The Expanse: Osiris Reborn - third-person action-RPG from Owlcat Games

[Sratopotator]

Yeah, my bad, went on to rant about ME story instead of the worldbuilding per se (and conflated the two).

*Reg the plausibleness of intergalactic societies: That's why a "mature approach" to sci-fi is Lem's 'being unable to comprehend/communicate with the crystaline greygoo hiveminds'. Though that would be even harder to portay in a visual medium than in books.

 

[Hellraiser]

*Reg the plausibleness of intergalactic societies: That's why a "mature approach" to sci-fi is Lem's 'being unable to comprehend/communicate with the crystaline greygoo hiveminds'. Though that would be even harder to portay in a visual medium than in books.

I think I have to disagree with it being more mature, at least for "natural" biological entities, artificial and transhuman (or transxeno, or whatever) aliens that took control of their own evolution are a different story. And yes I do admit that given the age of the universe you're more likely to find artificial intelligent lifeforms (if this is at all possible, jury's still out on that) than biological intelligence.

But everyone thinks they're clever with shilling starfish aliens because hurr durr aliens should be alien, it's in the name, duh. But in recent years I have came to the conclusion that this is ignoring that in order to develop a spacefaring society you need a species that can develop mathematics and physics (implying logical thinking similar to ours), can develop industry using local enviromental conditions (I mean it's really fucking hard to build a spaceship that can reach orbit if you're some ammonia ocean dwelling goblinoid that can't use oxygen to burn shit and forge metal - the Dolphins building civilization problem), has some form of appendages that can be used to manipulate precision tools (Dolphins get fucked yet again) and of course a means of communication with other individuals and passing information along (although this could as well be gamma ray blinking or slow as fuck pheromones).

There are some hard limitations on what kind of lifeforms have a shot at getting to orbit, and this reduces the pool of possibilities in how they would look like and force some similarities. Yes, you could have a species where only the queens/fertile females are intelligent or something similar and the considered nonsentient drones/workers are considered worthless, get casually eaten or killed all the time by the higher thinking caste, and thus a completely alien structure of society, but on a high level when exploring space and interacting with other sentients, you would have sentients meeting other sentiens, sharing some similarities due to the hard requirements of developing spacefaring.

Furthermore if we look at evolution on Earth, good ideas keep getting reinvented. Flight evolved multiple times (bats, insects, birds, flying fish etc.). Bilateral symmetry is clearly more advantegous to winning the darwinian struggle, considering how prelevant it is amongst animals (starfish get fucked). If it happened on Earth multiple times it's likely it happened elsewhere in the universe.

 

[The Nameless One]

Ch 4 in Wrath and 3 in RT both suck because they break the flow of the game

Owlcat's entire design philosophy breaks the gameplay flow

It breaks the entire goddamn game also. For the second time in the second goddamn owlcat game Im playing I get quest-breaking bugs, over 1 year after release. Fuck this, really.

 

[Sratopotator]

in recent years I have came to the conclusion that this is ignoring that in order to develop a spacefaring society you need a species that can develop mathematics and physics (implying logical thinking similar to ours), can develop industry using local enviromental conditions

Oh, totally agree if we talk about "spacefaring societies", but that in itself is a human-centric framework. Or, maybe it is, who knows.
That's why establishing any kind of shared characteristics model (even being made of the same type of matter) is already slightly immature (if we are to keep using that unfortunate scale).

I like how Expanse skips over that dilemma by going for human factions model, just with a solid 'what if' biological twist (belters). It just screws up the whole thing with the cliched ancients race
In my mind, human factions model (can be a millenia long separation variant) is always more believable than any multi-race setup.

 

[Israfael]

Pretty sure the people who think that SciFi is about starwarsean rubber-faced aliens were misgenred at birth, they should just switch to fantasy and its likes

 

[luj1]

I like how Expanse skips over that dilemma by going for human factions model, just with a solid 'what if' biological twist (belters). It just screws up the whole thing with the cliched ancients race
In my mind, human factions model (can be a millenia long separation variant) is always more believable than any multi-race setup.

