Oye, kapetang!
In our previous dev blog, we talked about how your origin shapes your captain's journey through The Expanse: Osiris Reborn and mechanically defines where you find yourself starting. But where you begin doesn’t define how you have to play. What if character creation didn’t lock you into an RPG class?
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.
Choose Your Playstyle
At the start of the game, you'll pick a specialization that sets your captain's initial skills and gear. For example, a cyber warfare specialist (formerly a hacker in the Beta) starts the game with decent gadget expertise, and their playstyle leans toward using abilities more than firearms. A firearms specialist (formerly an officer) starts with better shooting and leadership skills, relying both on their own aim and on issuing orders to companions in combat.
Specializations don't restrict your progression or lock you into a particular role. 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 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, as the name suggests, 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.
Mix and match as you like — you won't be able to take everything, but nothing stops you from leaning into two directions at once. Change your mind later, and 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 and that you must consider your respecs carefully. Skill trees expand your captain's capabilities, but they don't determine your playstyle on their own. That comes from the weapons and gadgets you equip, the abilities they provide, and the upgrade paths you choose for them.
Gear Evolves With You
The real fun starts as soon as you get your hands on a 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 that the original item lacked.
Nothing Is Set in Stone
Imagine you've spent a dozen encounters pouring resources into your rifle, building your playstyle around tight, accurate bursts. Then you find something better. You can reset the rifle’s upgrades and instead build around the new weapon. Normally, the resources you invest are lost, but a limited consumable lets you recover them.
Take a look at the Kovach M46 rifle before and after a couple of upgrades, and the difference is obvious: a bigger magazine, harder-hitting headshots, five-round bursts instead of three, and a scope that is perfect for picking off enemies at ranges unreachable before.
Your Crew Gears up, Too
Building your crew is also part of building your playstyle. Your companions also have skill trees, and their signature gadgets also have their own unique upgrade paths, allowing you to tailor their combat roles to your captain's strengths and weaknesses.
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, how the turret evolves is entirely up to you. 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 and tear through enemies while causing massive explosions. Every companion you recruit brings their own gear, which you can customize to synergize with your playstyle.
At the end of the day, we didn't want to lock you 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. Your captain's arsenal and your companions’ skills and equipment are designed to adapt to your chosen playstyle.
Are you excited to try out different playstyles? Are you already planning builds for your companions? Let us know in the comments. And if you have any questions, feel free to ask!
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Oyedeng!