Exodus didn’t do much for me when it was first revealed at the 2023 Game Awards, but my interest in it started to grow after Matthew McConaughey started releasing daily Exodus trailers as some kind of deep space David Attenborough. Today we got our first look at any actual Exodus gameplay, and I hate to say it, but I’m back to feeling pretty ambivalent about the whole thing, which to me doesn’t look like anything so much as an alt-universe Mass Effect.
To be fair, you can’t take too much away from a single trailer: They’re little bits of hours-long gameplay meant to build hype above all else. But there’s just so much going on here that so closely echoes Mass Effect, right down to the glowing neon space magic staff gauntlet. You can call it “celestial technology” all you want, but come on, it’s an Omni-Blade.
Even the very short bits of dialogue leave me cold. There’s a springiness to it that reminds me of Fraser Brown’s thoughts on how Dragon Age: The Veilguard has “become BioWare’s Avengers“, takes call signs from a Marvel formula that has grown very close to wearing out its welcome. “Loaded guns are a hell of a way to greet your new partner,” says our hero, before the grizzled veteran lunges out – presumably after everyone has figured out that it’s all just a big misunderstanding – “Now that we’re all best friends, let’s make each other rich.”
I, along with pretty much everyone else at PC Gamer, also have questions about why we’re fighting the bear. “Space Bear should be this game’s Wrex,” said news writer Lincoln Carpenter, and he’s absolutely right. But I also think there is a better than good chance that the space bear is this game’s Wrex, and much like the previous “loaded guns” encounter, this entire fight turns out to be a misunderstanding where the space hero and space bear reluctantly earn each other’s respect and become rock-solid partners in countless future adventures. Or maybe there is another space bear. Anyway, if it’s anything we learned from Baldur’s Gate 3 it’s that bears are friends (sometimes with benefits), and I’ll be totally surprised if Exodus doesn’t give you a space bear buddy at some point.
There’s no doubt that at least part of my lack of enthusiasm for this trailer stems from the lead up to it. McConnaughey’s gritty tales of a genuinely terrifying galaxy where humanity is little more than a prey species flitting between sources of food and shelter while desperately trying to avoid the attention of the cosmos’ true predators? That’s what’s good. This new trailer looks so unremarkable in comparison that I can’t help but feel a little let down.
It’s far from a final verdict on Exodus, which I hope lives up to the promise of the previous narrative videos, and there are definitely some unusual twists to it. In a stream with Coh Carnagefor example, creative director James Ohlen, a former BioWare veteran whose credits run from the original Baldur’s Gate to Mass Effect: Andromeda, said there are “no extraterrestrial aliens at all” in the game.
“Everything comes from — it has a terrestrial origin, whether it’s the celestial bodies that come from human stock, or whether it’s some of the really weird stuff that actually also either comes from animals or humans that have been modified over tens of thousands of years,” said Ohlen. “I always like to say, if people with no technology whatsoever can take a wolf and turn it into a chihuahua in a thousand years, what are we going to be able to do with all the technology over 40,000 years for us and other animals.”
Time dilation, a physics headache that tends to go around most sci-fi video games, also features prominently in Exodus, a point trip home in a cinematic story trailer released last year.
“From a character and emotional arc, I mean, imagine you leave your family and everything you love behind and come back and they’ve all lived their lives while you’ve lived nothing,” Blur Studios creative director Tim Miller said during the stream. “I think the whole story we were trying to tell in the opening trailer was, you know, for the young man, it’s been six months since he lost the woman he loved, and she was living his whole life. It’s hard to imagine the emotional impact of that for the character.”
It’s still exciting, and so I hope that Exodus will ultimately deliver on its promise. I just wish this first look at the game wasn’t so conventional.
Also absent from today’s trailer is any sign of a release date, but considering the game is labeled “pre-alpha” I’d expect a long wait yet.
