The Expanse: Osiris Reborn beta had a Mass Effect on me

A studio reinventing itself

Owlcat built its reputation on Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous and Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, both beloved CRPGs with complex systems and top-down combat. The Expanse: Osiris Reborn throws that template out entirely. This is a fully voiced, motion-captured, third-person action RPG set in The Expanse universe created by James S.A. Corey, covering events that run parallel to the first three seasons of the show. 

The comparisons to Mass Effect are unavoidable, and Owlcat has not tried to dodge them, but the studio is also aiming for something more grounded. The Expanse is hard sci-fi, which means no shortcuts, no alien magic, and no shorthand. Every character earns their identity through where they came from and what they believe, whether they are an Earther, Martian, or Belter.

Game Design Director Leonid Rastorguev has described zero-gravity combat as the team's proudest achievement and biggest technical hurdle, and having played the beta, that claim holds up. The team, three to four times the size of previous projects, running on Unreal Engine 5 with Nanite and Lumen, is evident in every corridor and every exterior view.

Getting into Pinkwater-4

The Calm Waters mission opens in familiar Owlcat fashion. You land somewhere unfamiliar, you meet someone who knows the area better than you, and you are immediately presented with decisions that feel like they carry weight.

That person is Zafar, voiced by Kerem Erdinc, a calm and measured mechanic who chooses his words carefully and can, as the studio has noted, be surprisingly poetic when he does speak. He greets you on Pinkwater-4 after the Eros incident, guides you through the station, provides fire support, and at one point plans your evac route as the situation deteriorates. 

The writing in these early exchanges is tight. Zafar does not feel like a tutorial device. He feels like someone who has been working in difficult places for a long time and is quietly assessing whether you are worth his trust.

The interior of Pinkwater-4 is detailed in the way The Expanse has always insisted its sets should be. Cluttered corridors, warning signs on every surface, functional tech readouts that look like real engineering interfaces rather than game UI dressing. 

The mission objective reads "Find a way to get off the station" and later shifts to "Bypass Protogen," which gives you a clear sense of who your antagonists are and why you are running from them. Protogen, for those unfamiliar with the series, is the corporate entity behind the horrors on Eros. Encountering them this early sets up the stakes cleanly without requiring prior knowledge of the books or show.

Combat that rewards patience

Inside the station, combat is built around cover and repositioning. You carry a primary weapon and a sidearm, and an active pause system lets you slow the action down to assess the situation and issue orders to your squad. You take Zafar into the field in the beta, and the game makes clear that even crew members not part of your active squad can offer support from a distance, disabling systems or drawing enemy attention through what Owlcat calls the Exploits system. 

Each companion carries one of four Exploit categories: Precision, Demolition, Malfunction, or Cyber-attack, all tied to their personality and background. While Zafar’s calm, analytical presence might suggest a precision role, the beta reveals his official category is Malfunction. He uses a mix of EMP devices and automated turrets to disrupt enemy tech, a skillset that ties directly into his newly confirmed backstory as a former MCRN engineer

The combat feels responsive on both controller and keyboard. Enemies use cover intelligently, and staying still is punished quickly. It is not as immediately spectacular inside the station as it becomes once you get outside, but it is solid, and it rewards the kind of deliberate approach that Owlcat's games have always favoured.

The zero-g sections change everything

This is where The Expance: Osiris Reborn truly distinguishes itself. When the mission takes you out onto the hull of Pinkwater-4 and into open space, the game shifts into something genuinely exciting. Zero-gravity movement is fluid and disorienting in the best possible way. Pushing off surfaces, reorienting in three dimensions, and navigating the exterior of a space station against a hard vacuum backdrop with enemy threats closing in from multiple angles is a completely different experience from the interior corridors. 

Owlcat has described zero-g as the section of development that caused the most technical headaches. The environments out here are also stunning, the kind of visuals that make you stop moving for a moment just to look.

Most weapons, abilities, and gadgets work the same in zero-gravity as they do inside, which means the combat system does not collapse when the floor disappears. That consistency is important. The station hull sequences feel dangerous and open in a way that interior combat cannot replicate. If this is what early missions look like, the later game's setpieces across Ganymede, Ceres, Mars, and Luna are going to be something.

A full companion roster to come

The beta primarily features Zafar, but Owlcat has officially confirmed a total roster of seven companions. Joining J (your twin), Zafar, Michael, and Regina are three recently unveiled crewmates: Teo, a boisterous Lunar combat medic; Aleesha, an electronic warfare specialist; and Polly, a young Belter support fighter who rounds out the squad’s tactical diversity. Each companion's personality is directly wired into their combat Exploit, which is exactly the kind of design integration that Owlcat does better than most.

The dialogue system and choice architecture from Owlcat's previous games are present, rebuilt for Unreal Engine 5. The studio has confirmed that the same etude system used in Wrath of the Righteous and Rogue Trader, which tracks every player's decision and maintains narrative continuity across the entire game, is running under the hood here. 

Choices made in the beta mission have consequences, and Owlcat has asked players to think carefully when making decisions that affect the lives of others. The universe never tells you if you did right or wrong, they note. That is very much The Expanse talking.

Character faces in some cutscene moments look a little flat compared to the quality of the environments around them. The gap between the level of detail in the station interiors and the facial animation in certain dialogue sequences is noticeable. That said, this is a beta, and Owlcat has been explicit that the build does not represent the final quality of the product.

I went into this beta with no particular attachment to Mass Effect and no pressure about the AI development question, having tested the build on a Lenovo LOQ 16IRH8 running an Intel Core i7-13620H and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 on a 16-inch 165Hz WQXGA display. On balanced settings, it ran well, with some stutter here and there - which is expected within a beta testing environment.  

The more interesting question for The Expanse: Osiris Reborn is whether Owlcat can build something that stands on its own rather than living in the shadow of BioWare's legacy. Based on what is here, the bones are strong enough to do exactly that. The Expanse universe deserves a game that feels like The Expanse, not a reskin of something else, and this beta suggests Owlcat knows that. Spring 2027 cannot come fast enough.