After Pathfinder and One of the Best Warhammer 40,000 Games Ever Made, Owlcat's Next Step Is to Top Them All — and It's Grown to 600 People to Do It

Six hundred people. That is the number Owlcat Games now employs. A decade ago the headcount sat at fifteen. Most studios that swell this fast either fracture or flatten into assembly lines. Owlcat has done neither. It has shipped Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, and Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader — three dense, systems-heavy CRPGs that each pushed the genre forward. Rogue Trader, in particular, achieved what decades of licensed 40k games failed to do: it made the setting feel alive instead of merely decorated. The writing carries weight. The choices cascade. The Imperium's rot and grandeur sit in every dialogue tree. It is, by any reasonable metric, the best Warhammer 40,000 video game ever made.

Mishulin disagrees with the premise. He points to Wrath of the Righteous as the moment the industry took Owlcat seriously. "When a studio does a second game and it is still successful, it is proof you can make these experiences over and over with new things, new ambition, new goals," he says. The logic holds. Kingmaker proved they could finish. Wrath proved they could iterate. Rogue Trader proved they could transplant their design language into someone else's IP without diluting it. Games Workshop saw internal builds of Pathfinder before Wrath even launched. That trust, earned early, opened the door to the Rogue Trader license and, later, to Dark Heresy.

Dark Heresy is the safe bet. Another isometric CRPG. Another cascade of consequence. Another 40k license. The risk lives in The Expanse: Osiris Reborn. A third-person action RPG. Mass Effect structure. Real-time combat. No pause-and-plan safety net. Owlcat has never built this. The Expanse rights holder, Alcon Entertainment, saw the pitch while Rogue Trader was still cooking. That timing suggests confidence — or hubris. Mishulin frames it as evolution: the studio wants to prove its systems thinking survives a perspective shift. Fair. But CRPGs and action RPGs demand different muscle memory. One rewards readability; the other demands readability under pressure. The translation is not automatic.

Six hundred people changes how decisions happen. Mishulin admits process has formalized. Leads own verticals. Communication routes are documented. The "shout across the room" era is dead. What he refuses to concede is that passion has diluted. He argues the core — the writers, the systems architects, the narrative designers — still moves as a unit. The new hires build around them. That model works until it doesn't. The danger isn't bureaucracy. It's the slow erosion of the weird, specific instincts that made Wrath's mythic paths feel like discoveries rather than content blocks. Rogue Trader's best moments — the voidship management, the companion arcs that twist based on ideological friction — came from designers who understood the genre's grammar at a molecular level. Scaling that understanding is the hardest problem in game development.

The industry watches. Larian proved a mid-sized studio can craft a genre-defining hit with Baldur's Gate 3. Owlcat is attempting the same trick twice at once, in two different subgenres, with a team four times larger than Larian's at BG3 launch. If Dark Heresy lands and The Expanse connects, Owlcat becomes the first studio to master both the classical CRPG and its modern action descendant. If one falters, the narrative shifts to "spread too thin." There is no middle ground. The next two years will tell us whether 600 people can move with the coherence of fifteen.