CRPGs have always been a niche genre, but a genre with a diehard playerbase that would play every single release and talk about them at length. In the late 90s and early 00s, we had the first golden era of the genre, with Infinity Engine projects leading the way into the isometric future.
Lots of time passed since then, and it wasn’t until Pillars of Eternity hit Kickstarter that the genre renaissance began. We’ve had Obsidian, Larian, inXile, Harebrained Schemes, and many others released games like Tyranny, Divinity: Original Sin, Wasteland 2, Shadowrun trilogy, Atom RPG, Solasta, and many, many others. Many would argue that the current age even eclipses the times of Baldur’s Gates and Icewind Dales.
While that is up for debate, one thing is undeniable: you can’t talk about modern CRPGs without mentioning Owlcat Games. The studio burst into the scene with a highly ambitious but also flawed Pathfinder: Kingmaker. The game had all the fundamentals down, the writing was solid, but performance issues and some design decisions kept it from reaching the top of the genre.
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, however, fixed all the issues and then some. The second game based on Paizo’s Pathfinder property turned out to be one of the best CRPGs ever made, as it had incredibly deep gameplay with tons of replay value, an actually good story, and well-written characters.
When Owlcat announced that their next game would be set in the Warhammer 40,000 setting, many heads turned. Two Pathfinder games proved that Owlcat wasn’t joking around, so this development got both Warhammer and CRPG fans supremely excited. What Owlcat delivered is considered by many to be the best game in Games Workshop’s grimdark setting.
Now, Owlcat is preparing to release two high-profile games: Warhammer 40,000: Dark Heresy, a traditional CRPG that looks to be a natural progression to Rogue Trader, and The Expanse: Osiris Reborn. It’s something the studio hasn’t done yet: a high-fidelity third-person action RPG inspired by Mass Effect.
Naturally, Dot Esports couldn’t let the opportunity to talk with the devs pass. In this exclusive interview, we talked with Anatoly Shestov, Executive Producer of the Warhammer games, Leonid Rastorguev, Game Design Director of The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, and Andrey Tsvetkov, Publishing Director of Owlcat Games.
Dot Esports: Dark Heresy is your second Warhammer 40k game in a row after Rogue Trader, which, as far as the CRPG fans are concerned, was a major success. But what feedback did you receive from the Warhammer fans and Games Workshop?
Anatoly: Most and foremost – overwhelmingly positive. But the real question is not the feedback itself but the conclusions from it. We reimagined our approach to combat and system design with the aim to more closely connect all the elements of the game.
We reshaped our understanding of cutscenes and their importance. We remade internal tools and processes to level up in-game visuals. We now have proper estimations on time and all other kinds of efforts related to creating game content free of critical bugs and with a budget to actually achieve it.
Dot Esports: To add to this, how much freedom do you have in making new stuff for both games? Do you need to run things by GW, or do you have a relative carte blanche on making up new canon?
Anatoly: It depends on the meaning of freedom. Can we make any crazy, straight-from-our-imagination, no-constraints stuff? No. We are working in a wide and established setting with all the possible respect. It means we need to account for everything that was said about it, in it, from it. And GW is a huge help to this – as expected, they know their setting best. But inside these borders, we are totally free in telling the stories we want to tell, in a way we would prefer to tell them, with expressions we find best for delivering them straight to the player experience.
Dot Esports: Your games usually feature supplemental systems: Kingmaker had the kingdom management, WotR had the army management, and Rogue Trader had the Rogue Trader’s empire management. Are the investigations in Dark Heresy such a system, or should we expect something else as well?
Anatoly: Investigations is our “supplemental system” for the Dark Heresy, yes. No other is planned.
Dot Esports: Dark Heresy is a noticeable deviation both in style and vibe from Rogue Trader. How difficult is it to remain in this setting while trying to tell a story that won’t just feel samey?
Anatoly: 40k has lots of facets. It’s not like we’re trying to find a way to tell other kinds of stories. These stories have always been with us, from the time long before the start of Rogue Trader’s production. From the tabletop campaigns of Deathwatch and Black Crusade, from the epic battles with miniatures, from heated debates about the true nature of Blackstone Fortress, and articles about the reasons behind Imperium saints doing what they did.
This time, with Dark Heresy, we’re allowing ourselves to tell stories about getting your hands dirty, about rusty cogs of monstrosity called Imperium that can’t spin with immediate and instant and totally-not-good actions, about fighting for your personal understanding of what’s right and losing it, without doing what’s wrong.
Dot Esports: All three of your released games have featured secret endings. What was the impetus and motivation for including them?
Anatoly: That’s just how we feel internally about proper storytelling. There needs to be a hidden layer. There needs to be ways to uncover it. Not everyone is directly interested in it. But this approach makes all other things deeper. We find it important for the genre.
Dot Esports: Expanse: Osiris Reborn, how did a video game adaptation materialize? Did they approach you with an offer, did you reach out, or how did it happen at all?
Leonid: I would describe it as a two-sided match. As a studio, we constantly monitor which franchises are available to better understand our future opportunities, especially as we approach the later stages of large projects. For some time, the idea of creating a larger-scale space RPG aimed at a broader audience had already been on the table.
We wanted to build something in the spirit of Mass Effect — a space adventure with a more cinematic approach — but infused with Owlcat’s DNA: strong narrative depth, meaningful choices, and attention to detail. The Expanse came onto our radar at exactly the right moment. It aligned perfectly with the ambitions of the team and felt like a natural fit.
Dot Esports: Osiris Reborn will be unlike any game you’ve made before – a third-person shooter action RPG. There have been many before: Mass Effect, Alpha Protocol, Fallout 3 onwards, System Shock, Deus Ex, and they’ve been largely action games that nobody truly regards for the depth of RPG combat. What’s your approach with OR, and how do you balance action against RPG?
