Exodusdebut Entertainment archetypea studio under the auspices of Wizards of the Coast, which employed former BioWare talent, was first announced in 2023. At the 2025 Game Awards, Archetype gave the RPG an early 2027 release date in an action-packed trailer. In anticipation of the announcement Polygon caught up with Archetype management to discuss some of the real-life scientific concepts behind the game: time dilation, genetic alteration, galactic expansion, and more. All quite heady concepts. All this is difficult to convey in a three-minute commercial.
“I wish some of these interesting and new ideas were in the trailer. All I got was 'regular man in space,'” one Polygon commenter wrote in response to our article. “All I got was, 'We have Mass Effect at home,'” another replied. The review on the game's official subreddit was similarly mixed.
The trailer approach certainly makes sense from a business perspective. In an attempt to stand out in a four-hour barrage of ads, what sells better: a group of scientists discussing the intricacies of Einsteinian physics? Or do giant robots explode while other giant robots shoot lasers at their faces? But while speaking loudly, the Archetype did not include the quieter details that make it louder. Exodus one of the most exciting sci-fi games on the horizon. Let's figure it out.
Does Exodus features of aliens? Yes. No. Something like that? This shot at the beginning ExodusThe Game Awards trailer showing a humanoid with grey-blue skin and metal fused into its flesh was definitely an alien, right? It all depends on where you settle on one of the main philosophical questions posed by the game: if you applied the reasoning of Ship of Theseus to the human genome, would what was left remain human?
“We want the Celestials, for a player who's not going to spend a lot of time learning the IP, to still understand the core concept that they are evolved people, understand that they're an antagonist that you're going to face, understand their impact on the overall scope of the game,” Archetype general manager Chad Robertson told Polygon in an interview with Polygon this month. “But also, at the end of the day, make sure that it's fun, that they're tough, and that they're a good game to fight with when you have to challenge them or deal with them in the decisions that you make.”
Understanding that these people who appear to be aliens are technically not aliens means contending with vast expanses of space and time. Time dilation—or Einstein's theory that time moves more slowly for faster-moving objects—is a hard line at work Exodus'sci-fi attributes. Polygon Exodus preview gets more details, including how the concept influences the structure of the role-playing game, but here's the basics: Humans leave a desiccated Earth in the 23rd century and head to a corner of the Milky Way, the Centaurus Cluster, about 16,000 light-years away. Time dilation means that some people get there earlier than others. These people greatly corrupted their genetic sequences and adopted the nickname “Celestials”.
“There are different levels of evolution. The people who first got to Centauri, where the game takes place, went through many thousands of years of evolution into Celestials and into different types of Celestials, taking different branches, where they sort of became superhumans,” Exodus said production director Drew Karpyshyn. “They really consider people primitive, undeveloped, beneath them, not quite suitable for the upper echelons of society, at best servants and slaves. [and] at worst, pests that need to be controlled or perhaps even exterminated.”
Exodus The story takes place approximately 40,000 years in the future. Think about the scale—it's essentially all of recorded human history magnified tenfold. Now imagine what people would look like if they spent again ten complete recorded histories of humanity pushing the boundaries of biotechnology and genetic manipulation. You will never recognize the result as human. You might even think you're looking at an alien. The most terrible branch of the Celestial Empire, a vicious line called Mara-Yamacan take various forms. Some have fangs and claws and are nine feet tall. The rest are covered with exoskeletons. According to the official Encyclopedia of Exodus companion desk guide, When the Mara-Yama travels between star systems, their “bones and limbs degenerate”, meaning they float weightlessly on spaceships, being little more than a fleshy lump of organs attached to their head.
“An ordinary ordinary person will have many problems associated with a celestial being,” Karpyshyn said.
Between the explosions, lasers and fighting bears, you've probably caught snippets of otherworldly technology in ExodusGame Awards trailer. The main character June Aslan interacts with a chrome car that emits a purple, alien-like glow. The spaceship crashes into the portal and disappears at close to the speed of light. It seems that all these things are beyond human understanding, such technologies that one can only imagine have been achieved by the Type 3 civilization on Earth. Kardashev scalethe leading theoretical framework on the potential technological limitations of space-faring societies. (Humans aren't even a Type 1 civilization yet.) But these are just a few more examples of things that seem alien but actually have their roots in humanity.
In addition to the Archetype team, Exodus Canon is created, as Karpyshyn puts it, by a duo of “sci-fi giants.” Peter F. Hamilton has already published one exciting novel set in the universe, with another planned for 2026, and Adrian Tchaikovsky has written a series of short stories for game website. Bringing in legitimate science fiction several years before release allowed Archetype to develop a rich fictional universe upon which to build a game. (Hamilton's first novel, Exodus, Archimedes enginehas a volume of more than 900 pages; the two desktop volumes total 600 pages.)
“It was actually a joint venture,” Karpyshyn said. “We laid some foundations and working with him, he had his ideas and we worked to see how they all fit together. With someone like Peter Hamilton, who is as talented and established as he is, and who has proven himself, you don't want to handcuff him. You want to give him a lot of freedom. And he was great to work with because he also made sure that everything was in line with our knowledge. So it was really working together.”
One key scene shows June manipulating the ground she walks on, sculpting a rock as if by magic to create a makeshift bridge. It is a silicate material called living stone that responds to the neural commands of the Celestials or Uranian people – the descendants of humans who arrived after the Celestials achieved dominance over the region and were given the right to use certain technologies and abilities to enforce Celestial rule. Finn, the protagonist of Hamilton's novel, is a Uranian man. Since Jun demonstrates the same ability in the trailer, is he the same too?
“June isn't specifically a Uranian person, because they were created by the Celestials to help them, and they're kind of limited in what they can do. June is kind of a hacked version, for lack of a better term,” Karfsin said, before declining to elaborate due to spoilers, but noting that being able to interact with Celestial technology is “a key part of the game.”
According to Karpishin, Archimedes engine The story takes place approximately 300 or 400 years after the game. The scale of Exodus's setting—both physical and temporal—means that there is plenty of room for stories to exist that build on the same codes and pull the same thematic threads, without the risk of duplication.
Although Exodus has been in the public eye for two years now and won't see another one yet, there are plenty of stories already told in his universe. Archimedes engine explores the connection between Finn and a woman named Ellie, whose ark arrived on Centauri 24,000 years later than expected, meaning she has far more in common with you or me than with anyone in the system; to her, the Celestials could indeed be aliens. Amazon Prime anthology episode Secret level tells the story of a father chasing his runaway daughter across the stars and the devastating effects time dilation can have on families; by the time he catches up with her, she has aged decades.
Exodus It is itself a “Jun story,” Karpshin said, and centers around Lydon, a planet that has largely renounced the Celestials and has become the cluster's human stronghold. A technological virus called “The Rot” has begun to corrode everything, including critical life support systems, and June must use these Celestial powers to figure out how to solve the problem.
“The great thing about our universe is that it's so broad that we can tell other stories. So the story that Peter Hamilton tells in his books could have similar themes,” Karpyshyn said. “And a lot of those themes will be reflected in them, but the stories are unique enough that they can stand on their own because the universe is so wide and deep and expansive. You can tell so many different stories without stepping on each other's toes.”
Exodus will be released in 2027 for PlayStation 5, Windows PC and Xbox Series X.
