How does time dilation set Exodus apart from Mass Effect? It "supersizes all of the choices that you make"
Revealed during last week's Geoffening, Exodus is the first game from Archetype Entertainment, a new studio that includes former members of BioWare and Naughty Dog. It's a sci-fi odyssey with third-person shooting that looks and sounds a lot like Mass Effect, but it has one differentiating Big Idea (aside from Matthew McConaughey): time dilation, whereby time passes different in different places, depending on relative velocity and local gravity.
As I wrote in a very reachy piece about Starfield's universal and local clocks, way back in August, time dilation is a fascinating concept that poses all sorts of challenges for game designers, extending from questions of plotting to the practicalities of quests and resourcing. For example: if time dilation is a factor, flying back to a solar system in a faster-than-light vessel to polish off sidequests might see thousands of years passing on the planets in question. I am a very indecisive and absent-minded player: am I going to relegate generations of NPCs to the ashes, because I can't remember which world has the store that sells that weapon attachment I've been saving up for?
Most sci-fi games sidestep such issues by introducing made-up magic technologies, or just throwing up their hands and pretending that time dilation isn't real. So how much will Exodus really lean into it? Will the effects be carefully stage-managed at the level of chapters and cutscenes, with specific choices advancing the clock in predetermined ways, or will the game try its hand at something like a full-blown relativistic simulation? It's hard to say, this close to announcement, but the developers have dropped a few hints in between the grander promises.
According to Archetype co-founder and
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