Yup... I liked their vision of grindy worker future... Kinda like terran vibe in Starcraft. But everything about the protomolecule and crystals and aliens is very shitty

Overall I think it's a dry choice for IP. Kinda like Starfield. Its crazy no one wants to make up something new, people's imagination got destroyed

 

[Donald Gordon Lord]

Ch 4 in Wrath and 3 in RT both suck because they break the flow of the game

Owlcat's entire design philosophy breaks the gameplay flow

It breaks the entire goddamn game also. For the second time in the second goddamn owlcat game Im playing I get quest-breaking bugs, over 1 year after release. Fuck this, really.

Ha ha I feel ya. Eurojank gonna eurojank.

If it's RT, we're prob at least a year out from having an actually stable build. Kingmaker took around 2 years, think Wrath was a year plus.

Got the invisible throne bug that doesn't let you interact with anything the last time I played back in Feb, and had to redo part of Ch 3.

 

[Roguey]

Whoever wins: Swen Vincke already likes this.

The only studio approaching the human resources to do a possible "BG3 killer" opts out of it to do a Bioware -- the very thing that helped Larian and Owlcat to ascend and get some money in the first place.

They have the staff, and are fairly decent at what they do, but they lack the tech base to compete. Larian's propriety engine is a very important part of their success. You're not going to get a BG3 killer out of Unity or Unreal.

 

[Sobchak]

Whoever wins: Swen Vincke already likes this.

The only studio approaching the human resources to do a possible "BG3 killer" opts out of it to do a Bioware -- the very thing that helped Larian and Owlcat to ascend and get some money in the first place.

But Larian also gave up on money by not doing a BG3 expansion.

Game developers are skilled professionals and sometimes they just want to do something new.

It's not like that... They builded up their reputation that gives them the freedom to do so. After what happened with BG3 is much easier to create a new IP (or whatever) and sell well.

(And yes I want them to do something new btw).

 

[Dishonoredbr]

Kingsmaker and WotR were impossible to complete around release.
WotR some mythic patches were so broken that they caused soft lock or worse and the best advice Owlcat gave was to start the game over (lich & demon).

I always see this but i never had game breaking bugs playing WoTR and i have 2k hours into it.

 

[luj1]

You're not going to get a BG3 killer out of Unity or Unreal.

This decline-causing sheeple mentality is present in both devs and players. Don't try to kill anything, come up with your own concept

 

[Dishonoredbr]

People trying way too hard to kill the past, it seems..

 

[Vagabond Merchant]

Whoever wins: Swen Vincke already likes this.

The only studio approaching the human resources to do a possible "BG3 killer" opts out of it to do a Bioware -- the very thing that helped Larian and Owlcat to ascend and get some money in the first place.

They have the staff, and are fairly decent at what they do, but they lack the tech base to compete. Larian's propriety engine is a very important part of their success. You're not going to get a BG3 killer out of Unity or Unreal.

I don't get why people say this. You can make exacty the same Larian makes in both Unity and Unreal

 

[The Nameless One]

Whoever wins: Swen Vincke already likes this.

The only studio approaching the human resources to do a possible "BG3 killer" opts out of it to do a Bioware -- the very thing that helped Larian and Owlcat to ascend and get some money in the first place.

Larian's propriety engine is a very important part of their success. You're not going to get a BG3 killer out of Unity or Unreal.

"Muh proprietary engine" -feat. Michelangelo

If this meme's real then why did CDPR switch to UE after Glitcher 3 and Cybercuck? All you need nowadays to succeed is funding and proper 'marketing', including forum-shilling as you well know.

The last time tech advancements were an out-selling point was the late '90s/early 00s. And yet still stuff like BG2 succeeded, because even then quality could make a selling point. So yeah, that's a double miss, miss.

 

[Roguey]

I don't get why people say this. You can make exacty the same Larian makes in both Unity and Unreal

I haven't seen any proof of this.

