Exodus Succeeds With Mass Effect's Combat, But I'm Worried About Role-Playing

It's been almost a decade since a new Mass Effect game was released. Meanwhile, BioWare as we knew it ended with widespread layoffs, narratively and technically complex development, the development of Dragon Age: The Veliguard, and slow progress on the next Mass Effect.

It's no surprise that so many Mass Effect fans rallied behind Exodus. This sci-fi RPG is being created by some big names from BioWare, most notably James Ohlen (who left the studio) and Drew Karpyshyn, who worked on KOTOR and the original Mass Effect trilogy.

The latest trailer shows what Mass Effect-y Exodus will be like, at least in terms of presentation. You can form a party of up to two companions at a time and give them orders during combat. We gain new abilities for them and ourselves through skill trees. There's also the Paragon and Renegade systems (which give you legally distinct designations Paladin and Immortal), allowing you to earn points on both sides by unlocking various abilities.

But of course Paragon and Renegade existed mostly for roleplaying in Mass Effect, and Exodus' version is no different. In the character creator, you can choose whether you want to be a paladin or an immortal, and depending on your decision, you can earn points for both. The developers emphasized that the choices we make in the character creator don't lock you in from the start and expect some trial and error before players land on one side.

But even with that in mind, I worry that this still has the trappings of Mass Effect's binary morality. In the dialogue we only saw two or three basic dialogue options. When faced with a (seemingly) life or death decision for one of our colleagues, there are only two options. And nothing goes deeper than deciding how violent you want to be.

That life-and-death scenario was presented with much fanfare in the trailer, and the preview ended before we could see the consequences of this decision. The decision at issue is whether to escalate the situation with violence or words, a classic conundrum in the game design of Paragon and Renegade.

It's too early to judge, but it's not a successor to Mass Effect or KOTOR, but rather a rehash of similar mechanics. A similar scenario in Mass Effect 3 (where you have to tell a former colleague not to shoot you) depends on a variety of factors. How you communicate with them is important, but so is how you participate in the politics on the ground. And sadly, here too the feeling of knowledge and how we interact with it was somewhat lacking.

With Exodus, there was no way we could get a brief look at something like a scene from Mass Effect 3 for this new IP's first game, but we haven't even seen the basics yet. There may be character moments, but what about politics? What about ideological conflicts? To put it more simply, where is the source?

How customizable are the characters in Exodus?

Exodus screenshot showing a character swinging from a hook.

Another concern concerns the player character, Jun Aslan. In the preview, the developers were quick to reiterate that Jun could be either male or female, but didn't really look at the female model. Then, throughout the presentation, Jun was referred to as a man.

Ironically, this is a departure from the Mass Effect tradition, with many hardcore players preferring the Femshep, even if the overall player population still gravitates towards the male option.

Jun has a set backstory as a famous human and celestial child. A highly evolved group of humans. They had to go into hiding because their older half-brother tricked them out of their inheritance. When you start the game, Jun is a traveler trying to harness ancient astronomical technology to save humanity.

For one thing, it's much more of a set setting than the game Exodus depicts. Shepard can also have one of three backstories and three different kinds of service records before even dealing with the Paragon and Renegade systems. Combined with how Dude Jun has so much more work put into him than his female counterpart, this feels like a lot more of a pre-written protagonist than fans of BioWare's older games would like.

So much of the game depends on how much we like Jun as a character rather than how we build our own Jun, which I'm not sure about right now. The backstory is interesting and shows that the developers were inspired by things other than Mass Effect (Dune, for example, was named for its touchpoints), but it didn't carry that weight in the conversations we saw.

Even excluding Jun, this approach puts more pressure on the companions to shine, and I'm still waiting to become obsessed with them. Our first colleagues, Tom Vargas and Elise Charroux, had potential, but what we saw was very derivative. Tom grieves for his dead wife, and Ellis is a “no-nonsense” soldier. We offer store brands Kaidan and Ashley. With Phaedra, we also have someone to fill the role of cute, socially awkward science type Liara.

The only thing that gives me hope is the time dialing mechanism

Exodus screenshot showing a character taking cover from a giant machine-like creature during a boss fight.

If Jun is not our Jun, then the morality options are about how violent we want to be and the companions seem like metaphors, so where does that leave us?

In practice, this means that something else will have to do the heavy lifting to bring this to anywhere near the strengths of Mass Effect. Fortunately, Exodus do This can be achieved through a time dilation mechanism.

Time dilation is where another Exodus inspiration comes into play: Interstellar. The expedition your character embarks on may take hours or days, but returning home may take months or years. I certainly hope this is enough to arouse some passion and emotion beyond a man on a ship talking about his dead wife.

After all, Mass Effect 2 (considered the best hour of the series) revolved around suicide missions. The game is built around the fact that anyone who agrees with this either believes that much in the cause or has no choice but to accept the call. That's what brings conflict into the narrative, and lets us role-play how we approach the mission and whether we care about the people we're dragging along.

Time dilation has the potential to do just that, inject some fire into characters who desperately need it. What kind of people are desperate or passionate enough to agree to this? How will it affect everyone’s relationships? How does the man in charge of humanity deal with the fact that travelers from the past regularly return from missions years later? This is what I want to know now. It's not how the combat goes or how crappy I can be in dialogue.

This latest trailer proves that Exodus has the makings of a solid shooter and sci-fi game. But for the game to live up to what sparked interest in the project in the first place, we now have to believe in its narrative and world-building potential and feel confident that there will be plenty of room to explore it through Jun and company.