Leonid: Personally, I don’t believe that every RPG needs to be mechanically complex to be meaningful. The core goal of an RPG is to give players the opportunity to role-play — to inhabit a character and make choices that define who they are within the world.
With The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, we approached combat design from that perspective. During pre-production, we mapped out the key combat roles and capabilities that would make sense within this universe, and only then translated them into mechanics. From that foundation, we developed distinct playstyles — whether you prefer to operate as a precision shooter, an engineer controlling the battlefield through technology, or a hacker manipulating systems and enemies indirectly.
Our combat system encourages experimentation and gives players access to a wide range of tools they encounter throughout the game. At the same time, true mastery requires commitment. To become highly effective in a particular role, you have to make meaningful choices and focus your progression accordingly. That balance — freedom to explore combined with the need to specialize — is how we approach the intersection of action and RPG depth.
Dot Esports: Most of your games are incredibly long. Do you start off the design process thinking of how to make something expansive, complex, and something that could last a long time, or maybe it just sort of gets stacked on over the course of making the game?
Andrey: We have started the studio with a desire to create a game that would be a spiritual successor to CRPGs of the early 00s. That was the ambition — to tell a massive branching story and mix it with some complex dice-based game mechanics. Though we have decided to be more moderate about the time needed to complete the “golden path”, it still takes dozens of hours to tell a coherent story, set all the pieces properly, and introduce the level of reactivity players expect from a good CRPG. And keeping replayability in mind, it might consume players for hundreds of hours easily.
But we don’t believe that 60-80 hours is the perfect time to tell any story — that depends on the story itself. For instance, The Expanse: Osiris Reborn would take far less time to finish than our CRPG releases.
Dot Esports: Have you considered making more compact titles that would be only maybe roughly 20 hours, maybe as spinoffs and such?
Andrey: Osiris Reborn may be considered a compact title compared to, for instance, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. But still, it will take longer than 20 hours to beat.
Dot Esports: You’ve mentioned before that you’d like to eventually make your own original IP. Should we wait for it in the near future, or do you still have some exciting collaborations in mind?
Andrey: From time to time, the studio’s creative minds share some ideas with each other on how our own IP might look. But all those ideas are far from being set in stone. At this point, we have several games in the works, which tell exciting stories within already existing universes.
Dot Esports: When Baldur’s Gate 3 came out, everyone was talking about how supposedly people really, truly love CRPGs en masse, and this is a sign of the genre renaissance and profitability. Did you, as a CRPG-first studio, feel any of the supposed positive impact?
Andrey: Though Baldur’s Gate 3 is an amazing game and deserves all the attention it got, its impact on the other games in the genre is quite moderate. So I wouldn’t say people are jumping into CRPGs en masse now. They are still mostly niche games. The enormous success of Baldur’s Gate 3 is based on embracing the genre’s traditional strengths, such as the complexity and variability of narrative and gameplay, while obliterating its weaknesses, such as a certain lack of visual fidelity and cinematic experience.
Those limitations are typical for CRPGs due to their scale and team budget restrictions, and these games are still attracting players motivated enough to look past the rough edges. Baldur’s Gate 3 has set a direction, though — if a team wants to reach success with masses of players and get out of the niche, they know what to do and how much it might cost.
Dot Esports: AI has been a major topic lately, with largely beloved companies like Larian and Sandfall Interactive receiving backlash for their usage of it. You’ve talked about AI in the past as well. If your stance on it didn’t change, could you describe the way you’re utilizing it in your working processes?
Andrey: AI is a set of tools that can significantly improve tech processes, allowing the team to focus on creative tasks. Since any development process is always a race against time and money, the devs get the opportunity to compromise less on their creative vision by cutting features and content that don’t fit the budget constraints, and do more for the game. We experiment with AI a lot, but it’s not our to-go solution for all problems. We don’t use AI to create in-game art or narrative content, but we use it to speed up a lot of things: from prototyping and testing features faster to saving time on steps where an artist’s work might end up in a trash bin.
For instance, AI allows us to take the character concept created by an artist and see how it would look in an isometric environment. Sometimes, things that look nice in concepts are not good enough from an isometric perspective (like small details becoming indistinguishable) — and it is great that we can now identify and address those issues before 3D and tech artists start working on the actual models and textures. It really saves a lot of people’s time by eliminating these back-and-forth iterations. Also, we don’t believe that becoming more effective due to AI or any other tool in particular, that value quality will lay off talent. On the contrary, it is a way to stay closer to the original vision and avoid limiting ambitions too much in order to deliver the game on schedule.
Dot Esports: You love peppering your games with romance options with little to no restrictions, making them essentially playersexual. But you also love subverting expectations by making many of them evil, or at least morally questionable. The question is, should we expect any romance options that go under the “I can fix them” banner in Dark Heresy or Osiris Reborn?
Andrey: Well, I would want to argue a bit with the statement that the romance options in our games are playersexual. There is a significant difference in how the player might pursue their romantic interest, depending on the character they choose to roleplay and the decisions they make, not based solely on gender options. And while there are several characters who are basically “bisexual,” a lot of them also only respond to one gender. I would not comment much on what players are to expect in Dark Heresy or Osiris Reborn when it comes to romance. Let that remain a mystery for now. *smiles*
Dot Esports: Any final words for the fans of your games?
Andrey: We are extremely grateful to all our fans who have supported us over the years and continue to do so. It is because of you that we are able to craft new adventures and tell new stories. And we are excited to share more about Osiris Reborn and Dark Heresy quite soon. Stay tuned!
