Exodus, the new game being led by BioWare veteran James Ohlen, finally reveals some gameplay, and boy it sure looks like Mass Effect

Exodus didn’t do much for me when it was first revealed at the 2023 Game Awards, but my interest in it started to grow after Matthew McConaughey began dropping daily Exodus trailers like some kind of deep space David Attenborough. Today we got our first look at some actual Exodus gameplay, and I hate to say it but I’m back to feeling rather ambivalent about the whole thing, which to my eye looks like nothing so much as an alt-universe Mass Effect.

To be fair, you can’t take away too much from any individual trailer: They’re tiny slices of hours-long games intended to generate hype above all else. But there’s just so much going on here that so closely echoes Mass Effect, right down to the glowing neon space-magic stab-glove. You can call it “celestial tech” all you want, but come on, that’s an Omni-Blade.

Even the very brief bits of dialog leave me cold. There’s a snappiness to it that reminds me of Fraser Brown’s thoughts on how Dragon Age: The Veilguard has “become BioWare’s Avengers,” taking conversational cues from a Marvel formula that’s grown awfully close to wearing out its welcome. “Loaded weapon is a hell of a way to greet your new partner,” our hero quips, before the grizzled veteran throws out—presumably after everyone’s figured out that it’s all just a big misunderstanding—”Now that we’re all best friends, let’s make each other rich.”

I, along with pretty much everyone else at PC Gamer, also have questions about why we’re fighting the bear. “The space bear should be this game’s Wrex,” news writer Lincoln Carpenter opined, and he’s absolutely correct. But I also think there’s a better-than-good chance that the space bear is this game’s Wrex, and much like the earlier “loaded weapon” encounter, this whole fight proves to be a misunderstanding in which space hero and space bear grudgingly earn each other’s respect and become rock-solid partners in countless future adventures. Or maybe there’s another space bear. Either way, if there’s one thing we learned from Baldur’s Gate 3 it’s that bears are friends (sometimes with benefits), and I will be absolutely astonished if Exodus does not give you a space bear buddy at some point.

There’s no doubt that at least some of my lack of enthusiasm for this trailer stems from what led up to it. McConnaughey’s gravelly tales of a genuinely horrific galaxy in which humanity is little more than a prey species flitting between sources of food and shelter while desperately trying to avoid the attention of the true predators of the cosmos? That’s the good shit. This new trailer looks so unremarkable by comparison I can’t help but feel a little let down.

That’s far from a final judgment on Exodus, which I hope lives up to the promise of the earlier narrative videos, and there are definitely some unusual twists to it. In a stream with CohhCarnage, for instance, creative director James Ohlen, a former BioWare veteran whose credits run from the original Baldur’s Gate to Mass Effect: Andromeda, said there are “no extraterrestrial aliens whatsoever” in the game.

“Everything is descended from—it has a terrestrial origin, whether it’s the celestials who come from human stock, or whether it’s some of the really really weird stuff that actually also either comes from animals or humans that have been modified over tens of thousands of years,” Ohlen said. “I always like to say, if humans without any technology whatsoever can take a wolf and turn it into a chihuahua in a thousand years, then what are we going to be able to do with all the technology over 40,000 years to us and to other animals.”

Time dilation, a physics headache that tends to get skirted around in most sci-fi videogames, also features prominently in Exodus, a point drive home in a cinematic story trailer released last year.

“From a character and emotional arc, I mean, imagine leaving your family and everything you love behind and coming back, and they’ve all lived their lives while you’ve lived nothing,” Blur Studio creative director Tim Miller said during the stream. “I think the whole story we tried to tell in that opening trailer was, you know, for the young man it was six months ago that he lost the woman he loved, and she lived her whole life. It’s hard to imagine the emotional impact of that for the character.”

That’s still intriguing, and so I hold out hope that Exodus will ultimately deliver on its promise. I just wish this first look at gameplay wasn’t so conventional.

Also absent from today’s trailer is any sign of a release date, but given that the gameplay is labelled as “pre-alpha,” I would expect a long wait yet.