Are The Expanse and Exodus the True Heirs to Mass Effect? - IGN

How many Mass Effects do you need?

Typical. You wait ages for a new Mass Effect and then three come along at once. Well, not quite, but there are three major contenders for Shepard’s helmet in various stages of production right now. Alongside the actual next Mass Effect from the studio currently calling itself BioWare, believed to be heading for a 2028 release, we have two complementary visions of spacebound role-playing: Exodus, an honest-to-goodness spiritual redux of Mass Effect Andromeda from actual ex-BioWare devs, and The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, a foray into something resembling Triple-A from the people behind Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader, obviously based on the Amazon Prime series everyone loves but nobody watched.

So Mass Effect fans, in theory, are set to eat very good indeed over the next couple of years. But do any of these projects really have the juice, the massive antimatter reactor up their backsides required to impress fans of a series that is now so old it has become A Classic and therefore remembered with a lot of vaseline on the lens, its myriad imperfections buffed away by the chamois cloth of nostalgia? Can anything live up to that?

It’s a difficult question to answer at this stage having only played one of them, and a small slice at that, but we do know a fair bit about each project and their respective goals.

The pitch for The Expanse: Osiris Reborn feels like the sort of unlikely dream game that only exists in wistful forum threads. Science fiction fans in particular are prone to imagining their favourite shows as BioWare style RPGs. “What if we had a Star Trek game like Mass Effect?”, “Imagine BioWare did a Stargate game!”, etc etc. It’s not an unreasonable suggestion, given how all of these things are about visiting a bunch of different planets from a home base, having Cool Adventures, and doing relationships (doing them vigorously and often in Captain Kirk’s case). So the first thought about Osiris Reborn is: wow, it’s actually happened! Popular space adventure show gets a BioWare style game. Sometimes miracles do occur.

The Expanse doesn’t seem like the most obvious choice as a basis for this sort of game, given how most of it occurs within a single star system. But, the fact that it is a scifi universe made up of tiny colonies and orbital habitats may be a godsend for a team tasked with building a Mass Effect game within it: an inner solar system full of prefabs and mass-produced tech, all human designed and heavily extrapolated from contemporary life. They don’t have to figure out what a Quarian glove or a Turian helmet looks like. They don’t have to invent the logistics of a society that caters to wildly different breathing requirements. And, much of the production design can be adapted from the TV show that already exists. I would imagine, although this is not a given, that Owlcat has access to certain production materials that would make that process easier. If not, there’s no shortage of reference frames.

They’re not imagining an entire universe from scratch, unlike the team behind Exodus, who have bitten off a lot more to chew in the grand scheme of genre entertainment. This is a universe that’s much closer to something like Dune or Foundation – Earth long gone, humanity spread amongst thousands of stars and starting to evolve into something else, technology sufficiently advanced to be considered magic. Proper science fiction from when petrol was 9p a litre and your average scifi author was taking so many psychedelics that the mushrooms could have sued for royalties.

So these are two visions of science fiction that have a great deal of crossover, in their roots, their format, their inspirations, but they are wildly different places to be in, so while they are both looking to capture the same audience I think there’s room for both of them to exist. Especially if you consider the insatiable appetite of science fiction fans. And I’m not talking about our eating habits, I know that’s the joke you just made in your head.

The other thing to consider in determining “The Juice” is that every post-Mass Effect game has to be its own proposition. Neither Owlcat, Archetype, or even BioWare themselves can just do Mass Effect again because it already exists. So whatever follows up on it, however directly or indirectly, must be bringing something to the table.