Exodus Might Be the Mass Effect Successor We've Been Waiting For
Into the beyond.
It’s been eight long years since the release of Mass Effect: Andromeda, and with the current state of EA and BioWare it’s hard to say how Mass Effect 5 will pan out — or if the game will even see the light of day at all. But Mass Effect fans don’t need to despair, as a couple of key games are hoping to move into Mass Effect’s legacy — and chief among those is Exodus.
The studio behind Exodus, Archetype Entertainment, was founded by key developers from BioWare’s history, including Baldur’s Gate I & II creative director James Ohlen, and Mass Effect I & II writer Drew Karpyshyn. The talent and experience is undeniably there, and it’s hard to looks at Exodus and not see the influence of Mass Effect. But the team at Archetype also wants to do something different, made clear by the game’s bold new trailer at The Game Awards. Inverse had the chance to see the game’s new reveal early, and hear more about Exodus’ ambitions from the developers.
Exodus is a sci-fi role-playing shooter, where you’ll travel around a universe filled with humans, aliens, and even talking sentient animals. In the BioWare tradition there’s a huge emphasis on player choice, party members, and crafting your own journey.
And in a bid to get players invested early, Archetype has already started laying the groundwork for Exodus’ universe long before the game comes out — building lore like a puzzle with a novel and series of table-top books. Ironically, this is remarkably similar to Mass Effect, which had a prequel novel, Mass Effect: Revelation, release months before the game.
Taking place forty thousand years after humanity’s “exodus” from Earth due to environmental collapse, the game takes place in the Omega Centauri Cluster. Humanity launched massive arkships to try and find a new home, and as they spread out into the universe new species of humans started to develop — namely a genetically modified species known as “Celestials.” Now on humanity’s new home, Lidon, life support systems crash and a mysterious force calls the Rot threatens extinction. You play as a young salvager named Jun, whose lineage links him to a legendary faction called “Travelers,” who seek mystical relics.
In the universe of Exodus, “Awakened” are genetically engineered animals have accentuated qualities, like increased strength or intelligence.
With that description, you can surely see the influence of Mass Effect, but there’s an edge of something else to Exodus.
“We're dabbling in a bit of hard sci-fi. There’s inspirations like Aliens and Interstellar. One of the things we gravitated to early was a lot of games, when you're going sci-fi, the notion of getting on a spaceship — it feels like you're getting on a car and driving to the grocery store or something,” game director Chris King says, “You lose sight of how magical, how big space is, how long it takes to get places — and how inconsequential humans are in the grand scheme of things. So part of the reason we chose hard sci-fi was for cool gameplay reasons, but also that theme of the scale and significance of space.”
Interstellar is a particularly interesting inspiration, because it manifests in two distinct ways. For one, the legendary Matthew McConaughey plays a major character in the game — a mysterious ghostly cowboy that, I for one, can’t wait to learn more about. But even more interesting is a scientific theory that Interstellar directly tackled, Time Dilation — the idea that time passes at different rates for different observers. You might remember this from Interstellar, where Cooper only experiences a handful of days on the planet, but learns that years, decades, have passed on Earth.
This ship looks suspiciously similar to another iconic one.
Choice, as you might expect, is an integral part of Exodus, and will shape Jun’s journey throughout the universe. You’ll consistently have to make hard choices, but Time Dilation adds another whole layer to the formula. Essentially, the choices you make can reverberate through generations, where a few minutes for Jun might spell doom for an entire planet.
The example given by the game’s devs was trying to decide if you set out on a journey for a relic that can save your home planet, but gambling on what might happen to said planet in the decades that pass — or if you’ll even have a home to go back to. Time Dilation is a fascinating idea that hasn’t ever really been explored in video games, and could easily help Exodus stand apart from any other RPG out there.
Matthew McConaughey plays this mysterious ghostly figure.
Of course, the second vital half to a game about player choice is the main character — and how you can shape their personality. Much like Commander Shepard, Jun is a pre-defined characters with their own personality, but players decide how the character acts and evolves (and yes, you can play male or female Jun).
“We’re coming from a tradition of role playing games where you get to choose and define your character and make choices. This is something our team really believes in, and something we feel fans are looking forward to,” says writer Drew Karpyshyn, “If we achieve our goals, we’re going to be standing up there in that upper echelon of role-playing games that people look back on years alter with love and affection. That’s what we’re going for.”
The team says one distinct thing they’re really aiming for with Jun is making decisions “morally ambiguous,” with more shades of grey — really making players think deeply before they choose. That extends to a variety of romanceable companions, too.
Exodus is an RPG-focused third-person shooter, with a big emphasis on utilizing the skills of your party members.
Despite the massive success of Mass Effect, there are few games that manage to strike that perfect balance between sci-fi role-playing and complex shooter. While we still haven’t seen a lot of actual gameplay, Exodus’ narrative ambitions shine through clear as day — and the universe Archetype has created undeniably looks intriguing already.
With the success of games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Clair Obscur, fantasy RPGs are having a big comeback — but sci-fi RPGs have yet to have that moment. There’s a chance Exodus could be that game the genre rights, just at the right time.
