Exodus hands-on: "Carries the Mass Effect baton well into deep space with ambitious RPG mechanics that let me get tactical"

Exodus, the upcoming sci-fi action-adventure RPG from developer Archetype Entertainment and Wizards of the Coast, is a big swing. It's the first title from the developer – which includes talent with pedigrees from the likes of Halo Studios, Electronic Arts, Naughty Dog, and, yes, BioWare – and an early salvo from Wizards of the Coast's shift toward internal game development. But it's not out until early 2027, and after seven years in development, the team has yet to share much in detail about Exodus.

Until now.

In addition to the Exodus extended gameplay reveal at the end of the Future Games Show Summer Showcase, I recently spent several hours playing Exodus for myself at Archetype Entertainment's Austin, Texas game development studio as well as interviewing the developers for an early look at next year's release.

Exodus, defined

Exodus' premise isn't exactly simple, but it is straightforward: you are Jun Aslan, the uniquely gifted child of the legendary Traveler Orion Aslan, and you're trying to save your world from falling to the dreaded Rot, an unforgiving disease that consumes the Celestial technology that keeps your home alive (Celestials being super-evolved humans, and a result of time dilation).

That is a goodly amount of proper nouns, but in short: the weight of the world is on your shoulders, and you've got a lot to prove as you go out into space in order to "borrow" alien tech from elsewhere. No pressure.

"At the end of the day, it's a hero's journey about Jun Aslan on a story of overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds to save his home world," Chad Robertson, studio general manager at Archetype Entertainment, tells me. "He starts the journey as a lowly salvager, trying to understand his place in the world and how he fits in, knowing that he's got unique origins, but not really understanding how those add up to something that's going to be spectacular for him – and then meets amazing companions and friends along the way, and constructs this journey on his route to save humanity."

Meet the team

Not that any of that is front of mind when I load into Exodus, however, as it's still early in the narrative and Jun has seemingly only just hired Tom Vargas and Elise Charroux, who both also happen to be previously revealed playable companions, to help him salvage some of that oh-so-important Celestial technology. A nearby (relatively speaking) air scrubber isn't working anyway, and it's just going to waste.

The three of us don't always see eye to eye on what to do or where to go, and Tom and Elise have no problem letting me know. Multiple dialogue options are presented at pivotal moments as well as inconsequential ones, and I ultimately decide to be a bit saucy as Jun; he's had it pretty rough, and now he's dealing with folks that are questioning his capabilities when he's the one that hired them. He's earned the right to snark, in my opinion, though my two companions aren't always thrilled.

"You want them to feel alive," says Drew Karpyshyn, narrative director on Exodus at Archetype Entertainment, when I ask about the most important quality for companions. "You want to be able to make them love you and hate you."

"And maybe it's even hard – maybe you don't know the right answer," he continues. "You can't get everyone to be on board. You want to have that drama, that conflict. If reality TV has taught us anything, it's that drama and conflict are entertaining and fun."

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It was a firefight

It's hard to get a sense of those narrative consequences and ramifications while I play given I'm only seeing one small part of a larger relationship, but it's much easier to digest the combat gameplay loop and feedback. Functionally, Exodus firefights play a bit like a third-person shooter with RPG elements. That description likely evokes Mass Effect for anyone familiar, and while there's plenty of that franchise's DNA (and developers) within Exodus, it's also not exactly that.

As I creep around and take on strange angular beings as well as rival salvagers on my way to the aforementioned Celestial tech, I find a much greater emphasis on stealth. The initial moments of any encounter are about positioning and engagement rather than always an all-out brawl, and the varied level design lets me, for example, take cover or begin from the high ground before firing my first shot from the Recycler, my unique weapon that can reconfigure itself into multiple different types so that I can be sniping from range one moment and firing a burst up close the next.

Add to this weapon modifications, a crew of companions to pick from with their own abilities, Jun's own skills, and more. Every single combat encounter feels like it can become something more akin to a small chessboard, quickly moving pieces around, firing off abilities, and repositioning before doing it all over again. You can manage most of these with some quick thinking, but the more notable encounters – like the giant armored mech I have to take on in order to exfil after my mission's complete – will absolutely require in-depth planning.

I say this in more of a "do as I say and not as I do" tone as my encounter with the big mech proves the point. Instead of being particularly thoughtful, I gun it as hard as I can from the moment the fight begins. I drop all of my ability cooldowns as soon as I can rather than waiting for an opportune moment and I'm not taking anything that resembles careful aim despite realizing there were certain weak points being highlighted. In hindsight, some of those abilities hit the mech's armor harder and might have been better timed. Next time, I'll do better, which sort of seems to be the point.

"One of the things we wanted to lean into hardcore was more moment-to-moment tactical choice," says Chris King, game director on Exodus at Archetype Entertainment. "Part of that is approaching encounters – a lot of action RPGs devolve into more reactionary stuff and using abilities just in response to what's being thrown at you. We want players to think a little bit bigger, so we have a pre-stealth loop."

"We encourage players to go into encounters and scope things out," he continues. "There's a skill component to everything, but we really want players thinking about what they're doing and plotting out the best way for them to solve the problem."

Time dilating

It is sometimes hard to envision what a complete video game will be like at release during these early looks. For any RPG, it often comes down to the particulars of the progression systems, which are obviously still a work in progress in Exodus. Like any in-development game, the section I play has its share of placeholders, temporary bits, little visual issues, and geometry trouble that I have faith will 100% be ironed out by the time Exodus ships next year. Literally every single day, there's a whole studio still working on it, and the Exodus I play is almost certainly not the same Exodus of two weeks later and absolutely not the retail release version of Exodus.

Playing a game this early is less like being handed a fully cooked or even a half-cooked meal and more like being handed several in-progress sides and maybe the main is largely done but still needs to be on the grill for another five minutes. The quality of the ingredients is obvious, but it's all about how they layer together in the end, and that's something you have to envision for yourself.

As just one example, I didn't actually experience any of Exodus' all-important time dilation – to be extremely reductive for the sake of brevity, more time passes for those not traveling at near lightspeed so the places and people you leave behind can change drastically. From everything I have seen, however, this will play a major role and in fact cause the world to change around you after each Exodus (the name of the game and the proper noun for the time dilation-causing jaunts) to distant worlds.

But the ingredients are good, and so far, I like what I've experienced of what the developers at Archetype Entertainment are cooking.