Last year, a group of BioWare veterans unveiled Exodus, a new space RPG made by former developers from Halo, The Last of Us, and, of course, those classic BioWare RPGs. While hopping around the galaxy in BioWare is a pretty speedy affair, though, Exodus takes a substantially more scientifically accurate approach.
In a new FAQ, the developers attempted to explain that approach. One of Exodus’ key ideas is Time Dilation - the principle that the closer you get to Light Speed, the slower time moves for you. In Exodus, that means that “while you may experience only days or weeks passing by on your own journey, years or even decades will pass for everyone and everything else in the galaxy.”
That idea is key to Exodus’ choice-based gameplay and multiple endings - the decisions you make in the present could be felt years, decades, or even centuries down the line, after you return from your spacefaring adventures. And developer Archetype is keen to make sure that you know there’s no way to reduce the effects of Time Dilation.
The devs describe the phenomenon as “an inescapable fact of our universe,” and “an immutable law of physics.” That means that “there is no possible way to prevent, avoid, or alter the effects of time dilation.” No items, abilities, or technologies will protect players from the long-term consequences of their actions, because Time Dilation is stitched into our understanding of the universe, and Exodus is taking a pretty ‘hard sci-fi’ approach to its world, the core facets of the game based on Einsteinian physics.
That hard sci-fi is also based around the understanding that it’s not possible to travel at the speed of light, but to help with that, Exodus relies on a technology known as the ‘Gates of Heaven’. A hyper-advanced technology left behind by a missing race known as the Elohim, these Gates allow Travelers - those who explore the galaxy and will have to deal with the effects of Time Dilation - to accelerate instantly so close to Light Speed that interstellar travel becomes possible.
There are some hints around the narrative of Exodus hidden within the description of the Gates. The Elohim’s absence from the galaxy seems a likely plot point, and there are also mentions of what happens if the Gates are attacked or otherwise destroyed, as well as in-universe rumors of a virus capable of damaging the Gates. If I know anything about galaxy-spanning time-based sci-fi, it’s that if a character can get trapped on the other side of the known universe with no obvious way of getting home before being Deus Ex Machina’d back to civilization, they will.
As yet, there’s no word on when Exodus will release, but as it’s planned for release on PS5 and Xbox Series X, as well as PC, it shouldn’t be more than a few years away.
Mass Effect 5 director gives props to Exodus, the new time-hopping sci-fi game from BioWare RPG veterans.
I really hope that this is a more focused RPG and not a free roaming game. I don’t really see a way to do time dilation and have open world planet hopping at the same time.
You can visit closer systems without too much time pass. But if you want to go real far out… thats when the issues happen. Say you left home and explored, the farther you went out the more the story would change. That could work in rpg sense. Its interesting tho imo.
It would make for some interesting game play mechanics if there were certain events that would always happen in “history”.
All of these things would mean you’d have to restart to order events in the most beneficial with the limited non-relativistic time available to you. Essentially the game would have “The Great Filter” programmed in as part of the story line, and you had to prepare yourself for it with whatever you could collect/accomplish before too much near-FTL travel would put you on The Great Filter’s boundaries.
If it’s anything like Mass Effect, you can hop around planets within a solar system relatively quickly without huge effects on dilation, recall we’re mere minutes from the Sun. Traveling between solar systems however will result in far greater effects due to the much larger distance between them.