What we know about Exodus, the upcoming not-Mass Effect game from Wizards of the Coast

Last week at gamescom, we got a bit of a surprise in the form of a full-length trailer for Exodus. To those unfamiliar, Exodus is an upcoming sci-fi action shooter that may look a lot like Mass Effect with the serial numbers filed off, and for good reason! But more on that in a sec. First, the big news coming out of gamescom 2026: Exodus officially launches on April 7, 2027.

So what is Exodus?

Exodus comes from several former Mass Effect and BioWare devs

As I alluded to above, Exodus is an upcoming sci-fi adventure game with a pretty significant tie to the mostly defunct but extremely beloved Mass Effect series. Exodus is developed by Archetype Entertainment, a new company formed by video game industry veteran James Ohlen, who was the Senior Creative Director at BioWare for 22 years. In 2019, he formed Archetype as a new development studio under Wizards of the Coast.

He’s not the only one, though; in January 2020, another BioWare member, Chad Robinson, was named as Vice President and General Manager of Archetype Entertainment. One month later, BioWare Writer Drew Karpyshyn came on board as the Lead Writer at Archetype. We knew they were working on Exodus — but that was all we knew for a while. The other bits of information have been slowly drip-dropped out over time.

Following the collapse of Earth’s environment in the 2200s, humanity launched arkships to find a new home. One of those arkships lands in the Omega Centauri cluster — which just so happens to be the setting of the game. Of course, that kind of intergalactic travel takes time; due to Exodus’s emphasis on ultra-relativistic travel and the effects of time dilation, players will be playing roughly 40,000 years after that arkship initially arrived in Omega Centauri.

In the intervening time, a progenitor species has built interstellar gateways, humanity has genetically “uplifted” animals called Awakened — like Salt, the sentient octopus/mech pilot seen in the trailer above — weird relics, alien and human factions with differing agendas, moral choices for your protagonist that affect both personal and broader outcomes, and a companion system — sound familiar?

Archetype and WOTC are building an entire universe for Exodus

What we’ve seen of the game itself has been relatively minimal. First announced — by Matthew McConaughey, no less — at The Game Awards in 2023, all we saw for a while was a pre-rendered cinematic and a small snippet of gameplay. Since then, Archetype and Wizards of the Coast have been busy publishing everything except the game so far, building out the Exodus universe across all types of media:

• Two lore-heavy novels from Peter F. Hamilton, Exodus: The Archimedes Engine in 2024 and Exodus: The Helium Sea this year (2026).
• An entire TTRPG that had a limited run but which will be seeing a reprint from Renegade in the near future.
• A six-part playthrough of said TTRPG called Star Heist from the devs, with James Ohlen serving as DM.
• Multiple short-story cinematics (~1.5 min each) narrated by Matthew McConaughey.
• Several written short stories that act as prologue tales to the game.
• A somewhat sporadic Q&A series with the developers, spanning from 2023 to 2025.
• And, of course, a few additional game trailers, including an almost 20-minute extended gameplay reveal.

Not to mention, a core rulebook, monster manual, and lore guide are all apparently on the horizon. You’d be forgiven if you had no idea none of this existed — but for lore fiends, space nerds, Mass Effect fans, and everyone in between who might be remotely interested in Exodus, there’s a whole wealth of knowledge to be absorbed before the game finally launches.

So when can I get my hands on it?

There was some concern about the status of Exodus after James Ohlen stepped down in late 2025 that perhaps development was rockier than we knew — after all, Wizards of the Coast just recently canceled most of its known and unknown video game projects, leaving only Exodus and Warlock in active development — but it seems that it was because he felt his work was done, and he’s still with Wizards as a creative advisor on tabletop RPGs.

As of right now, Exodus is set to release April 7, 2026. I know I’m not the only Mass Effect fan who’s had a Shepard-shaped hole in my life since finishing the trilogy, and Exodus looks like it might fit the bill as a big science-fiction epic video game.