Exodus, the debut of Archetype Entertainment, a studio under the Wizards of the Coast umbrella stacked with ex-BioWare talent, was first announced in 2023. At the 2025 Game Awards, Archetype gave the RPG an early 2027 release window in an action-packed trailer. Ahead of the announcement, Polygon caught up with Archetype leadership to discuss some of the very real scientific concepts underpinning the game: time dilation, genetic alteration, galactic expansion, and more. All suitably heady concepts. All tough to convey in a three-minute ad spot.
“I wish some of those interesting and new ideas were in the trailer. All I got was ‘generic man in space,’” one Polygon commenter wrote in response to our article. “All I got was ‘we have Mass Effect at home,’” responded another. Feedback on the game’s official subreddit was similarly mixed.
The trailer’s approach certainly makes sense from a business perspective. In trying to stand out amid a four-hour barrage of announcements, what sells better: A group of scientists debating the finer points of Einsteinian physics? Or giant robots exploding while other giant robots shoot lasers out of their faces? But in going loud, Archetype neglected to include the quieter details that make Exodus one of the more exciting hard sci-fi games on the horizon. Let’s break it down.
Does Exodus feature aliens? Yes. No. Kind of? That shot near the start of Exodus’ Game Awards trailer, of a humanoid with gray-blue skin and metal fused into their flesh, was definitely an alien, right? It all depends on where you land on one of the big philosophical questions posed by the game: If you applied Ship of Theseus reasoning to the human genome, is what’s left still human?
“We want the Celestials, for a player that isn’t going to invest significant amounts of time into the IP to learn it, to still understand the core concept that they’re evolved humans, understand that they’re an antagonist you have to face, understand the impact of them on the overall scope of the game,” Archetype general manager Chad Robertson told Polygon in an interview this month. “But also, at the end of the day, make sure it’s fun and that they’re cool and that they play well to fight against, when you have to challenge them, or deal with them, in decisions that you’re making.”
Understanding how these alien-seeming humans aren’t technically aliens means grappling with vast expanses of both space and time. Time dilation — or the Einsteinian theory that time moves slower for faster-moving objects — is an operative hard line of Exodus’ science-fiction trappings. Polygon’s Exodus preview gets more into the details, including how the concept impacts the RPG’s structure, but here are the basics: Humans leave a desiccated Earth in the 23rd century for a corner of the Milky Way, the Centauri cluster, some 16,000 light years away. Time dilation means that some humans arrive there before others. Those humans messed heavily with their genetic sequences, and adopted the “Celestial” moniker.
“There’s different levels of evolution. The people who got to Centauri first, where the game takes place, had many thousands of years of evolution into the Celestials and into different types of Celestials, taking different branches where they sort of became transhuman,” Exodus narrative director Drew Karpyshyn said. “They really see humans as sort of primitive, unevolved, beneath them, not really suitable for the upper echelons of society, at best servants and slaves, [and] at worst, pests that need to be controlled or possibly even exterminated.”
Exodus is set about 40,000 years in the future. Think about the scale there — that’s effectively all of recorded human history ten times over. Now consider what humans would look like if they spent, again, ten entire human recorded histories pushing the limits of biotech and genetic manipulation. You would never recognize the result as human. You might even think you’re looking at an alien. The scariest branch of Celestial, a vicious line called Mara-Yama, can take various forms. Some have fangs and claws and are nine feet tall. Others are covered in exoskeletons. According to the official Exodus Encyclopedia tabletop companion guide, when Mara-Yama travel between star systems, their “bones and limbs degenerate,” meaning they float zero-gravity in starships as little more than a fleshy blob of organs attached to a head.
“The average day-to-day person would have a lot of trouble relating to a celestial,” Karpyshyn said.
Between the explosions and lasers and battle bears, you probably caught snippets of otherworldly tech in Exodus’ Game Awards trailer. Protagonist Jun Aslan interacts with a chrome machine that emanates a purple, alien-like glow. A spaceship jets into a portal and vanishes at near-light speed. All of this stuff seems beyond human comprehension, the sort of tech you could only imagine achieved by a Type 3 civilization on the Kardashev Scale, a leading theoretical framework about the potential technological limits of spacefaring societies. (Humans aren’t even a Type 1 civilization yet.) But these are just more examples of stuff that seems alien but really has its roots in humanity.
Beyond the Archetype team, Exodus canon is being crafted by what Karpyshyn called a duo of “sci-fi giants.” Peter F. Hamilton has already published one doorstopper novel set in the universe with another planned for 2026, while Adrian Tchaikovsky wrote a series of short stories for the game’s website. Bringing legit sci-fi royalty into the fold years ahead of release has allowed Archetype to develop a rich fictional universe upon which to build a game. (Hamilton’s first Exodus novel, The Archimedes Engine, is more than 900 pages long; the two tabletop tomes collectively run 600 pages.)
“It was really a joint venture,” Karpyshyn said. “We had set some basics, and working with him, he would have ideas of his and we would work to see how they all fit together. With someone like Peter Hamilton, who’s as talented and established as he is and 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 as far as making sure everything fit with our lore as well. So it was really a collaborative effort.”
One key scene shows Jun appearing to manipulate the ground he’s walking on, molding stone, as if by magic, to create a makeshift bridge. This is a silicate material called livestone, which responds to neural commands from Celestials or Uranic humans — a descendant of humans who arrived after Celestials attained dominance over the region and were granted use of certain technologies and abilities to help enforce Celestial rule. Finn, a major character in Hamilton’s novel, is a Uranic human. Since Jun exhibits the same ability in the trailer, is he one too?
“Jun’s not specifically a Uranic human, because those were basically created by Celestials to help them, and they’re kind of limited in what they can do. Jun is sort of a hacked version, for want of a better term,” Karphsyhn said, before declining to elaborate on account of spoilers, but did note the ability to interact with Celestial technology is a “key part of the game.”
According to Karpyshyn, The Archimedes Engine is set roughly 300 or 400 years after the game. The scale of Exodus’ setting — both physically and temporally — means there’s plenty of space for stories to exist, drawing from the same codices and pulling on the same thematic threads, without risking overlap.
Although Exodus has been in the public eye for two years and won’t be out for at least one more, plenty of stories have already been told in its universe. The Archimedes Engine explores the connection between Finn and a woman named Ellie, whose arkship arrived at Centauri 24,000 years later than intended, meaning she has way more in common with you or me than with anyone in the system; to her, Celestials really might as well be aliens. An episode of the Amazon Prime anthology Secret Level tells the story of a father chasing his runaway daughter across the stars, and the devastating effects time dilation can impart on families; by the time he catches up to her, she’s aged decades.
Exodus itself is “Jun’s story,” Karphshyn said, and is centered around Lidon — a planet largely abdicated by Celestials that has become the human stronghold of the cluster. A technological virus called “the Rot” has started eating away at everything, including critical life support systems, and Jun must use those Celestial powers to figure out how to solve it.
“The great thing about our universe is it’s so broad that we can tell other stories. So the story Peter Hamilton’s telling in his books, there might be similar themes,” Karpyshyn said. “And a lot of these themes will echo across them, but the stories are unique enough and can stand alone because the universe is so broad and so deep and so 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.
.png?width=1200&height=630&fit=crop&enable=upscale&auto=webp&w=360&resize=360,270&ssl=1 "Divinity will be a turn-based RPG and see Larian “unleashed”, declares CEO Swen Vincke, replacing the D&D system with one “made for a video game”")
