EXCLUSIVE: How The Expanse: Osiris Reborn's Progression System Works, Plus Brand New Screenshots

The Expanse: Osiris Reborn is a third-person action RPG that has major Mass Effect vibes. But what’s different with this game is that your gear, not your class, defines the way you fight — and we’ve got exclusive details and screenshots to tell you how it all works.

In Osiris Reborn, your origin shapes your captain's journey and mechanically defines where you find yourself starting, but it doesn’t define how you have to play. That is to say, character creation does not lock you into an RPG class. So, instead of choosing a fixed role, you develop your captain across four skill trees, but the weapons and gadgets you equip and upgrade ultimately define how you fight.

At the start of the game, you pick a specialization that sets your captain's initial skills and gear. For example, a cyber warfare specialist starts the game with decent gadget expertise, and their playstyle leans toward using abilities more than firearms. A firearms specialist, meanwhile, starts with better shooting and leadership skills, relying both on their own aim and on issuing orders to companions in combat.

But specializations do not restrict your progression or lock you into a particular role. For example, you can begin as a cyber warfare specialist, invest in weapon skills as you level up, and gradually turn your captain into a hybrid of a cyber warfare and firearms specialist. All four combat skill trees — Marksmanship, Gadgets, Survivalist, and Leader — remain open, so you are free to combine them and develop your captain in the direction that suits you.

The Expanse: Osiris Reborn combat skill trees

• The marksmanship skill tree focuses on your mastery of various weapons and unlocks bonuses to critical damage, accuracy, and other combat modifiers.
• The gadgets skill tree focuses on making your gadget-related abilities more powerful, increasing damage and duration, reducing the cooldown of abilities, etc.
• The survivalist skills ensure your survival in combat by increasing your health, armor, armor regeneration capabilities, as well as providing unique bonuses that make you more lethal to your enemies while you are exposed or engage in melee.
• The leader skill tree represents your ability to work with your crew. It provides various bonuses to your companions, such as weapon and ability damage, increased armor and damage reduction, and buffs for your own captain while companions are nearby.

While you can mix and match as you like, you can’t take everything. But you could lean into two directions at once. If you change your mind you can respec on your ship for a price (increases each time). This means you can't change your whole approach in the heat of battle, so you'll have to choose respecs carefully.

Gear then helps define your combat playstyle, and you can upgrade weapons and gadgets via the workbench. Every weapon and gadget you find can be upgraded at the workbench, shaping your abilities, your combat rhythm, and the way your captain fights.

Some upgrades are straightforward stat boosts: more damage, a wider radius, a shorter cooldown. Others are triggered effects, like a damage bonus that stacks with every kill. And a few rarer upgrades can unlock entirely new abilities for your gear.

Even gadgets like a simple frag grenade are upgradable, from a simple radius increase to emitting three extra projectiles that will explode and deal extra damage when you shoot them.

At each tier, you'll make an exclusive choice between two or three upgrade paths, pushing your gear toward your desired playstyle, until reaching the final tier, where the item can be upgraded with a powerful final perk. How far you can take an item depends on its quality. While you can't upgrade quality directly, you can find a higher-quality variation of the same weapon or gadget, which allows you to unlock further upgrade depth the original item lacked. Helpfully, you can reset gear upgrades, so you don’t lose the resources you invested in one item when you replace it with something better. A limited consumable lets you recover the upgrade resources, ensuring nothing is set in stone.

The image below shows the Kovach M46 rifle before and after a couple of upgrades. There's a bigger magazine, harder-hitting headshots, five-round bursts instead of three, and a scope for increased range.

Your companions have skill trees and signature gadgets with their own unique upgrade paths, too. Take Zafar, for example, an engineer who joins your team early in the game. With no upgrades, he installs a portable turret to hold a position. From there, you can substantially boost its rate of fire and enhance its targeting systems until it can actively intercept incoming enemy projectiles. Or, you can equip a heavy-caliber module to maximize its raw power, allowing it to deal heavy area-of-effect damage. Every companion you recruit brings their own gear, which you can customize to synergize with your playstyle.

Developer Owlcat says that it didn’t want to lock players into a fixed way of playing The Expanse: Osiris Reborn. “Instead of fixed classes, you are free to experiment with different playstyles until you find what you enjoy the most,” the studio said. “Your captain's arsenal and your companions’ skills and equipment are designed to adapt to your chosen playstyle.”

We’ve got much more on Owlcat, including an in-depth interview about the developer’s impressive journey from Pathfinder to Warhammer 40,000 and now The Expanse, as well as the studio’s response to calls from fans for it to make Baldur’s Gate 4.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.