There’s various ways to adapt a hit book, TV show, or film into video game form. You can obviously try to take that main narrative and fan-favourite characters and retell their tale, but when games (and RPGs in particular) try to give you narrative freedom, that’s not always the best approach. The Expanse: Osiris Reborn goes the alternate route, taking the setting of the books and TV show and looking off to the side to see what some other people might be getting up to.
The Expanse: Osiris Reborn follows identical twin mercenaries who find themselves embroiled in the early stages of the Protogen conspiracy and the emergence of the Protomolecule within the otherwise hard sci-fi setting.
“From the start we decided that we want to have our own character, our own story,” said Leonid Rastorguev, Game Design Director. “Obviously Holden and his crew are a major part of The Expanse universe, but we have our own enemies, our own struggles, our own victories and the impact we leave on the universe is no less than Holden. So we have our own very big, very important challenges and very important choices to make.”
Our hands-on picked up a little way into the side story to all of James Holden’s shenanigans with the crew of the Rocinante. The Pinkwater Security squad has managed to survive the pivotal incident on Eros, snatching a Protogen stealth ship on the way out and now needing to save their own skins one way or another. That takes them right into the lion’s den, following the trail to a Protogen facility on Ganymede so they can try to wipe their identifying data from some servers and also try to figure out what the hell is going on with a mystery shipment.
That’s where our hands on time picked up, as the player character and their twin, J, don Protogen security space suits and blagging their way into the facility. Since you can blend in, there’s free exploration here, though you still have to puzzle out how to get access to what you need.
While you will have a limited party with you, other characters in the group can still chip in over comms, having stayed back on ship but maintaining remote access and camera feeds. Aleesha in particular is very handy as you try to manipulate shipping documents to get you past, she can chip in over comms and tell you what she needs to hack together some fakes to convince the guy in charge of shipping.
There’s various interactions that feed into the sprawling mess that is Protogen. Where the books and the TV show established two arms of the company working on different projects, Osiris Reborn is able to create a third, creating a fresh undercurrent of villainy that you can explore and battle in parallel to Holden’s journey.
Leonid told us, “This is a different antagonist with different goals, not every time aligned with what Jules-Pierre Mao wants from Protogen. So it’s his own agenda there.”
This infiltration all goes wrong, of course, but not because of anything you do. As you explore, the alert level gradually rises, and as you bumble into a curious section lorded over by Doctor Simic, it jumps up to a full red alert, an assault from some rival faction breaking into the installation, managing to release one of those Protomolecule experiments. It forces you to change your plan, dash off in the opposite direction from the big blue monster man and fight your way out.
Perhaps one of the most direct ways that Osiris Reborn gets close to Mass Effect is found in its combat. This is a third-person cover shooter style of action with some tech-based abilities, and your allies fighting alongside who you can order around a little bit. Having played this right around the same time as Exodus, I preferred the way that Owlcat has handled party member abilities, so they will use their own arsenal for themselves, unless you order them specifically.
“So that was part of the initial design,” Leonid said, “because obviously we have looked at some other games in a similar genre and we decided we still want our companions to be fully independent because that’s part of their personality. They behave differently in battle, so for example, Michael, later he gets a personal shield and an autocannon and he’s more Tank-ish, so he will be going into the battlefield and drawing attention while doing Tank-ish stuff. And Regina with the sniper rifle, she will be mostly keeping to the back and just picking up the targets. […] In some games, your companion doesn’t really make much difference in combat. They are present, but they don’t have much damage output, and you have seen that J can destroy with her flame grenade, and it’s quite efficient in taking out the targets.”
If you do want more granular control, you can order them around. Leonid continued, “In the Active Pause menu you can actually tell them to take particular cover, but it’s not necessary. They’re totally independent; they can be efficient without you in the combat. We didn’t want them to just be a couple more buttons for you to press, like extra abilities. It doesn’t feel right.”
Speaking of extra abilities, the demo build’s loadout gave me a few bits of futuristic tech, pulling out a drone to hover around and attack enemies, with a throwable turret which I would often through behind enemy lines to hit them from the rear, and an explosive homing grenade which is as satisfying to use as it sounds. The assault rifle and sniper rifle in my hands also feel pretty solid and nice to use. There’s a free customisation system here, so you can respec to match skills to be more suitable to the weapons you want to you, and these go alongside the six social non-combat skills that apply elsewhere.
But there is something you can’t change. Leonid explained, “You have a few important choices to make during character creation, besides appearance, which is obviously important. So you have to pick an origin, whether you want to be from Mars, from Earth or from the Belt, and that influences your story quite a lot because the early stages, for example, the Martian citizen can visit the Martian hub, but it’s unavailable for any other character because Mars has restricted people from coming to them because of the incident on the Eros.”
The scramble back through the facility with the monster hot on your heels eventually sees you run into another member of the attacking PMC, Michael. In the heat of the moment, they’re able to reach an accord, descending down into some of the earliest and now abandoned tunnels from the Ganymede colony.
Similar to Holden’s crew, there’s a real hodgepodge of different characters and backgrounds that can end up in yours. You have your own background to choose, which can give different dialogue options, but then there’s the potential friction between characters from Earth, Mars and the Belt. Your choices will naturally impact your relationships with the others on the crew, and while that’s nothing especially new for an RPG, it hits a little different when it’s humans instead of fantasy creatures. It feels more real.
It also makes the final moments of the demo feel different. Coming out into an agricultural dome and with a very specific plan to deal with the proto-monster using a satellite-guided beam of pure sunlight, you find it full of people. You have to decide how to handle this. Can you fight the monster alone while Michael helps civilians escape and J handles the satellite controls? It’ll be a tougher fight, but I’ll not find out if I could because that’s where my hands-on ended.
This was a linear mission and demo from the game, where Owlcat promises that the wider game will be more open, giving you side missions to take on throughout the solar system, and lots of other environments and situations. You’ll likely have more freedom in how you approach situations in the side missions, as opposed to action-packed main story missions.
“Sometimes you can talk yourself out of the combat, but not very often,” Leonid said while no doubt picturing me trying to parlay with a Protogen monster. “It’s just sometimes, yeah. And talking of different approaches to the universe than it was in the books and in the TV series, we took a slightly different tone for the game. It’s slightly more heroic because the books and the series, they were dark and gloomy, all about struggling, the politics, the survival stuff and stuff like that. For our crew, the story is just slightly more light-hearted and heroic.”
But the team has still been able to take on board feedback from private playtests earlier this year. “We had some feedback about [the tone and quippy dialogue] from the beta and we took some action. We iterated some of the narrative we had in the mission and we made some changes to these bits of the game. It’s still not as dark as the show; it might be slightly more heroic.”
I can definitely see a more optimistic note running through what I played of The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, and applying Mass Effect-inspired combat to a sci-fi world that I and many others have a lot of fondness for could be a great fit.