If this meme's real then why did CDPR switch to UE after Glitcher 3 and Cybercuck? All you need nowadays to succeed is funding and proper 'marketing', including forum-shilling as you well know.

Because they burned out all their engineers crunching on Cyberpunk and they don't have enough people who know how it works to keep at it. It's easier on them to go with the engine that "everyone" knows how to work with, as clumsy as it is for the types of games they want to make, hence why CDP and Epic are making a concerted joint-effort into making it work.

The last time tech advancements were an out-selling point was the late '90s/early 00s. And yet still stuff like BG2 succeeded, because even then quality could make a selling point. So yeah, that's a double miss, miss.

The Infinity Engine has its problems, but it was pretty solid tech especially in contrast to all of Black Isle's attempts (Fallout was only good for one sequel, Descent and Lithtech were disasters, Jefferson went up in smoke)

 

[The Nameless One]

Because they burned out all their engineers crunching on Cyberpunk and they don't have enough people who know how it works to keep at it

...Or, they'd rather improve their margins with layoffs and outsourcing at the expense of quality and mechanics...

 

[Vagabond Merchant]

I haven't seen any proof of this.

Do you have any game development experience? The engine is not that big of a limiter to what you can do. It's just a tool and it mosty depends on what you do with it and how you code and handle your assets. Optimization is not linked to an engine either, that's fully on the devs

 

[Roguey]

Do you have any game development experience? The engine is not that big of a limiter to what you can do. It's just a tool and it mosty depends on what you do with it and how you code and handle your assets. Optimization is not linked to an engine either, that's fully on the devs

I make observations. I'd say there's a pretty good reason why D:OS 1 and 2 on Larian's own engine did far better than their Unity/Unreal competitors: Obsidian with Unity, inXile with Unity (Wastelands, Torment) and Unreal (Bard's Tale 4), Tactical Adventures with Unity and now they're moving to Unreal but a BG3-competitor Solasta II isn't, Harebrained Schemes with Unity, Owlcat with Unity, Logic Artists first with Unity and then Unreal (Expeditions Rome), and so on.

If none of these developers can make a Larian-tier game with Unity and Unreal, I'd say it just can't be done. Maybe in the realm of the hypothetical, but this is the reality.

 

[Tyranicon]

You're not going to get a BG3 killer out of Unity or Unreal.

This decline-causing sheeple mentality is present in both devs and players. Don't try to kill anything, come up with your own concept

The "Imma gonna make a Halo killur!" line is something you feed to investors and marketing (10 years ago).

I can't think of a single time where a copycat game actually managed to overthrow the super popular game it wanted to kill.

Was Fortnite sold as a PUBG killer? Maybe that.

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

*Reg the plausibleness of intergalactic societies: That's why a "mature approach" to sci-fi is Lem's 'being unable to comprehend/communicate with the crystaline greygoo hiveminds'. Though that would be even harder to portay in a visual medium than in books.

But everyone thinks they're clever with shilling starfish aliens because hurr durr aliens should be alien, it's in the name, duh. But in recent years I have came to the conclusion that this is ignoring that in order to develop a spacefaring society you need a species that can develop mathematics and physics (implying logical thinking similar to ours), can develop industry using local enviromental conditions (I mean it's really fucking hard to build a spaceship that can reach orbit if you're some ammonia ocean dwelling goblinoid that can't use oxygen to burn shit and forge metal - the Dolphins building civilization problem), has some form of appendages that can be used to manipulate precision tools (Dolphins get fucked yet again) and of course a means of communication with other individuals and passing information along (although this could as well be gamma ray blinking or slow as fuck pheromones).

There are some hard limitations on what kind of lifeforms have a shot at getting to orbit, and this reduces the pool of possibilities in how they would look like and force some similarities. Yes, you could have a species where only the queens/fertile females are intelligent or something similar and the considered nonsentient drones/workers are considered worthless, get casually eaten or killed all the time by the higher thinking caste, and thus a completely alien structure of society, but on a high level when exploring space and interacting with other sentients, you would have sentients meeting other sentiens, sharing some similarities due to the hard requirements of developing spacefaring.

