‘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.

Exodus has had a long journey

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 centered around a deep dive on Salt, an Awakened octopus, building on the third-person action gameplay revealed in March.

Salt wears a mech suit constructed around a portable aquarium, and is a member of protagonist Jun Aslan’s party, storming into battle with the unstoppable ferocity of a Krogan. She’s also an expert sniper and, befitting her biology, can deploy smokescreens to confuse enemies. But Salt is much more than a killing machine, with dialogue in the trailer revealing her calm, intelligent personality. The trailer dives into the consequences of time dilation, showing Salt returning to a formerly aquatic world that has since had its oceans evaporate to sand, presumably many of her loved ones moving away (or worse) as a result.

Salt is one of five confirmed combat party members in Exodus. Also joining Jun are Tom Vargas, a fellow Traveler (humans who sacrifice personal lives to travel relativistically); Elise Charroux, a human merc in a non-octupus mech suit; Phaedra Nath, a blind archaeologist who sees the world through the use of drones; and a dude named Suliman, an apparent human who Archetype has not shared info about beyond a name and a screenshot.

Exodus will be next April for PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.