Owlcat Games is a Video Game developer, headquartered in Cyprus with satellite offices in Russia and Armenia... with the "satellite" office in Moscow previously having been the de facto main development studio and home to the vast majority of the staff, prior to events of the early 2020s prompting a move of the bulk of the team to Cyprus. Owlcat is primarily devoted to the creation of computer Role-Playing Games in the Western RPG mold, taking particular inspiration from Baldur's Gate and other Infinity Engine-era titles. The studio was founded in 2016 by Oleg Shpilchevskiy and Alexander Mishulin, and soon after its founding launched a Kickstarter campaign for their first title: Pathfinder: Kingmaker, an RPG based on the Pathfinder ruleset (which branched off from Dungeons & Dragons in 2009) and was in fact the first CRPG made for that setting and ruleset.
While that game faced a turbulent launch, Owlcat put in the work to clean up the game's bugs and defects, and by 2019 it was considered easily one of the best games of the "isometric revival". This led to a highly successful second Kickstarter for a sequel, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, and to Paizo (Pathfinder's tabletop developer & publisher) being very satisfied with the treatment Pathfinder was getting in the CRPG space and developing a close working relationship with Owlcat.
In 2022, Owlcat pulled off another coup in partnering with Games Workshop to produce the first CRPG based on the d100 ruleset that traces its roots back to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, that game being Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader (using the Rogue Trader tabletop game as its inspiration and source material).
Perhaps the most notable thing about Owlcat is that its development leads have far more experience than the apparent age of the studio would suggest: Shpilchevskiy, Mishulin and several other leads are, in fact, former major figures from Nival Interactive, and were core members of the teams behind the Allods titles, Silent Storm, and Heroes of Might and Magic V. The move to found Owlcat evidently stemmed from them being fed up with Nival's turbulent acquisition and publication history and a desire for more creative control over their works. Their games to date have had physical publication handled by Deep Silver and/or META Publishing, though the company is owned by the founders.
Games developed by Owlcat:
- Pathfinder: Kingmaker (2018)
- Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (2021)
- Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader (2023)
Tropes in Owlcat's works:
- Modular Difficulty: One of Owlcat's trademarks is allowing the player to manually customize the difficulty level of their games in great detail: both Pathfinder adaptations feature several preset difficulty levels that can then be further customized with sliders for damage differentials for the Player Party and mobs, whether the mobs can inflict critical hits, whether a party member being reduced to the negative of their Constitution score is actually killed or only badly wounded, etc. Rogue Trader has a similar system, though the options are implemented slightly differently since the game is based on the d100-based Rogue Trader system.
- Turn-Based Combat: Owlcat has evolved towards this trope over time. Pathfinder: Kingmaker initially shipped with just Real-Time with Pause (a typical gameplay style in isometric RPGs), but modders came up with a Game Mod to add a turn-based mode to more closely emulate Pathfinder tabletop gameplay. The mod proved popular enough that Owlcat decided to add an optional turn-based mode in the Definitive Edition patch, which came shortly before the release of Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, which shipped with the mode. Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader abandons Real-Time with Pause altogether.
