Exodus Narrative Director Explains Romance, Relationships, and Mass Effect Comparisons in New Sci-fi RPG

Your first impression of Exodus was probably, "Oh, this looks like Mass Effect." And narrative director Drew Karpyshyn, who was a narrative lead on BioWare's legendary space opera RPG series, told me, "It's a perfectly fine way to wrap your head around it." He'd love for Exodus to be regarded in the same way, and it's easy to see why. Exodus has all the pieces you'd want from a spiritual successor sci-fi RPG: tough decisions to make about the fate of humanity in space, punchy action combat, and the tangled web of character relationships you influence.

After playing Exodus myself, I talked with Karpyshyn about building out a new universe with developer Archetype Entertainment and many of the philosophies driving its RPG elements. How does the morality system work? How do you romance the characters you adore? And why should players care about the choices they make and how are they reflected in a story that needs to feel impactful? We dig into all that and more.

Parts of our discussion reference the demo I played, so be sure to read my Exodus hands-on preview for additional context about the story and gameplay elements we touch on, or you can watch the video version below.

IGN: The thing that jumps out to me and I'm most curious about is how you're handling choice and consequence. In the demo, I saw the Paladin-Immortal alignment system, kind of reflective of the Paragon-Renegade in Mass Effect. I want to dig more into the morality system, how it works and how you're thinking of choice and consequence in the context of that.

Drew Karpyshyn: Those are all related, for sure, but I'll start with choice and consequence. Obviously, we think choice is very important in our RPG and we want it to matter. So, we want it to have an impact on the story; how decisions you make impact the direction the story goes. We want it to impact your companions, your relationships and how they feel about you, and the romances. And we want it to affect things in gameplay and have choices matter there.

We look at it as if there are three levels of choices. There's the small moment to moment choices, like what do I say in a particular dialogue; maybe it's something small that has characters saying something different, and you can get little funny moments. We have more mid-level choices, which are things like building affinity with a companion, maybe going down one of the morality paths, maybe doing something with a character who's going to show up later. And then we have our sort of "gold-level" choices, which are like these big consequential moments in the story.

You got a glimpse of one of them at the end of the Khonsu mission [from the preview demo]. There was what we call the breakpoint. There's a decision you make at the end about what to do with the Kay's beacons. You have a couple of options, whether you side with Suliman [or leave the beacons alone]. And breakpoints are where Jun has these predictive abilities. Not so much prophetic, more like if you've read The Foundation [book series by Isaac Asimov] with hyper-accurate prediction models. This gives you insight on what direction decisions will go and what the potential consequences are. What you saw in the demo is pretty early in Jun's development, so as you get further in the game, you can develop those abilities and get more information about what the long-term consequences of those choices will be. So, we want to have those choices affect the world you're in, the future of your society, your companions, your friends, your choices in gameplay, and so on. To us, choice is incredibly important and that's sort of our overall philosophy.

I'll jump into the Paladin-Immortal side of things. That's our morality spectrum. It's a little bit different than simple good or evil. There are elements of that, but a huge part of our game revolves around Jun as a human who has certain genetic upgrades or anomalies that allow you to interact with Celestial technology, and you kind of bridge the gap between humans and Celestials. One of the key things here is: how do you want to grow and evolve? And the Paladin path is where Jun decides to hold onto their humanity, maybe rejecting some of the darker elements of the Celestials. And maybe you don't want to mess with it because it could have dangerous consequences, it could change you in certain ways. The Immortal path is more for the sake of strength and power, and to survive, you embrace some of the darker elements of the Celestials. In general, Celestials are typically seen to be less empathetic, less compassionate, and a little more ruthless.

سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/exodus-narrative-director-drew-karpyshyn-explains-romance-and-relationship-systems-building-on-mass-effect