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.
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.
As far as plot goes, this isn’t sounding all that innovative. They couldn’t think of anything except going with the old “we’re using Stargates Jump Gates Mass Relays Gates left by a mysterious missing race called Precursors Ancients Protheans Elohim”?
They had to do something there. It takes about a year to approach light speed with constant 1G acceleration, and at that point you’ve already traveled half a light year. But how boring of a game would that be?
They had to do something there.
Yeah, sure, but that doesn’t mean that their only options are either warming some leftover Protheans in a microwave and calling it Elohim with Gates, or a “boring” game.
They could have come up with literally anything other than the same subplot they had in Mass Effect. If they want near-instantaneous acceleration that won’t turn humans into mush they require effectively magical technology anyhow for their acceleration, but why not have humans invent it? Nothing says it has to be Precu… sorry, I mean Anci… sorry, Elohim. Or why not lean into the hard scifi aspect where acceleration does take a long time? Doesn’t mean it absolutely 100% has to be a boring game, just that they’d need to design around that somehow.
The Expanse’s approach, pre-gates, is pretty cool. Someone invents an engine that provides similar thrust to modern rockets but which can burn pretty much indefinitely. As such, ships can accelerate constantly at 0.3-1 G to provide “gravity” for passengers. At the same time, doing this actually gets you around the Solar System pretty damn fast as well, with journeys between planets typically taking between a day and a week. That limits you to one solar system, but you can do a lot with a whole solar system
If they want near-instantaneous acceleration that won’t turn humans into mush they require effectively magical technology anyhow for their acceleration, but why not have humans invent it?
If its a technology humans understand then there would be hundreds or thousands of other applications of that same technological principles across other disciplines. If its not used elsewhere, they have to explain plausibly why it isn’t. If it is used elsewhere, the authors of the story have to define the science as, well, science and that isn’t their endeavor. They want to tell time dilation stories, and that’s fine.
Example:
Where are the in-game near-FTL bombs?
How is it explained in the story where humans would have a technology to create the massive amount of energy in a single moment to accelerate a whole space ship to relativistic speeds, but we haven’t made bomb out this same technology? Its the first things that humans do with new tech is find the most horrible way to use it against other humans. We didn’t do that? Well to be consistent you’ll have to explain why.
In short, its an unnecessary distraction.
Gotcha. I took your post as ‘but that’s not sciencey!’, not that your main point was that they are just putting another coat of paint on the same tired plot device. And that’s an excellent point.
I mean your options are vessels that can travel at those speeds under their own power or vessels that require something else to move them. The latter is easier to do but they’re both very common and at the end of the day is the means to an end. Having realistic time dilation on the other hand is super interesting both from a narrative and mechanical perspective and has me genuinely excited for this game.
Fetch quests would be weird in the game.
NPC: Kill 10 rats.
You: Kill 10 rats, then travel the universe, and come back 100 years later to meet NPC’s grand child. “I killed the 10 rats! Give me 10 gold!”
NPC’s Grandchild: “Whaaat?”
You don’t collect interest if you fuck off for 100 years and never pick up your payment though
That’s not really true if you set things up with the correct legal structure. It would be easy to create a trust that you could withdraw from a century later. I mean, assuming that the government and banking structure doesn’t fall apart in that time period, which isn’t guaranteed.
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”.
- Perhaps the fall of civilization galaxy wide.
- Maybe resource exhaustion after a certain date.
- The virus spoken of could disable the gates at some point so if you “burned through” the elapsed time when the gates were still active too quickly you’d be marooned in a part of space you did your last near-FTL travel.
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.
Sounds like it will either be gimmicky, or very constrained and not open-world.
They talk a big game, but bioware was never as good as people made them out to be. If nothing else though it’ll be better than mass effect 5.
