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Atomfall
Sự phát triển của Atomfall - Ben Fisher Phỏng vấn tại Nordic Game 2025
Chúng tôi đã bắt kịp với trưởng bộ phận thiết kế của Rebellion để tìm hiểu thêm về mô phỏng hành động gần đây và cách dự án thay đổi và phát triển trong suốt chu kỳ phát triển của nó.
Phiên âm âm thanh
"Welcome back to Gamereactor's coverage here at Nordic Game in Malmö, Sweden.
We have been talking to a lot of different developers and right now we are talking to Rebellion, who has made one of this year's more interesting games. It's called Atomfall and it takes place in the, I want to say the 60s, maybe the 50s in the UK."
"It's a post-apocalyptic game, a bit like Fallout maybe, and it has gotten quite a good reception.
I'm here with Ben Fisher and could you start by introducing yourself and your role at the team?
Sure, so I'm Ben Fisher, I'm head of design for Rebellion, but I acted as creative director on Atomfall itself. What that involved was coordinating all of the work that people did, making sure we're working towards the same goal, trying to build a vision for the game over time, and because it was an experimental game that vision developed. So a lot of my job was kind of pitching to the team what the overall vision was, building spaces for them to express themselves creatively and making sure we're all working towards the same target."
"Yeah, and it's always a risk to develop a new IP. Your studio is of course known for the Sniper series, so why did you take this risk and why do you want to develop a completely new game?
Well, Rebellion always finds a balance between working on sequels to games we've made before and trying something new. Whenever we announce some kind of game content, people want to see when the next Sniper or the next Zombie Army game comes out, but you've got to start a new IP somewhere, right? So we always try and do a balance of trying new creative work and expanding something we've got already. In this particular case, the founders and owners of Rebellion, Jason and Chris Kingsley, are quite interested in history, like British history particularly."
"Jason observed that there are other kind of quarantine or atomic post-apocalyptic survival games like Stalker, like Fallout, like Metro, but none based around the world's first major nuclear disaster, which was the Windscale fire. So that idea sort of stuck in his head as what would a British version of those sorts of games be? And then at the same time, Rebellion likes making kind of sandbox games that have an objective, but a sense of freedom in how you achieve it."
"So when you layer those two things on top of each other, you start to get a sense of a direction for a game. So we've always got a few ideas of new games we would like to try, and we balance sequels and expansions, the games that we've got, with trying to find something new.
One of the things that made the game stand out a bit for me this year was the simple fact that it was released on Xbox One and the PS4. Why did you decide to release on the last gen consoles and did it give you some challenges during development?
So the challenges were getting the game performant, getting it to run so that it looked good on modern systems as well as those legacy systems."
"The reason that we developed on those systems was a couple of reasons. One, it started as a very small team doing very experimental work of what are RPG mechanics that would work with our engine.
So they started a while ago, meaning that those systems were more contemporary at the time. So we just continued in that style. And historically, we try and get games running on as many systems as people are playing on. So it's only when people stop playing on a system that we stop supporting it. It does mean that something like Sniper Elite, for example, Sniper Elite 4 was a previous generation game, and it means that you can port it to iOS, you can port it to Switch, and it's still performant in those contexts. So it allows us opportunities like that as well. Yeah, as we have already touched upon briefly, the world building in this game is quite unique. What are some of the challenges in bringing a world to life that is so far removed in time? And also, it's set in a rural area, so it's not that much in the media, not even back then. And of course, well, the disaster did happen, but not in this way. So how do you create a world that is so far removed from you? I'll answer that with several different answers, because there's layers to that problem. The early team visited the physical location, and also there were some survivors that they could talk to and find perspective on what really happened. So we could look at historical records of the real disaster. We could look at the way that the British government in general deals with topics like that at the time, I suppose."
"So throughout development, we made sure that wherever possible, we were inspired by history, or some layer of history that we could turn to an angle that suited us. So we've got a faction that are kind of like druids. So we looked at Greek and Roman reportings of the actual druids that lived in the UK thousands of years ago, and then made sure that we reflected that in the game."