Agreed. A high quality post. Star Control II had life forms who were intelligent but otherwise incapable of leaving their world because their physiology and/or environment were unsuitable for the development of technology required for it. Most notably the Slylandro who are gaseous beings that inhabit a gas giant. There is a whole quest associated with them.

 

[luj1]

*Reg the plausibleness of intergalactic societies: That's why a "mature approach" to sci-fi is Lem's 'being unable to comprehend/communicate with the crystaline greygoo hiveminds'. Though that would be even harder to portay in a visual medium than in books.

But everyone thinks they're clever with shilling starfish aliens because hurr durr aliens should be alien, it's in the name, duh. But in recent years I have came to the conclusion that this is ignoring that in order to develop a spacefaring society you need a species that can develop mathematics and physics (implying logical thinking similar to ours), can develop industry using local enviromental conditions (I mean it's really fucking hard to build a spaceship that can reach orbit if you're some ammonia ocean dwelling goblinoid that can't use oxygen to burn shit and forge metal - the Dolphins building civilization problem), has some form of appendages that can be used to manipulate precision tools (Dolphins get fucked yet again) and of course a means of communication with other individuals and passing information along (although this could as well be gamma ray blinking or slow as fuck pheromones).

There are some hard limitations on what kind of lifeforms have a shot at getting to orbit, and this reduces the pool of possibilities in how they would look like and force some similarities. Yes, you could have a species where only the queens/fertile females are intelligent or something similar and the considered nonsentient drones/workers are considered worthless, get casually eaten or killed all the time by the higher thinking caste, and thus a completely alien structure of society, but on a high level when exploring space and interacting with other sentients, you would have sentients meeting other sentiens, sharing some similarities due to the hard requirements of developing spacefaring.

Agreed. A high quality post. Star Control II had life forms who were intelligent but otherwise incapable of leaving their world because their physiology and/or environment were unsuitable for the development of technology required for it. Most notably the Slylandro who are gaseous beings that inhabit a gas giant. There is a whole quest associated with them.

There are intelligent plasma critters all around us IRL, the gas argument is 1000% on point

 

[Israfael]

Was Fortnite sold as a PUBG killer? Maybe that.

Fortnite was initially an extra tab in the Unreal Tournament 4 launcher (aka the current Epic gayme store), then it overtook the game and then Epic deleted UT4 completely. Sad times

 

[Vagabond Merchant]

Do you have any game development experience? The engine is not that big of a limiter to what you can do. It's just a tool and it mosty depends on what you do with it and how you code and handle your assets. Optimization is not linked to an engine either, that's fully on the devs

I make observations. I'd say there's a pretty good reason why D:OS 1 and 2 on Larian's own engine did far better than their Unity/Unreal competitors: Obsidian with Unity, inXile with Unity (Wastelands, Torment) and Unreal (Bard's Tale 4), Tactical Adventures with Unity and now they're moving to Unreal but a BG3-competitor Solasta II isn't, Harebrained Schemes with Unity, Owlcat with Unity, Logic Artists first with Unity and then Unreal (Expeditions Rome), and so on.

If none of these developers can make a Larian-tier game with Unity and Unreal, I'd say it just can't be done. Maybe in the realm of the hypothetical, but this is the reality.

In house engines have the advantage of having been made from scratch to create a specific kind of game, so once you have them, you can produce them more smoothly. Then you iterate them through the years and add the specific features you need, and the fixes that may be required.
They have the disadvantage of depending on the people that built them to function correctly, other than the overhead of having to create the engine. And having to spend time and money in developing the tools and training new hires. Look at what happened with CD Projekt or Square Enix with Cyberpunk and FFXV. They also tether you to a specific type of game and may struggle to make anything different (this depends massively on which engine we are talking about) like Bethesda being stuck making the same game over and over, or FromSoftware.

