As the Greater Chicagoland Area's number one Matthew McConaughey fan and one of its notable BioWare-likers, having him pop up at The Game Awards to announce he'd appear in a new RPG from some BioWare old hands feels tailor-made to make me freak out. The True Detective actor will have an unspecified role in Exodus, the debut game from Archetype Entertainment.
Archetype was founded by James Ohlen, whose BioWare bona fides date back to the Baldur's Gate days, and Exodus will also likely feature the work of Drew Karpyshyn, a former BioWare scribe with an outsize influence on both Knights of the Old Republic and the Mass Effect universe who joined Archetype shortly after its founding. Knowing the BioWare connection makes everything else fall into place with Exodus—not only does it look like a Mass Effect type of deal, its story synopsis makes it sound like Mass Effect Andromeda 2.
"Having fled a dying Earth, humanity has found a new home in a hostile galaxy," reads the topline summary from Exodus' official website. "Here, we are the underdogs, fighting our final battle for survival. You are the Traveler, humanity’s last hope."
The Exodus trailer chops through a ton of dense lore in just a little bit over 150 seconds, but here are the highlights: humanity's at war with bad guy aliens, our astronaut/space marine protagonists may have found the key to beating them (a Crucible, maybe, or a Prothean Beacon?), and faster-than-light travel in this setting includes a lot of general relativity-related time dilation wonkiness a la The Long Morrow episode of The Twilight Zone, or indeed, the McConaughey-led Interstellar.
Exodus' trailer and website make a big deal about that last bit, seeming to imply that FTL travel will have major story implications like characters dying offscreen or entire plotlines resolving themselves due to the effects of interstellar travel. Whether this will turn out to be an open-ended, systemic sort of thing or a bespoke narrative beat is unclear at this point, but it's an interesting concept to bake into a game.
While most of Exodus' trailer was pre-rendered, we did get some gameplay juice at the end: third-person, over-the-shoulder shooting with some spiffy-looking powers—all extremely Mass Effect-y. It's unclear what else Archetype has up its sleeve on a gameplay front, but a fresh take on Mass Effect's core ideas from developers who worked on the original classics certainly has my attention.
Curiously, despite presenting Exodus at The Game Awards, McConaughey himself does not feature in the trailer at all. He did say on stage that he will "have a unique relationship with every player," which sounds like both a promise and a threat. I'm hoping for a Johnny Silverhand deal where he's a full-on companion with you for most of the game.
Exodus has no planned release date at the moment, and it's not yet clear what storefronts it will release on—the trailer just has a "PC Game" logo at the end by the PlayStation and Xbox icons. You can learn more about the game at its official website.
