For a particular breed of science-fiction fan, the unveiling of Exodus stood as the most significant news from a recent gaming awards ceremony. Curiously, those very fans could have missed grasped its full significance during the initial showcase.
Exodus, the debut title from a freshly formed studio staffed with veteran talent from a famous RPG developer, was originally teased a couple of years prior. At the latest event, the development team provided an projected release window of 2027, accompanied by a spectacle-filled trailer. Prior to this presentation, the studio's leadership discussed some of the real scientific ideas that underpin for the game's universe: time dilation, genetic alteration, and galactic expansion. These are all appropriately complex ideas, which are notoriously challenging to communicate in a brief, marketing-driven trailer.
“I wish some of those intriguing and fresh ideas were featured in the trailer. My takeaway was ‘stereotypical man in space,’” wrote one viewer. Another responded, “My impression was ‘this is like a well-known space opera RPG at home.’” Reactions in online forums were similarly varied.
The trailer's approach certainly is understandable from a marketing standpoint. When attempting to make an impact during a lengthy deluge of game announcements, what is more marketable: A team discussing the finer points of theoretical science? Or enormous robots exploding while other mechs emit lasers from their faces? However, in choosing visual bombast, the developers omitted to include the more nuanced elements that make Exodus one of the more promising concept-driven games in development. Let's delve deeper.
Does Exodus contain aliens? Perhaps. The answer is nuanced. Look at that shot near the start of the trailer, showing a being with metallic skin and technological components integrated into their flesh. That was certainly an alien, yes? The truth hinges on your interpretation regarding one of the game's core philosophical questions: If you applied incremental change logic to the human genome, is what remains still humanity?
“We want the Celestials... for a player who isn't invest large amounts of time into studying the lore, to still understand the basic premise that they're advanced humans, recognize that they’re an opposing force you have to confront... But also, importantly, make sure it's engaging and that they're impressive and that they play well to challenge,” explained the studio's lead executive.
Grasping how these alien-seeming beings aren't technically aliens requires wrestling with enormous expanses of both space and time. Time dilation — the Einsteinian theory that time moves slower for rapidly traveling objects — is an key scientific basis of Exodus’ science-fiction trappings. Here are the essentials: Humanity leaves a dying Earth in the 23rd century for a distant corner of the Milky Way. Due to time dilation, some human colonists arrive centuries before others. Those firstcomers extensively engineered their genetic sequences and took on the “Celestial” moniker.
“There’s different levels of evolution. The people who got to the Centauri cluster first... had tens of thousands of years of evolution into the Celestials... They really see baseline humans as essentially unevolved, lesser, not really fit for the dominant positions of society,” stated the game's narrative director.
Exodus is set approximately 40,000 years in the future. Consider that immensity — that's effectively all of recorded human history repeated ten times over. Now think about what humans would become if they spent ten entire human histories advancing the boundaries of biological science. You would never identify the result as human. You might even believe you're seeing an alien. The most fearsome branch of Celestial, known as the Mara-Yama, can adopt various forms. Some possess talons and claws and stand nine feet tall. Others are encased in chitinous shells. According to supplementary lore, when Mara-Yama travel between stars, their physical forms can degenerate into little more than a mass of tissue attached to a head.
Among the explosions, lasers, and war beasts, you might have noticed snippets of advanced technology in the trailer. The protagonist, Jun Aslan, operates a metallic machine that radiates a purple glow. A spaceship jets into a portal and vanishes at relativistic velocity. This all seems past human comprehension, the kind of tech ascribed to a highly advanced civilization. Yet, these are further examples of elements that seem alien but are ultimately derived in our species' own journey.
Beyond the core development team, the Exodus canon is being expanded by what the narrative lead called a duo of “sci-fi giants.” One acclaimed author has already published a doorstopper novel set in the universe, with another planned, while another award-winning writer has written a series of short stories. Incorporating such legendary science-fiction writers into the project years before the game's release has permitted the studio to develop a dense fictional universe as a framework for the game.
“It was really a collaborative effort. We had set some parameters, and working with him, he would have ideas... and we would work to see how they all integrated... With someone of that caliber, you don't want to handcuff him. You want to give him latitude,” the narrative director said of the collaboration.
One interesting scene shows Jun appearing to manipulate the ground beneath him, creating stone into a instant bridge. This material, called livestone, is controlled by neural commands from Celestials or Uranic humans — descendants of later human arrivals who were given limited technologies by the Celestials. Since Jun shows this ability, one might wonder about his nature.
“Jun's not exactly a Uranic human... Jun is sort of a hacked version, for want of a better term,” clarified the writer, stating that the ability to interact with Celestial technology is a “central mechanic of the game.”
The immense scale of the Exodus setting — both in the galaxy and historical time — means there is abundant room for diverse stories to be told, pulling from the same universe without risking overlap.
Although Exodus has been publicly known for a couple of years and isn't releasing, several stories have already begun to be told within its universe. The first major novel examines the connection between a Uranic human and a woman whose ship arrived tens of thousands later than planned, making Celestials totally alien to her experience. An episode of a television series tells a heartbreaking story about a father pursuing his daughter across star systems, with time dilation causing profound effects on their family; by the time he finds her, she has experienced a lifetime.
The game itself is centered on “Jun’s story,” set on the planet Lidon — a world mostly left by Celestials that has become a bastion. A technological virus known as “the Rot” has begun eating away at everything, including vital life support systems, and Jun must master his Celestial-like powers to {find a solution|stop
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