EXODUS - Sci-Fi Action-Adventure RPG with Time Dilation from James Ohlen's Archetype Entertainment

[Alienman]

Felt kinda wholesome. Expected cringe.

 

[Morgoth]

Hopefully all of this leads up to a TGA 2024 gameplay reveal.

 

[Morgoth]

https://www.exodusgame.com/en-US/founders-special-limited-time-offer

There are also some cool new artworks.

 

[Jaesun]

I may have missed it, but clicking that link above shows the games pages and a WotC icon? Are WotC the publisher for this? That just seems a bit...... odd?

 

[Morgoth]

WotC are the publisher of Exodus and the owner of Archetype.

 

[scytheavatar]

I may have missed it, but clicking that link above shows the games pages and a WotC icon? Are WotC the publisher for this? That just seems a bit...... odd?

WOTC has been trying to break into the video game publishing business for a while already, it's not that odd when you realize a lot of their leadership came from the video game industry. Both Former and Current CEO of WOTC came from Microsoft Xbox.

 

[gurugeorge]

Yeah my little heart sank when I saw the brown woman being centered, but on the other hand the pseudo-gameplay footage looked very cool, and the art design looks like fairly imaginative s-f art design (unlike Starfield's aggressively mediocre generic art design).

If I have to accept a shitskin love interest as the price of entry for an otherwise decent game without the level of woke bs of the recent crop of Sweet Baby Inc failures, I might take that bargain to scratch the "big epic s-f game" itch.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

the art design looks like fairly imaginative s-f art design

If you haven’t followed scifi art for several decades.

 

[gurugeorge]

the art design looks like fairly imaginative s-f art design

If you haven’t followed scifi art for several decades.

I did say "fairly" - mainly, it's quite a step above Starfield, and that's good enough for a game of this type.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

I did say "fairly" - mainly, it's quite a step above Starfield, and that's good enough for a game of this type.

I suppose, but it’s still galling that scifi video games are still behind the genre by several decades. Uplifted animals were already standardized by the 1980s, but quite frankly they look silly and the pretentious “awakened” title instead of “uplifted” doesn’t help. I’m genuinely curious if the creator is at all familiar with scifi outside of Mass Effect. “Awakened” makes me think of being initiated into occultism and realizing truths of the universe, or being “woke”, not having a computer implanted in your head that makes your dumb animal brain able to replicate a human brain.

Wizards of the Coasts owns Star Frontiers, Star*Drive and a bunch of other scifi settings that all sound more interesting than this glorified vanity project. Why go to the effort to make a new untested IP from scratch, when they could use the dozens of books already written for those?

S*D in particular has a fascinating human-dominated galaxy that I haven’t been able to find elsewhere in scifi. Most scifi settings use aliens as stand-ins for human foreigners, but S*D uses actual human civilizations a la Alpha Centauri. Speaking of other scifi, it’s got its own equivalents of Scarrans, Nietzscheans, Asgards, Goa’ulds, bugs, Westworld… The whole thing is a fascinating pastiche of 90s and 2000s era scifi tropes that I think represents the peak of the scifi genre before it creatively collapsed afterward.

“We’ve got talking bears and talking crows” feels like they wanted to make a fantasy game with druids but had to settle for scifi. It feels painfully derivative and not even in a fun way. If you’re gonna be derivative anyway, then why not revive a dead rpg game from two or more decades ago?

 

[Tyranicon]

painfully derivative and not even in a fun way

We can close this thread now.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

I’m not even saying talking animals are inherently bad. I would love to see a Gamma World video game where the animals talk and have crazy superpowers like telepathy and transmuting metal into rubber. The idea of talking animals is inherently ridiculous so you might as well go all out with gonzo craziness.

 

[mediocrepoet]

I’m not even saying talking animals are inherently bad. I would love to see a Gamma World video game where the animals talk and have crazy superpowers like telepathy and transmuting metal into rubber. The idea of talking animals is inherently ridiculous so you might as well go all out with gonzo craziness.

You don't have pets, do you?

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

I did say "fairly" - mainly, it's quite a step above Starfield, and that's good enough for a game of this type.

I suppose, but it’s still galling that scifi video games are still behind the genre by several decades. Uplifted animals were already standardized by the 1980s, but quite frankly they look silly and the pretentious “awakened” title instead of “uplifted” doesn’t help.

Cordwainer Smith's short stories from 1957-1966 seem to have been the primary impetus for uplifted humanoid animals, especially catgirls, though there are even older examples of uplifted animals, such as The Faithful by Lester Del Rey from 1938.

 

[Hammer Of The Heretics]

Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau was published in 1896. That might be the ur-text for this kind of story.

 

[gurugeorge]

The only "uplift" stuff I'm familiar with was from the David Brin books I read yonks ago. IIRC there was some use of the concept by Vernor Vinge too.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau was published in 1896. That might be the ur-text for this kind of story.

I was gonna mention that but decided not to.

Speaking of, the Moreau series by S. Andrew Swann features humanoid animals. This solves a number of mechanical problems compared to animals with computers sewn on.