"The impact of time dilation is something very unique and fresh" — sci-fi RPG Exodus looks like Mass Effect but there's a very important difference Big on tick tock. Feature by Robert Purchese Associate Editor Published on 17 comments Follow Exodus Exodus looks a lot like Mass Effect — let's get that out of the way. Not only does Archetype's space-faring RPG have the same look and the same sensibilities, right down to getting a spaceship and gathering a crew in order to save the day, but it's made by some of same the people who dreamt Mass Effect up, including, notably, lead Mass Effect 1 & 2 writer Drew Karpyshyn. Exodus Publisher: Wizards of the Coast Availability: Releases in 2027 on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series S/X But what sets Exodus apart is time dilation. If you've seen the film Interstellar, or if you're familiar with actual space-travelling science, you'll know broadly what this means. It's to do with relativity. Time passes slower for objects moving very quickly or in strong gravity compared to stationary observers. The faster you go, broadly speaking, the slower you age. Exodus has this concept at the heart of its design. "The IP I feel is unique enough — people, once they get into it, will see it," Drew Karpyshyn, narrative director of Exodus, tells me in an interview. "The impact of time dilation is something very unique and fresh, I feel, and we really leverage that. We really lean into it. It's an important part of our IP and a very important part of our story. "I don't know too many other science fiction properties, especially games… Most of them have instant travel or fast travel between planets. We are staying more hard sci-fi and saying it does take literally years to go [there], so that makes a huge impact in how your choices play out. That, to me, is one of our really defining features." Watch on YouTube Information of how time dilation will work in Exodus has been kept intentionally vague. We know chunks of time will pass and that we'll be able to see the longer-term consequences of our role-playing decisions in the game, but we don't know more than that, such as how much time will pass and what kind of consequences we'll face. Are we talking months, years, decades, centuries, or even millennia? There are, however, significant clues available in an Exodus companion tabletop role-playing book published earlier this year, which I have to hand. But before I dive into the clues within it, here's more scene-setting explanation from the people making the game. "Time dilation really only impacts as you start to approach the speed of light," Karpyshyn explains. "When you are travelling within your system, if you're going from Earth to Mars for example, you wouldn't really see the effects of time dilation. Technically it would happen but it'd be hundreds of a second, so it wouldn't be anything anyone would notice. It's more once you get into distances of light years, that's more how it impacts. And that's, again, based on real-world science, so we're trying to follow the rules of actual physics as far as space travel [is concerned]." As to the question of how much time will pass, the assembled interviewees — which include Archetype studio co-founder Chad Robertson and game director Chris King — are cagey about answering. "It's a dangerous one," says Robertson. "We teased generations," adds King. "We said generations." But how long is a generation? A quick internet search tells me somewhere between 20-30 years. 1 of 8 Caption Attribution This tallies with the Exodus TTRPG book. Somewhere near the back, there are tables for a Game Master to use when implementing time dilation-related consequences of their own. These consequences can relate to characters close to the player or they can relate to the world and technological advancements. Should you return from an 'exodus' — the game's name for a mission away — with a valuable piece of civilisation-altering technology, for example, you may see it begin to change the world you live in, first hand. You might also see major world events occur which change the shape of the world or societies living in it. World peace could come about, according to another table in the book, or ecological collapse or asteroid strikes or the rise of totalitarian rule. Here's the Exodus book on my lovely carpet. As a guideline for how much time we're talking about, there are tables related to "anchors" in the game, which are characters the player has a meaningful relation with, which list events in the brackets 0-9 years, 10-30 years, and 31+ years. Events that can occur include people dying or being murdered; people falling in love and marrying and having children; and things like deaths in a family or changing career or self destruction. There's even a table listing events that can occur long after an "anchor" passes away. Here, consequences are listed in brackets of 0-30 years, 31-100 years, and 101+ years, suggesting much more time can potentially pass. Events in these brackets include biographies being written about that person, or that person becoming a pop culture icon, or even the subject of a film. So when Chris King says "generations" of time can pass, it seems he does mean generations, plural. More interestingly, these "anchors" are people you'll consider your best friends, parents, mentors, siblings, partners, and even children, which begs the question of whether the video game will go as far as you having children, too. The passing of time will also probably have an effect on your adventuring companions, too. "Time dilation really only impacts as you start to approach the speed of light" You will gather companions as in a game like Mass Effect, but unlike Mass Effect, your spaceship won't be your travelling hub. Instead, your hub will be on your home planet, meaning that if and when you need to fly away, you'll choose the people you want to travel with — the people who'll experience time as you will. Everyone else will experience time relative to the planet they stayed on, meaning, of course, that you might return to find decades have passed. "A big difference in, say, Mass Effect, where you hang out on the Normandy quite a bit, [is] we don't really have the same hub structure," King tells me. "You'll go travel in the ship but primarily our hub is back on the home world, so the structure is a little bit different there. But yeah, there's some similarities in terms of getting a ship and going into space and traveling to different places and whatnot. "You do bring your companions on the ship with you," he adds. "There are times where you may not bring everyone on a quest. It sort of depends on what's going on. And then when you actually land on a planet, you'll pick two companions that will come join you, but then you can call the other ones if you'd like to swap out or bring someone else in." To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Manage cookie settings Time dilation will be a major part of the Exodus experience, then, and form many of the role-playing conundrums within it — a way of showing you short and longer-term consequences I've been fascinated by in games such as Dragon Age 2 , for example. Time dilation will be a fact of life — and a widely understood risk — for people living in the world. "They understand it as a phenomenon of their existence," Chad Robertson says, "because it's a real, physical element. And so when Jun [the protagonist] goes on his journeys, much like in Interstellar, they understand that there's going to be some ramification that could happen if things don't go as planned, depending on where the journey goes and how long it lasts. It doesn't make it less shocking; we want it to be shocking to players when there's changes that occur at a big scale, both with the world or with companions and other things. "We hope the players will accept it once they immerse themselves, that this is just a natural reality of this universe that you have to deal with, and then, my gosh, this decision is something that does matter to me more because I can't control the amount of time passing that may occur based on this journey that I'm about to undertake." Exodus is due out in 2027 on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X. Notably, Exodus stars decorated Hollywood actor Matthew McConaughey in his first video game role, and it will also, according to Drew Karpyshyn, feature a roster of "pretty thirsty" game companions . Read this next Source: https://www.eurogamer.net/sci-fi-rpg-exodus-looks-like-mass-effect-but-time-dilation-makes-big-difference