The Expanse: Osiris Reborn developer Owlcat – known for making Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, and Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader – has confirmed it is using generative AI during the sci-fi game’s development.
“We don’t use it to create any assets that will be in the game,” PR manager Katharina Popp said, answering my question during a press briefing ahead of today’s The Expanse: Osiris Reborn release and beta announcements. “We use it a lot for prototyping, trying things out, placeholders. They will all be replaced at the end.
“We use it basically for trying out things on a technical level,” Popp added. “For example, looking how a 2D image looks in 3D, or changing colours to what looks good. So it’s basically for being able to iterate faster. But we don’t use it to write, we don’t use AI voice actors, so everything that will be in the final version will definitely 100 percent be human made.”
This isn’t the first time the Cyprus-based studio has faced questions over gen-AI use. Back in 2024, the company posted a job advert for a concept artist and listed one of their tasks as “concept generation using AI and other modern tools”. A screenshot of the vacancy was shared on X by someone who’d been interested in the role, prompting a response from Owlcat in order to “clarify” the issue.
“We use AI as a working tool for our future project, which is in the early stages of production right now,” said Owlcat, presumably referring to The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, which was under wraps at the time. “AI will be used exclusively for additional work with concepts and speeding up some internal processes (for example, for creative search, inspiration, or vision coordination before starting conceptualisation itself).
“The final version of the game will not have any art generated by the neural networks. The same goes for the final concepts. Everything will be original and drawn by professional artists. On our current projects, Rogue Trader and Pathfinder, AI was not used at all.”
Owlcat expanded on that answer to try and cool some heated backlash later on. “We will under no circumstances replace our artists with neural networks,” it said. “All art in our games, including concepts, portraits, etc. [are] drawn exclusively by artists. We use a neural network to find direction and inspiration before developing concepts for our upcoming project, which is currently in early development and unannounced.” Expanse: Osiris Reborn was eventually announced last summer, more than a year after that X exchange occurred.
The Expanse: Osiris Reborn looks at first glance a lot like Mass Effect, with a similar kind of presentation and similar kinds of gameplay. This is partly because Owlcat was heavily inspired by BioWare’s renowned sci-fi series; the studio has made no secret of this inspiration – indeed, it was repeated during the press briefing. Cover-based combat, squad commands, romance, dialogue, RPG upgrades and customisation: there’s a lot here that can be compared.
The major difference is the tone of The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, which is going for a more grounded and believable kind of technology rather than characters with magic-like biotic abilities. It’s also based on a celebrated book series that was adapted successfully into a well regarded The Expanse television show by Syfy.
Owlcat announced today that The Expanse: Osiris Reborn will be released in spring 2027, on PC, PlayStation and Xbox Series S/X, and that there will be a closed beta demo released next month for people who’ve pre-purchased the game. It’ll also be available day one on Game Pass Ultimate.