Proprietary engines like Unity and Unreal are made to be versatile, so they willl not be as smooth of a ride when making something like a crpg, but you can make the exact same thing with some effort (probably less time than building a modern engine from zero) Owlcat has made their own tools for Unity to make their rpgs and they produce them in record time.
It's also way faster and easier to hire people that already know how to use the engine, which in case of Owlcat is coming handy with their rapid growth.
The main disadvantage of them is depending on a different company, and taking the risk of your game looking generic. The latter should not happen if you are not a basic bitch and actually hire a graphics engineer and avoid using premade assets.

In Owlcat's particular case, I think picking Unreal to make their new game is the most sensible choice, as they have been able to quickly assembe a team with prior knowledge of the engine, and they diversified to not depend fully on the whims of the Unity company.
Also, would you trust Owlcat making their own engine when they don't even have the patience to make bug free tools and games with a pre-made engine? Maybe they are just not competing one to one with Larian because they are not yet playing in the same league.

 

[axedice]

The core of Expanse's Starfish Aliens (aka Ring Builders) is that they've evolved into a parasitic hivemind that hijacks other "fast" life-forms to do their physical bidding. There's even a theory that they have later evolved fully into a digital consciousness, completely shedding their physical forms, which also explains why the killer bullets did not immediately wipe out humanity (since our consciousness operates on a biological medium).

 

[Hellraiser]

The core of Expanse's Starfish Aliens (aka Ring Builders) is that they've evolved into a parasitic hivemind that hijacks other "fast" life-forms to do their physical bidding.

No.

spoilers up to the end of the 4th novel

That's just the protomolecule, which itself is a tool of the Builders. Through the projection of the Investigator (a troubleshooting sub-program of the protomolecule) fucking with Holden's brain, it is explained that it is merely a tool, a particularly clever one capable of a lot of agency for a blob of grey (or rather blue) goo, but merely a tool with the purpose of recycling biological material into gates that was limited in other regards. It could not by itself decide to fuckoff and rebuild the Builder civilization, all it does after the gate is built is as a consequence of the directive in its programing saying that it needs to successfully restablish contact with the creators once the gate is operational. But all its calls to report mission complete fail to get an expected (or any) response, so what agency it had made it try to troubleshoot the issue and try to establish what the root cause is and if it has to keep trying to make contact, hence why its chapters/interludes/whatever start with "it reaches out it reaches out":

“—it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out— One hundred and thirteen times a second, nothing answers and it reaches out. It is not conscious, though parts of it are. There are structures within it that were once separate organisms; aboriginal, evolved, and complex. It is designed to improvise, to use what is there and then move on. Good enough is good enough, and so the artifacts are ignored or adapted. The conscious parts try to make sense of the reaching out. Try to interpret it.”​

​

This is why through the investigator it tries to get Holden to find out what happened with its masters/creators, it improvises to fullfill the directive and fucking with Holden's brain to communicate with him is one such improvised action. It needs to verify if there is anyone left to answer and if it need to keep trying or essentially die (and after all it does tell Holden to basically kill it after it gets its answer, since it no longer has any directives to fullfill nor purpose).

Supposedly it was not meant to consume more complex ecosystems than purely microbial ones, hence why Eros was such a freakshow, but there's a lot of ambiguity here if the builders actually would give a shit if they sent it towards planets with intelligent life. Per the quote above, it's designed to improvise and use what is there. Whether the creators lacked imagination or just didn't care for possible sentient life getting in the way and getting gobbled up, ripcages crawling along the floor propelled by one skeletal arm dragging it forward and all that, is left ambigous in the series.

But in any case it's not the Builders as such that did the biomass hijacking into their hivemind, the gatebuilder goo they made the hijacking and primarily to build things with it. For them gate building was a process like say hunting animals to skin them is for us, resource extraction, and instead of a rifle and a skinning knife (and whatever other tools are needed for that kind of thing, I'm no hunter) they had the protomolecule to handle the whole thing, only they hunted whole ecosystems.