky | CTO | Led the engine transition from Unity to UE5. Oversaw the extensive zero-gravity physics rewrites required for the game. |
Sergey Eybog | Audio Director | Leads the sound design team. Detailed the vacuum sound approach in a March 2026 developer diary. Responsible for the game's approach to sound in space. |
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.
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.
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 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.
