EXODUS Q&A – ‘Compared to Mass Effect, We’re Trying to Make the Choices a Lot More Morally Ambiguous’

At TGA 2025, Archetype Entertainment, the studio created five years ago by former BioWare vets on behalf of Wizards of the Coast, announced the release window of EXODUS, their sci-fi action/adventure roleplaying game that's highly reminiscent of Mass Effect. The game is scheduled for launch in early 2027 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X.

Wccftech joined a pre-TGA 2025 remote press event hosted by Wizards of the Coast, where Archetype revealed a lot more about EXODUS. You can read our report on the presentation here; this article focuses on the subsequent Q&A portion, where Game Director Chris King, Studio Founder Chad Robertston, and Narrative Lead/Main Writer Drew Karphysyn answered several questions from the assembled press.

You guys obviously have a lot of history with Mass Effect and BioWare. There's a lot of former BioWare people on the team. With that in mind, can you describe how you're letting players define Jun as a character? Commander Shepard set a precedent for this a long time ago. How are you either echoing, evolving, or growing that with how you treat Jun?

Chris King: We're embracing giving the players tons of choices. Drawing the direct comparison to Mass Effect, I think one of the things that's a lot different for us is that we're trying to make the choices a lot more morally ambiguous. You could sort of interpret right or wrong for them. Maybe there's shades of gray. The choices you make will be perceived well or not well from a variety of other sources, so there's
a multi vector decision-making process anytime you get one of these choices. That's one of the biggest things that sticks out to me.

Drew Karpyshyn: Obviously, you know, a lot of the people at our studio worked on Mass Effect. I was very involved. We would be honored to be in that upper echelon of role playing experiences. That is our goal, to become an iconic franchise. We are coming from a tradition of role playing games where you get to choose and define your character and make choices and this is something that our team really believes in and we feel this is something that fans are really looking forward to and this is what we're really focusing on, is delivering that experience. If we achieve our goals, I think we're going to be standing up there in that upper echelon of RPGs that people look back on, you know, years and years later with just love and affection, and that's what we're going for.

Talking about Jun and these genetic modifications that were hinted at and talked a little bit about, should these be perceived as like aspirational or is it sort of quietly horrifying that there are these things inside June that they don't understand?

Drew Karpyshyn: It's sort of in the vein of, if anyone's read the novels, the uranic humans, who are humans who have been modified to help them serve the celestials better. They are given modifications that allow them to interact with Celestial tech in ways most humans can't. Celestial tech is kind of locked so that only the Celestials can use it. Jun's abilities are, as is often said, a blessing and a curse. They allow you to do some incredible things, but there is sometimes a cost. As you progress through EXODUS, how much do you want to embrace this? This sort of leans into our player choices, right? Do you try to maintain your humanity or do you start modifying Jun and lean more toward embracing Celestial technology at the risk of losing what makes you human? These are the kind of things we like to explore in the story and the gameplay.

Chad Robertson: As Drew said, if any of you happen to read the Peter Hamilton novels, there's an explanation of it from the point of view of uranic humans, but ultimately one of the ways it manifests in the game, those abilities is then part of the player kit and specifically Jun's ability to interact with livestone. If you haven't heard us describe it before, the easiest way to think of it is a material that's kind of at this intersection of mineral and vegetation. Because of his Celestial DNA, Jun has an ability to manipulate that and work with it in cool ways that affect both combat and core gameplay.

Chris King: When we talk about the hero's journey, I think when Jun starts EXODUS, as Drew has kind of mentioned, just kind of scraping by, it probably feels like more of a hindrance or like Jun's a bit more of an outsider because of this. Eventually though, as the game progresses, you learn that this ability called neural induction and some of your genetics allow you to interface with Celestial tech in ways that no other human can. That's ultimately what makes you special and that's kind of your calling into going from lowly salvager eating oatmeal in a shed at the very start of the game to trying to save the entire world and having the whole of humanity riding on your shoulders. So yeah, essentially, a lot of our big gameplay beats revolve around using neural induction to collect new Celestial toys, gadgets. We teased those things in the trailer. If you look closely, you'll pick up on some of them.

What do you guys look at as the things that inspired you or continue to inspire you as you're making this game?

