director Shawn Levy has assured fans that the highly anticipated movie won’t need a ton of Marvel Cinematic Universe knowledge to watch.
07.04.2024 - 19:33 / gamingbolt.com
A new AAA sci-fi RPG coming from former Mass Effect veterans would have been strong enough as an elevator pitch in and of itself, but everything that developer Archetype Entertainment has revealed about Exodus has only made it that much more of an exciting prospect. Most recently, the studio shed light on what will serve as the central hook for the game- time dilation, and how every time players travel long interstellar distances, when they come back home, years and decades will have passed for the people they left behind.
Speaking in a recent interview with GamingBolt, narrative director Drew Karpyshyn – known for his work on titles like Mass Effect, Knights of the Old Republic, and more – explained in greater detail what role time dilation will play in Exodus, and how it will tie into its choice-and-consequence mechanics.
In Exodus, players will play as a Traveler, tasked with traveling great distances in a hostile, alien galaxy in order to ensure the continued survival and growth of your people. As Karpyshyn explains, however, doing so will come at a cost. Players will have to make “hard choices” with “long-term consequences”, with time dilation being the centerpiece of the story and how it will react to players’ choices.
“Time Dilation is one of the key features of our game, and an inescapable part of being a Traveler,” Karpyshyn told GamingBolt. This is the great sacrifice every Traveler must make – to save humanity, you lose years or even decades of time with the ones you care the most about. The game is all about hard choices and long-term consequences, and the effects of Time Dilation are central to that conflict, so we are focusing the entire core story around this cycle.”
How exactly will time dilation work in terms of gameplay mechanics though? As per Karpyshyn, when traveling shorter distances – like a planet or moon in your own system – players won’t need to travel at lightspeed, which, in turn, means time dilation won’t be a factor. That said, every time you set out on something that isn’t a shorter mission, that will change.
“Time Dilation only comes into play when Travelers go on Exodus – a major journey to another system light years from their homeworld,” Karpyshyn explained. “Exploring a planet or moon within your own system doesn’t cause Time Dilation, as you do not need to travel at near lightspeed to visit these nearby locations. You will still make choices that affect the game on these shorter missions, but Time Dilation only becomes a factor when you prepare and embark on a true Exodus.”
In the same interview, Karpyshyn told us that the primary goal for Archetype Entertainment is to ensure that players “truly feel the weight of every decision they make” in the game.
Exodus is in
director Shawn Levy has assured fans that the highly anticipated movie won’t need a ton of Marvel Cinematic Universe knowledge to watch.
Ubisoft and developer Massive Entertainment haven’t spoken as much about Star Wars Outlaws’ space sections as they have about its many planets and moons and the gameplay opportunities they will present, but what little has been said so far has certainly indicated that the game’s grand scale and ambition will be reflected in the parts of its intergalactic map where protagonist Kay Vess will be piloting her ship, the Trailblazer.
Rebellion has today published a fresh PSVR2 trailer for Zombie Army VR, a spin-off from the main Zombie Army series that marks its first foray into virtual reality. It delivers a fully-fledged campaign that can be played alone or with a friend, and charts a path alongside the main games telling the story of a Deadhunter on the search for zombie war criminals.
One former GTA 5 developer says they "barely recognize the game I worked so hard on" after seeing it in VR combined with an ultra-realistic graphics mod, and has revealed that Rockstar's lack of interest in making anything similar is part of why they stopped working there in the first place.
Nier Automata's director believes Japanese game developers have had difficulty implementing "Western systems" because it was hard for them to move away from Japanese-made game engines.
Todd Howard has assured Fallout fans that the franchise's recently-released TV show does not contradict the games' pre-established lore.
Following the success of the Fallout TV show, the director of Fallout New Vegas is encouraging fans to give its much-maligned card game another try.
Airchat, an emerging social media platform developed by Naval Ravikant, the founder of AngelList, and Brian Norgard, former Chief Product Officer at Tinder, is rapidly gaining traction on both iOS and Android app stores. Unlike conventional social apps, Airchat distinguishes itself by prioritising audio posts. Users engage with the platform primarily through short voice recordings, automatically transcribed into text upon playback. According to Ravikant, this emphasis on natural voice communication aims to foster genuine human connection, countering the notion perpetuated by text-based online interactions that people struggle to relate to one another.
Star Wars Outlaws is set to launch later this year, and beyond offering an open world to explore, it's also going to allow players to step into the shoes of a scoundrel named Kay Vess. Needless to say, it's shaping up to be quite a departure from the lightsaber-swinging action we're used to from the recent Star Wars Jedi games, but the creative director of Outlaws says that the idea of having Jedi at the forefront of the game "didn't even enter the picture."
Ahead of the release of the highly anticipated Fallout TV show, Bethesda veteran Emil Pagliarulo has been fighting back against claims that "he doesn't give a shit about the lore" of Fallout, saying it's been "the honor of a lifetime" to be the series's lore advisor.
CEO of No Rest for the Wicked developer Moon Studios, Thomas Mahler, has revealed in a recent interview that the studio has ideas, including even a title, for a third game in the Ori franchise. Mahler spoke about a potential follow-up to Ori and the Blind Forest and Ori and the Will of the Wisp in an interview with Game Informer.
Developer Dimps and publisher Bandai Namco have announced that Android 18 (DB Super) and Videl (DB Super) will be included in the Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 Future Saga Chapter 1 DLC. The release date for Chapter 1 has yet to be announced.