Mass Effect veterans have another Normandy-type "major hub" in their new space RPG Exodus, but this time it's an entire city

Exodus, the upcoming game from a few veteran game developers who worked on the original Mass Effect trilogy, has a hub world. Good news for anyone who liked pestering everyone on the Normandy in between any excursion! But this time, the hub world is an entire city that'll change over the course of in-game decades.

Archetype Entertainment co-founders and former BioWare higher-ups James Ohlen and Chad Robertson sat down to dish more information on Exodus in this month's Q&A video, where the duo was asked about how exactly time dilation affects the game's world.

You see, in Exodus, you and your interstellar buddies go on expeditions to retrieve some ancient kind-of-alien artefacts, but time crawls much slower in space than it does on your home world. One trip into the aether for you might be a decade for your people back home. Archetype had only vaguely hinted that our choices would ripple across decades and even centuries before, but we now have a much more concrete idea of how that works in practice. 

"We've made the capital city on your world, Persepolis, a major hub of your adventures and your experience," Ohlen explains. "And so you go off on your Exodus journeys, and you leave behind your city, and some of your friends, and you make choices about them. For example, not everyone has to come on an Exodus with you. You might leave some behind, and when you come back, it might be one decade later, or it could be four decades later, and those choices will have impacted your relationships with people who are now a decade older or three or four decades older. How your city has evolved, how technology has been integrated into everything from the military to, you know, civic structures to, well, I could go on and on."

It's also interesting that the Archetype team named the game's main hub after an ancient Persian city that was destroyed after the empire's long-standing beef with the ancient Greeks. A hint of things to come for Exodus' crew? We'll find out when Exodus rockets onto PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PS5 sometime this year.

Exodus recently got an action-packed trailer with gunfights, aliens, and a massive grizzly bear fitted with some badass armor.