Drew Karpyshyn: I was a child of the 80s, so I was classic sci-fi. I got inspired a lot by things like Alien, Aliens, Terminator, all those classic things but also a lot of the older works. Dune, a lot of the Asimov stuff, and then of course as we've evolved into the 20th century there's been a lot of other things, a lot of other really interesting sci-fi has come along. Games have pushed things in a lot of interesting ways, but I think what we're trying to do is sort of use those as very broad inspiration, but still create something that honors the spirit of classic sci-fi and puts a little bit of a hard sci-fi spin on it. I guess I don't think this is a spoiler or anything to say there's a little bit of Interstellar in there with Time Dilation and Matthew McConaughey, of course. We combined those things into something that is the evolution of sci-fi RPGs and deliver something that will feel very fresh and unique to players in a world we spent a long time developing, a very deep and and vibrant universe.

Chad Robertson: I think that's really well said, Drew. If you were to walk the halls of our studio, on the walls we have Interstellar as a prominent movie poster that we've had up on the wall since the very beginning, just because of its obviously tangible touch points to what we're doing. But again, like Drew said, there are many things that have inspired us to as sort of cornerstones that we've built on and hopefully use as inspiration, whether it's Dune or Star Wars or Interstellar or video games that have inspired us from the sci-fi space. There's a lot of things that we want to bring to bear. I talked about this when I was speaking in the intro. We love the aspect of it being hard science fiction or real science fiction based on that grounded Einstein's theory of relativity and the core element of that being an unbreakable truth, but also, we're making a video game. We want it to be fun and we want people to be like, yeah, this is amazing. Like, I understand the core element is based in science fiction, but we want this to be super fun and be something that gameplay resonates from.

Chris King: You guys have nailed it. I think the only thing I'd probably add to is like, I think earlier Chad sort of touched on we're kind of dabbling in a bit of hard sci-fi. Some of the inspirations Drew mentioned were Alien, Aliens, Interstellar. I think one of the things we really sort of gravitated to early was just that in a lot of games when you're going in sci-fi, the notion of getting on a spaceship, it kind of feels like you're
getting on a car and driving to the grocery store or something. You lose sight of how magical and how big space is, how long it takes to get places, and how inconsequential humans are in the grand scheme of
things. Part of the reason we chose to do some of this hard sci-fi stuff was for really cool gameplay reasons and whatnot, but I think it was also that theme of the significance of space and the universe.

The Mara Yama Celestials look Lovecraftian and monster-like. Is that intentional or is that a happy coincidence that the Mara Yama feel like they're creepy space monsters?

Drew Karpyshyn: I mean, I'm not going to say I haven't read Lovecraft. Eldritch Horror is something we like to dip into as well. Again, it's one of the many influences in our game, and we definitely wanted the Mara Yama to be terrifying. I don't want to spoil too much again, but you know, they're very formative. You're not going to run into a Mara Yama walking down the street, right? This is a very high level, very
dangerous kind of enemy.

Can you talk a little about progression in EXODUS and then how that impacts both the RPG elements of the game and also combat?

Chris King: Yes. I probably need to be a bit careful here, but we have a ton of RPG systems, as you might imagine. We have a constellation skill tree that players will level up in and that applies to Jun. And then we have all kinds of other systems that touch and integrate with this. You'll be able to upgrade your abilities. Your weapons, the companions can all be upgraded. We have special combat suits; those can be customized and upgraded. That's sort of a a tease, I guess, of some of the various systems we have in play. I think with all these things, I've kind of emphasized it earlier, but it's really about trying to build synergies with all your components, leaning into the way you want to play and your play styles and also trying to pull your combat abilities, your companions abilities and combat tools together and kind of figuring out how to min-max those things so that you can use them really efficiently.

Is there anything else you'd like to share with fans at this stage of development?

Chad Robertson: EXODUS has been a labor of love for us from the beginning. Our team is super passionate about the IP. We've got some talented developers you from a bunch of different game studios and a bunch of different areas of game development. I think they're here, at the end of the day, because they love this IP in addition to the team. For us, being part of Wizards and Hasbro has been a really nice element of it because we've gotten such great support over the years that we've been working on this. We are super excited to bring all this to bear for folks to see and hopefully for players to really enjoy the experience when we can deliver to them.

Drew Karpyshyn: Yeah, I just kind of echo what Chad said. We're just super excited for people to finally get to see a little bit more and the more they see, the more excited we get.

Chris King: I'm going to go a different angle than Drew and Chad here. If you like really cool, funny companions, I've already professed my love for Salt, so I think that's a winner. I think the other tease I would give, though, is just like thinking through, you know, there's a bunch of other RPGs out there where you can make a bunch of choices, but I think the thing that's interesting for us that I can't think of anyone else that's done is the notion of Time Dilation and doing those choices and actually being able to experience and see how they play out over generations. When we first started the studio and we started digging into that, that was the appeal. That was why I came to the studio. So, hopefully you can sort of brainstorm some of that and see what the appeal is yourself, too.

Thank you for your time.

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