'Mass Effect' Replacement 'Exodus' Finally Gets A Release Date

Exodus is set 40,000 years in the future, and while it might have felt that long since we’ve had an update about its release date, that wait has come to an end. Exodus will be released April 7, 2027, developer Archetype Entertainment announced Tuesday in an emotional trailer at Gamescom’s Opening Night Live event. When Exodus arrives, it fills the gaming black hole created by Mass Effect’s decade-long absence: a space-faring third-person action-RPG rooted by heady sci-fi concepts, compelling party members, and branching narrative paths. In the fiction of Exodus, humans vacate a dying Earth for a cluster of habitable star systems some 40,000 light years away. But different arkships arrive on different timescales, and those that arrived first spent 40 millennia tinkering with genetic modifications, achieving a level of transhumanism and calling themselves Celestials. (The consequences of time dilation play a critical role in Exodus.) Celestials also applied that technology to animals from Earth — including wolves, frogs, and bears. These creatures, called Awakened, gain heightened consciousness and the ability to speak through technological augmentation. Tuesday’s Gamescom trailer ce