Are The Expanse and Exodus The True Heirs to Mass Effect?
Typical. You wait ages for a new Mass Effect and then three come along at once. Well, not quite, but there are three major contenders for Shepard’s helmet in various stages of production right now. Alongside the actual next Mass Effect from the studio currently calling itself BioWare, believed to be heading for a 2028 release, we have two complementary visions of spacebound role-playing: Exodus, an honest-to-goodness spiritual redux of Mass Effect Andromeda from actual ex-BioWare devs, and The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, a foray into something resembling Triple-A from the people behind Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader, obviously based on the Amazon Prime series everyone loves but nobody watched. So Mass Effect fans, in theory, are set to eat very good indeed over the next couple of years. But do any of these projects really have the juice, the massive antimatter reactor up their backsides required to impress fans of a series that is now so old it has become A Classic and therefore remembered with a lot of vaseline on the lens, its myriad imperfections buffed away by the chamois cloth of nostalgia? Can anything live up to that? It’s a difficult question to answer at this stage having only played one of them, and a small slice at that, but we do know a fair bit about each project and their respective goals. So, at this point it’s mixed: I think OwlCat understands the assignment, of that I never had any doubt because they’re talented people, and they’ve got a good track record of working their magic within the framework of a licensed IP. But whether it’s an assignment they’re really ready for remains to be seen. That’s a glass half full of juice… which can be more disappointing than no juice at all. Exodus has much grander ambitions, borrowing the real scientific concept of relativistic time dilation as a narrative device that basically means time passes quicker on your homeworld than it does for you while you’re cutting about the galaxy. This opens up massive opportunities for the choice and consequence narratives that we all expect from these kinds of games. For example, imagine you have a love interest on the homeworld, and an upcoming mission which for you will take a few weeks but for them will take five or six years. Then, some sort of miscalculation throws off the timetable and by the time you get back, your love interest is in their nineties. I’m not just imagining that, it was described to us by the developers in an interview back when they revealed the game in 2023. Putting aside the terrifying complexity of that from a development point of view, the RPG implications are delicious: imagine seeing the consequences of your decisions played out not just in their immediate aftermath, but over lifetimes, on a massive, civilisation-altering scale. Imagine a society that has to deal with that. How would human beings cope with their lives being lived so asymmetrically? So out of sync? Jim Trinca is a Video Producer at IGN, and when he isn't fawning over Assassin's Creed, he can be found watching Star Trek and eating stuff. Follow him on @jimtrinca.bsky.social, and check out The Trinca Perspective playlist over on IGN's YouTube channel!
Typical. You wait ages for a new Mass Effect and then three come along at once. Well, not quite, but there are three major contenders for Shepard’s helmet in various stages of production right now. Alongside the actual next Mass Effect from the studio currently calling itself BioWare, believed to be heading for a 2028 release, we have two complementary visions of spacebound role-playing: Exodus, an honest-to-goodness spiritual redux of Mass Effect Andromeda from actual ex-BioWare devs, and The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, a foray into something resembling Triple-A from the people behind Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader, obviously based on the Amazon Prime series everyone loves but nobody watched.So Mass Effect fans, in theory, are set to eat very good indeed over the next couple of years. But do any of these projects really have the juice, the massive antimatter reactor up their backsides required to impress fans of a series that is now so old it has become A Classic and therefore remembered with a lot of vaseline on the lens, its myriad imperfections buffed away by the chamois cloth of nostalgia? Can anything live up to that?
It’s a difficult question to answer at this stage having only played one of them, and a small slice at that, but we do know a fair bit about each project and their respective goals.
So, at this point it’s mixed: I think OwlCat understands the assignment, of that I never had any doubt because they’re talented people, and they’ve got a good track record of working their magic within the framework of a licensed IP. But whether it’s an assignment they’re really ready for remains to be seen.
That’s a glass half full of juice… which can be more disappointing than no juice at all.
Exodus has much grander ambitions, borrowing the real scientific concept of relativistic time dilation as a narrative device that basically means time passes quicker on your homeworld than it does for you while you’re cutting about the galaxy. This opens up massive opportunities for the choice and consequence narratives that we all expect from these kinds of games.
For example, imagine you have a love interest on the homeworld, and an upcoming mission which for you will take a few weeks but for them will take five or six years. Then, some sort of miscalculation throws off the timetable and by the time you get back, your love interest is in their nineties. I’m not just imagining that, it was described to us by the developers in an interview back when they revealed the game in 2023.
Putting aside the terrifying complexity of that from a development point of view, the RPG implications are delicious: imagine seeing the consequences of your decisions played out not just in their immediate aftermath, but over lifetimes, on a massive, civilisation-altering scale. Imagine a society that has to deal with that. How would human beings cope with their lives being lived so asymmetrically? So out of sync?
Jim Trinca is a Video Producer at IGN, and when he isn't fawning over Assassin's Creed, he can be found watching Star Trek and eating stuff. Follow him on @jimtrinca.bsky.social, and check out The Trinca Perspective playlist over on IGN's YouTube channel!
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