Can the Upcoming ‘Expanse’ Game Avoid ‘Mass Effect’s’ Biggest Mistake?

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A main theme of the nine-book sci-fi series The Expanse is that sometimes you may never know the consequences of a choice you made. The universe, utterly indifferent black box that it is, “never tells us if we did right or wrong,” as the character Naomi Nagata puts it in The Expanse TV show.

That’s the line the developer of the upcoming Expanse video game has adopted as its own slogan. The Expanse: Osiris Reborn is set to release in spring 2027. It’s being developed by Owlcat Games, the Cyprus-based developer known for dense role-playing games like Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader.

Osiris Reborn is a third-person shooter and role-playing game where the player slips into the boots of a spaceship captain leading a found-family crew of misfits across the far-future solar system. You fight bad guys and float around in zero-gravity environments in the hard-science setting of The Expanse books and show. Dialog options and choice trees baked into cutscenes let you shape the narrative and change the outcomes. As many people have pointed out, it sounds very much like the Mass Effect video game series.

This will be the studio’s first third-person shooter, a departure for a company known for its top-down role-playing games. Owlcat Games beefed up its staff to build Osiris Reborn, and has faced criticism after releasing a beta version of the game in April. Players lauded the combat and visuals, but many found the story and voice acting lacking. (Apparently the game does not yet incorporate “Belter creole,” a language construct used by characters in The Expanse that has become a beloved part of the series.) It’s important to note that this was indeed a beta test, and the company has said it is aiming to fix some issues players have called attention to, even recasting a voice actor.

The Expanse is a complicated property to adapt, given that Osiris Reborn takes place around the same time as the first and second books of a nine-book series. Owlcat shared some details with WIRED about how it plans to implement choices in the story—moments where the player is faced with the opportunity to make a decision that affects the world and story that plays out.

You can choose a backstory and appearance for your character, but there are no skill classes. Your character is meant to develop based on the decisions you make. There are also choices for how you interact with your spaceship’s crew, and the ability to mentor them to advance their skills in different areas.

There are three competing factions (Earth, Mars, and the outer-space dwellers in the asteroid belt called Belters) you can work with and try to befriend. Owlcat Games says, “Keeping good relations with everyone won’t be easy—you’ll only get one chance to stay on everyone’s good side.”

It all sounds very much like decision-tier systems in games like Mass Effect. Will it compare to the truly transformative choices you can make in a game like Baldur’s Gate 3? Maybe not. Owlcat declined to speak with WIRED directly, but Leonid Rastorguev, the game's design director, replied to questions via email.

“This isn't our first game where the sheer number of choices and consequences is a core part of the experience,” Rastorguev wrote.

For Osiris Reborn, Owlcat is using an internal development system it calls Etudes to build a system of flags and triggers in the narrative that can help track player decisions, even small ones, and carry them forward in the game. Rastorguev says those choices can range from cosmetic changes, to ones that block off or unlock additional content, lead to a character dying, or change the ending.

According to critics who have reviewed the beta, the outcome of the choices isn’t immediately noticeable. One choice—where you have to pick between fighting and standing down from a battle—plays out nearly the same way in the moment no matter which option the player chooses. Owlcat says what beta players haven’t seen yet is “how far that decision ripples.”

“[Players] want to feel that they've left a mark on the universe itself,” Rastorguev wrote. “But The Expanse also has an established canon and major characters whose stories have already been told in the books and the TV series. It would feel strange for us to rewrite their fates, especially by introducing branching outcomes into events that are already firmly established.”

Rastorguev says the key to a successful choice system is to give players enough information to know that they’ve set something in motion, without necessarily giving them the entire chain of consequences. The events may be referenced again in conversations, in-game news reports, or changes in the world, and “can suggest that the consequences of your decision will continue long after you've moved on.”

If that holds, it will be very neat. For a game so influenced by Mass Effect, I do worry that Osiris Reborn might inadvertently recreate Mass Effect 3’s worst mistake, botching the ending of its series by limiting all the choices people had made across the games into three basic options to wrap everything up. Choice systems in games are great, but they often boil down into two or three big options at the end. (The game will have multiple endings, but Owlcat is not ready to say how many there will be or how different they are from one another.)

“We've put a lot of thought into this,” Rastorguev wrote, “and found ways for some of the player's choices to feel meaningful on the scale of the wider universe and potentially shape consequences that extend years beyond the immediate events of our story.”

Sounds like a real moonshot.