Set in an alternate history five years after the Windscale Incident,Atomfallsees players take on the role of an amnesiac in a radically changed northern England. They’ll need to piece together everything going on by uncovering leads in the game world, while also attempting to survive against druids, a military occupation, and more. Players can also complete pacifist playthroughs or “kill everyone” playthroughs inAtomfall, ensuring there are tons of ways to engage with the game.
There’s also the fact thatAtomfalldoesn’t hold its players' hands: they’ll need to navigate the world without map markers or a minimap. This ensures players are fully immersed intoAtomfall’s world, giving them the freedom to do just about anything they wish. Recently, Game Rant sat down with Rebellion’s head of design Ben Fisher to discuss how its various design elements bring this world to life.The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: Everyone I’ve spoken with here has had a different experience so far, even with this being the start of the game. Can you talk a little bit about how you’ve approached that from a design perspective?
A:Man, that was one of the first big creative challenges with the game. To an extent, we had to take it on faith that players would eventually have that different experience. What we had earlier in development was a much more guided version of the playthrough, and we found that it was too guiding for the experience that we wanted to have. We asked ourselves: what happens if you unlock all the doors and let the player go wherever they want?
Then, we had to solve that creative problem: how do you ensure players can navigate their way through the game? That led to the lead system, so instead of quests, we’ve got leads that you uncover almost like a detective. The way we made sure that players could find their way through the game world is that all leads somehow connect to all other leads.
The storytelling approach was to build a giant spider web of narrative that, no matter where you start, you can find your way intothe deeper mysteries of the game. When it comes to the storytelling structure of the game, we make sure that the player can explore anywhere in the sandbox environment and access a bit of the story that they can understand from the context they’ve gotten so far. To get to stuff where they need a deeper, richer understanding of the game world, we push that physically into those deeper, darker locations. That seems thematically appropriate, but it also means that we hope the player has a deeper understanding of the game world when they get to that point.
The other thing that helps is the place you find yourself is a morally ambiguous, messy situation, and you’re arriving five years later. A lot of what you’re doing to begin with is trying to piece together an understanding of how everyone’s gotten into the situation they find themselves in. That means there isn’t a beginning, middle, or end because of that murky, morally ambiguous situation.
Beyond that, we just had to leave things open and hope players would find different social groups for the game. It seems to be working because people are playing drastically different ways.
Q: Another wrench in the design seems to be that you can kill everyone. How do you account for that fact?
A:Sure, yeah, you’re able to kill everyone or no one in the game, and you’ll still find a way to an ending in the game. We had to make sure there was a narrative trap door that meant, no matter who you kill, no matter what option you choose for yourself, you can still find an ending to the game. That’s partly where the idea forthe phone boxes ringingcame from. Actually, it was a combination of that creative problem and an experience that Jason Kingsley, one of the founders of Rebellion, had in real life. He was walking in the Lake District and heard a phone box ring as he walked past. It was weird. Why is this thing ringing in the middle of nowhere?
We wanted to use that motif because it’s a compelling, unsettling moment, so we combined those two things. If you kill absolutely everyone, there’s still a mysterious voice on the phone line that will guide you some way through the game world. Might not be the best route, certainly not the only route, but you can’t shoot a guy in a phone, right? That’s the trap door for players that like to kill everyone.
Q: I enjoyed exploring the Druid castle. I went under it, through it, everything. Could you talk a little bit about your approach to these dungeons? What’s the main thing when designing them?
A:What we wanted to do is make sure there are key locations that have more mysteries to uncover in them and more narrative richness to them. Even just the environment itself helps you understand how the story might piece together, and it gives you those high points of locations where you can find more interesting clues, more interesting materials, and develop an understanding ofhow the game twists together. At one point, there was a more traditional structure, and you were fed through each of these dungeons in a sequence.
Like I said, that felt too guiding, so we retooled them so you can access them from multiple different directions, making the rich interior environment even better to explore.
Q: Can you talk about the use of stealth, melee, and ranged weapons in combat? How do they all fit into Atomfall’s world, and what’s the gameplay design ethos behind them?
A:We didn’t want the game to feel like a war zone. That’s a great fit forsomething like Sniper Elite, but the players are trapped in this quarantine zone where people are just trying to survive. An all-out gun battle didn’t seem like a natural fit. We wanted that sense of simmering tension that you don’t know whether you should get into any fight because you might not survive. You shouldn’t go into a place unprepared because you might get overwhelmed. That built into that feeling of being a detective uncovering the mystery.
It also suits the location of northern England because it’s not a place where there are a lot of guns around. There might be farmers who have shotguns and things like that, but not everyone’s armed. In the case of Atomfall, there’s a military occupation, meaning there are more guns kicking around than you might expect, but we still wanted to make sure the player had to genuinely decide about using each individual bullet and whether it was a good call or not.
Over time, that meant we had this blendedbalance of melee and ranged combat, giving you options to use melee weapons or even throw melee weapons. you’re able to kick people to stagger them; it just adds a lot of texture to the system.
Q: Atomfall is releasing soon, and players will be stepping out into the world just as I did today. What would you say to them when they’re in that moment or have no idea what to do?
A:Take your time and observe the game world. There’s lots of mysteries to uncover. There’s a lot of different routes throughout the game. There is no correct route, so you’re not looking for the main path. Just take your time and explore. Observe, make a strategy, and see what happens.
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