Owlcat Won't Quit CRPGs: Good News for Handheld Owners

Owlcat Games being only 10 years old is the surprise — not because it feels ancient, but because it has already shipped three of the most sprawling CRPGs of the generation. Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, and Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader are each 80-to-100-hour commitments, which puts Owlcat’s output ahead of studios that spent the entire decade on a single project.

For handheld players, that density is the entire story. CRPGs are arguably the genre that fits portable PCs best — save anywhere, turn-based combat, dialogue-heavy menus that read perfectly at seven inches, and a natural rhythm for suspend-resume interruption. Owlcat’s head of publishing Andrey Tsvetkov calls the pace “speedrunning.” For anyone with a Steam Deck, a ROG Ally, or a Legion Go, it’s a steady feed of exactly the games this hardware was made for.

Three 100-Hour CRPGs in Ten Years Is a Handheld Pace

The genre-hardware fit is proven in every “what are you playing this week” thread: Wrath of the Righteous and Rogue Trader are perennials on Steam Deck screenshots, and the isometric UI holds up far better at handheld size than most modern action games. Tsvetkov credits that fit to Owlcat’s audience-driven approach — pre-release builds, crowdfunding, and fan feedback shaping the direction. That model also explains the pace: when your players tell you exactly what they want, iteration moves faster.

But the speedrun framing needs a caveat on portable hardware. Rogue Trader launched in 2023 with performance problems that hit Steam Deck players hardest in the late-game zones — problems the Switch 2 edition finally fixed — and Wrath of the Righteous needed extensive post-launch tuning before it played comfortably on the go. Owlcat’s cadence has been fast; its optimization has consistently trailed the release date. The first decade built trust through narrative ambition and community transparency. The second decade will be judged on whether the unglamorous work — settings menus, shader caches, battery draw — gets the same attention.

Dark Heresy and The Expanse: The Performance Question Owlcat Hasn’t Answered

Here’s what’s confirmed about the road ahead: Dark Heresy is another isometric CRPG set in the Warhammer 40K universe, and more than half of Owlcat’s studio pushed to work on Warhammer specifically. The fan pre-release build process that shaped Rogue Trader is already in place for Dark Heresy. Tsvetkov insists the studio “won’t be quitting the CRPG genre,” which is the right message for handheld players who’ve invested dozens of hours into these worlds.

What’s not confirmed — by anyone at Owlcat — is a portable performance target for either Dark Heresy or The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, the studio’s first third-person RPG due in 2027. The Expanse is the wildcard. It abandons the isometric pattern that translates so comfortably to the Deck, and third-person games typically hammer the GPU and drain battery faster than CRPGs ever will — the performance tax UE5 titles keep paying on handhelds. If Dark Heresy stays on the same Unity foundation as Rogue Trader, the optimization lessons should carry forward. The Expanse is a big enough departure that Deck owners should wait for real-world benchmarks before celebrating.

The Crowdfunding Model Is the Blueprint for a Deck-Ready Dark Heresy

Tsvetkov is literal when he says Owlcat owes its fans: Kingmaker raised $909,000 from 18,351 backers, and Wrath of the Righteous pulled in $2 million from more than 35,000. That backer base was overwhelmingly PC CRPG enthusiasts — the same people who formed the early Steam Deck install base and carried the platform’s early library through its handheld-darkest days. The connective tissue matters here: Owlcat’s habit of letting its most dedicated players test pre-release builds doubles as a portable-compatibility pipeline.

If Deck owners are part of that Dark Heresy feedback loop, this could be the first Owlcat game where portable play is a first-class experience from day one rather than a post-launch patch priority. The ten-year mark is a fine moment for reflection, but the next year is the actual test. The studio’s history says it listens to its community; the same history says optimization arrives late, not early. The best-case outcome for handheld players is that the next Owlcat decade opens with a CRPG that runs well on Deck at launch — and this time, the fans who funded the studio get to make sure of it before release day.