Mass Effect veteran's Mass Effect-style sci-fi RPG sure looks a lot like Mass Effect in its new trailer

Exodus, the upcoming sci-fi RPG from Mass Effect and Baldur's Gate veterans, is taking another major step towards full 'spiritual successor' status.

In its new trailer at The Game Awards, we got the longest look yet at Exodus' gameplay. While developer Archetype has done an awful lot to build out its universe - with everything from novels to a tabletop roleplaying game - it's not shown off much in the way of how the game actually plays.

As it turns out, the way it actually plays looks a lot like Mass Effect, though perhaps that's not too shocking with BioWare veterans Chad Robertson and James Ohlen helping lead Exodus. There's cover shooting, companions, and even some mystical abilities that make traversal look particularly exciting. A decent chunk of the trailer is given over to cutscenes, admittedly, but there's certainly a good amount of footage to go off.

There's also a lot of Matthew McConaughey, who's lending some extra gravitas to Exodus' Interstellar-style time dilation narrative by serving as the voice actor behind main character Jun's mentor figure. He's mostly voiceover, so we don't get a particularly substantial insight into his character, but that's made up for by Jun himself, whose hero's journey is a significant part of the trailer.

From sprawling in the mud of some backwater town to saving the world as the only person capable of wielding the Celestial technology that humanity now relies on, it's a pretty wild ride of an arc within a single trailer.

The companions appear in much of the trailer, once again riffing on Mass Effect. On each mission, you'll get to choose which two allies to take along with you, borrowing from their unique skill sets to decide on your approach.

That might mean a pair of stealth experts, tech geniuses, or simply those who prefer to go loud, but Archetype hasn't revealed all that much about how its cast will play out yet. What it has shown off is plenty of ensemble shots, suggesting that the downtime between characters might be just as important as the action itself.

There's a bittersweet sting at the end of the new Exodus trailer, which confirms a release date slip into early 2027. Initially planned for a 2026 release but with no more exact window than that, it's a shame that we're not getting hold of Exodus next year, but hopefully we're only looking at a real-time delay of a few months at most.

They're already responsible for many of the best RPG games on our list, but are Exodus' devs about to add another entry?