New space RPG from Mass Effect veterans has choices that impact you, your home world, your character progression, and your 'loved ones'

Exodus, a new sci-fi RPG from BioWare veterans, features time dilation mechanics where choices impact not only your party but also loved ones back home, resulting in consequences that span years and even centuries.

Choices in interstellar RPG Exodus won't just affect your party - they'll stretch back across space and dilated time to hit your "loved ones."

Exodus is the debut time-hopping RPG from Archetype Entertainment, a studio founded by some absolute industry veterans, including long-time BioWare designers. Studio co-founders Chad Robertson and James Ohlen have now sat down to answer some questions about their mysterious upcoming sci-fi epic.

"The choices you make are going to impact story progression in a bunch of different ways," Ohlen explains in the Q&A below. "Your choices are going to have consequences for your loved ones back home. You're going to see that impact on those choices in cool ways we unfortunately can't reveal quite yet, but they're also going to affect a bunch of other things. Progression options for your character as you advance in the game. Your home world and your civilization overall, and that's gonna be pretty enormous, we're super excited about that. There's a really cool element that I think we really, internally, are most excited about, which involves some crazy outcomes with your companions."

While the pair doesn't dive too deeply into examples, they do explain that the game's central premise is ripe for the types of tough choices that gave everyone such a deep connection to the Mass Effect trilogy. Exodus has our main character traveling from Earth into deep space in search of remnants, but every time we make that jump, time dilates - think Interstellar, where our clock moves differently to Earth's clock. 

That means we can return home from a 30-minute mission and see how our decisions affected humanity over the course of maybe years. There'll also always be choices gravitating around the remnants, as we decide whether to leverage the artefacts for war, peace, scientific progression, or else. 

The other thing that struck me from Archetype's post was the team's take on aliens. "The definition of alien in Exodus is a little different, because they aren't extraterrestrial," Robertson explains. All the 'aliens' we meet actually have ties to Earth, but thousands of years of evolution have made them take a not-so-human shape, and I'm sure the timey-wimey shenanigans have a part to play in how they mutate too.

Former Mass Effect devs’ new space RPG also has entire planets that will actively try to kill you.