If the embed above goes dark, the trailer is also here on YouTube.
Every space opera worth its reaction mass has a scene that begins in a grubby bar, and Owlcat Games knows its genre. The new mission trailer for The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, aired during the Golden Joystick Awards and titled “Becoming the captain”, starts in a dive on some outpost where a local asks you and your crew to do him a favour. Two teenagers, in a bid to impress the Outer Planets Alliance, have gone and antagonised a gang of space pirates, and now need rescuing. It’s an optional job. Nobody is ordering you to go. Which, as anyone who has played a role-playing game in the last forty years knows, means you’re definitely going.
What follows is a tidy demonstration of how a decision ripples outwards. There’s ship-to-ship combat against the pirates, then the crew docks and finishes the job on foot inside an abandoned asteroid mine the pirates have turned into a base. The firefights take place partly in zero gravity, and it’s here that the game looks most like it has actually read the books: shattered cover and lumps of rock drift lazily away rather than obligingly falling to the floor, and you get the sense that a stray grenade is as much a navigation hazard as a weapon. The teenagers, it turns out, are not entirely helpless. One of them, Polly, unleashes her own swarm of nanobots mid-fight, and she can later be recruited as a companion. She is, in short, the most Belter thing imaginable: reckless, resourceful and almost certainly not paying for her own drinks.
The trailer closes by asking when you truly become a captain: when you get a ship, when you gather a crew, or when you see the consequences of your choices in other people’s eyes. It’s a nice line, and a sensible one for a studio whose previous games, the Pathfinder titles and Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, were essentially enormous decision trees with dice attached. Here Owlcat has swapped isometric turns for a third-person cover shooter, and the comparison everyone keeps reaching for is Mass Effect, with the important difference that nobody in the Expanse universe would dream of fitting a ship with anything as frivolous as artificial gravity.
The broader setup puts you in the boots of a Pinkwater Security mercenary caught up in the Eros lockdown, which, for readers of Leviathan Wakes, is about the worst place in the solar system to be on duty. You can play as an Earther, Martian or Belter, and assemble a crew to fly the system’s most advanced ship. Owlcat was nominated for Most Wanted Game at last year’s Golden Joysticks, so this year it clearly decided to bring something to the party.
The Expanse: Osiris Reborn is due in spring 2027 on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, including Game Pass. Whether you can talk your way out of the asteroid mine without firing a shot remains to be seen. Holden would certainly try, and then broadcast the whole thing to the solar system.
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