Archetype Entertainment revealed their big game Exodus last year, with the big hype and pageantry of The Game Awards, but only to face a lot of confusion and indifference. Why is Matthew McConaughey there? (He narrated the trailer and may be playing a character.) Is this even going to be any good? And indeed, how can you trust a game studio that’s announcing themselves for the first time?
More than a year later, and after this year’s TGAs, Archetype has prepared a trailer that more clearly shows gamers what to expect, and why they should be excited for Exodus.
Their new gameplay trailer, dubbed “The Traveler’s Creed,” deliberately evokes comparisons to Mass Effect. We see multiple character building cinematic cutscenes, a third person back view perspective, cover shooter gameplay, and cool looking aliens.
Archetype has been building an elaborate storyline for Exodus with smaller trailers and teasers, but for now, what we believe is notable is that the studio is led by former Bioware creative director James Ohlen.
Ohlen was hired by Wizards of the Coast, AKA Hasbro, to launch the studio, alongside fellow Bioware alumni Drew Karpshyn. Karpshyn wrote the Mass Effect games, and is the most public direct link we know to Exodus and that franchise.
Ohlen, however, is best known for the Baldur’s Gate games, and the first Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. So he wasn’t quite involved in Mass Effect, but he helped make Bioware become the studio that would make that franchise. Ohlen’s interests lay more in fantasy, but it seems that he, Karpshyn, and the rest of the team at Archetype have brought their ideas together to form a new science fiction scenario to separate them from the pack.
Like Mass Effect, Exodus also has big bad alien races to fight, like the Celestials and the Mara Yama. They live in a dirty science fiction world, where humanity actively seeks out planets and galaxies to colonize. But their world seems closer to the start of humanity’s space colonization than Mass Effect was. They also eschew that franchise’s Star Trek ambitions, for a more down-in-the trenches scenario, at least from what we’ve seen in the trailer.
Exodus joins the unnamed G.I. Joe video game and upcoming Magic The Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons video games as part of Hasbro’s big push away from the toy and CCG aisles into the video game industry. It’s also an indication that Hasbro is completely open to coming up with new video game IPs entirely. Granted, Exodus could get its own action figures and a trading card game a few years down the line.
In hindsight, Hasbro’s decision to part ways with Larian Studios (and free them to do their own thing, really) doesn’t sound that crazy after all. As it turns out, Hasbro literally wants to become the next EA or Ubisoft. With Activision Blizzard joining Microsoft, there could very well be an opening in AAA third party game companies that they can fill.
For now, you can watch the latest Exodus gameplay trailer below.
