Tonight at The Game Awards, we got our latest look at Exodus, the Matthew McConaughey-starring space RPG from a studio founded by BioWare veterans, which—if we're being entirely honest—has looked a lot like Mass Effect in previous showings.
Tonight's trailer helps differentiate Exodus by laying out more of its characters and setting, featuring a crew of colorful companions embarking on a planet-hopping quest to uncover the mysteries of enigmatic alien technology.
Alright, that… still sounds pretty Mass Effect. But Mass Effect didn't have a spectral space cowboy voiced by Matthew McConaughey haunting its protagonist, did it? No! If anything that's closer to Cyberpunk's deal! But nobody in Cyberpunk can do space magic like Exodus protagonist Jun Aslan, so we're in the clear on that front.
Jun's journey begins on Lidon, "a fragile new home" in a new galaxy where humanity fled to escape a dying Earth. Lidon, unfortunately, is being assailed by the Rot, a "mysterious force threatening to erase everything humanity has built"—a sort of "Reaping," you could call it—which forces Jun out into space with a crew of misfits to track down Celestial technologies that could help safeguard humanity's future.
Those Celestials aren't your typical space opera precursor race. Instead, they're actually humanity's descendants, having branched off from our idea of humanity during the 40,000 years of travel it took to travel between our solar system and the Centauri cluster where humanity fled. As Chad Robertson, vice president and co-founder of Exodus developer Archetype Entertainment, told PC Gamer, not all of humanity's ark ships arrived in the Centauri systems at once.
"For Jun and others, their arrival was much more recent in terms of the timeline," Robertson said. "That creates this immediate sort of juxtaposition of this advanced, evolved—or transhumanist—version of humanity against humanity as we know it today."
Jun's comrades run a similarly wide gamut: According to a press release, Jun's companions will range "from punk mech pilots to genetically engineered savants." There's also Salt, an intelligent octopus in a mech suit. While other companions are romanceable, Salt is not. Apologies.
According to publisher Wizards of the Coast, Jun's own ancestry has its own complications. Jun is, I'm told, a descendant of "a revered Traveler dynasty," which has the benefit of granting them a variety of exciting space magics. Among them is an ability called the Auspex, a kind of clairvoyance that lets the player glimpse how their decisions will affect humanity's future—sometimes thousands of years in the future.
There's also ghost McConaughey. He's probably important, too, though we'll have to wait to see exactly how. Exodus is coming in early 2027, but you can wishlist it on Steam now.
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