"So there was a bit of historical research we could do. The next thing we did is that we made sure that we reflected the storytelling style of 1960s Britain. That was one of the biggest problems to solve, and we did have to iterate a lot to find that solution. Sounds obvious now that you say it, but when you're doing something new and experimental, it's easy to follow a pattern you've seen somewhere else before, and that made a lot of our characters for a while fit into any other post-apocalyptic game. And we've made a point of looking back at the sorts of characters and sorts of storytelling found at the time, and use that to improve what we had. So it didn't come straight away. It was a process that brought us to that conclusion. It helps that our principal writer on the project, Jonathan Howard, is an excellent writer. He does a very, very good job of writing characters you enjoy spending time with, and so he could take those definitions that were kind of stereotype, old-fashioned British characters, and then make them someone you would like to spend time with. And then the other layer to it was looking at something like old episodes of Doctor Who or 60s British speculative fiction and sci-fi, like the show called The Prisoner, which is set in an ambiguous village location where a character's been trapped and is trying to escape. There's a kind of Cold War tone to it, so what we did is we looked at Cold War storytelling and folk horror storytelling, and looked at the themes underlying those sorts of stories, and then put them into this new context. So making all of these elements stick together was one of the longest, most difficult parts of the production, but by the end result, it does feel like it sticks together, so we're happy with the result. Yeah, and your game, it kind of makes sense because you're in this environment, but it's very much about survival, and yeah, survival against all odds and a lot of hostility. But yeah, how do you manage to balance the difficulty? So the game also released on Game Pass, is that right? Day one? Yeah, so you get a lot of players in, I can imagine, who are maybe just gonna try it out for a few hours and see if it's something for them."
"How do you balance this, the survival aspect, with also easing the players in and catering to this, what can you say, hazardsome player base? So yeah, we wanted to ease the player in, and at the same time, we wanted to get the player into the sandbox as quickly as possible. So that was one of the big creative challenges of the game. We approached it in two separate ways. One was we had an overall sense of tone and challenge that we wanted the game to have, and one of the sort of standout mechanics in the game is not having a traditional quest system, but having leads instead. And we found that we were working against players' instincts to play the game like a shooter."
"So we balanced the game around the goal of making them slow down and be observant, changing the way that we populated enemies so you couldn't unpick the stealth puzzle like you would in a Sniper Elite game. So there was shifting around the details of the game to get the right feeling was one aspect of it. But then the other is that when you start the game, we list various different play styles. So if you want to play it in a more casual way, if you just want to shoot enemies and you want to be pointed at the next objective, that's an option. We think the game's most interesting when it's a bit challenging and the objectives aren't clear. So we recommend that, but we do leave it open and free to the player. Yeah, and you mentioned this open approach to the quest, the fact that it's not really a quest, but more an investigation where there's a lot of agency for the player. So that definitely poses some challenge for the players who have to think a bit more, but what kind of challenges does it pose for you as designers of these quests or investigations? I mean, it has a huge impact on how you try and guide the player through the game and what kind of story you try and tell. There was an earlier version of the game that was more guided, so it was more like a Metroidvania game. You would enter a sandbox location and find a character who would give you a skill or a clue or a tool to then unlock a new location and explore further. And it felt like it was their story, it didn't feel like you were guiding it. So we sort of looked at the game and said, what happens if we just unlock all the doors and let the player go where they want? That meant that the only structure we had available was physical depth in the world."
"So the deeper you go, the closer into the mysteries you're getting. And then to get that far, the player needs to have the skills and the equipment to survive, the tools to unlock. Doors are hidden in these locations. So there wasn't linear guidance, there was vertical guidance, I guess.
And we just had to hope that worked. That was one of the big experiments in the game, is can we leave it open? Can we give the player pieces of information that they can understand in any order?
And then the story comes from their interpretation of what they mean connected to each other, as well as their influence on the story. So it really becomes the player's story at that point. It was a huge challenge. The biggest change we made during development, I would say, was opening up and changing how you write objectives. So objectives tell you what to do, and leads and atomfall just tell you the facts. They tell you the state of the world, and it's up to you to decide what to do about them, if you trust them or not, if you think of another option, all those sorts of things. So we found that there were some lovely ripple effects on how you related to the game."
"But we did have to go through the game and work through aspects we'd already put in over and over and over to connect all the leads together, to make sure there were enough leads to find, to make sure there were routes through the game if you ignored characters completely or killed them, or all of those sorts of eventualities. So it was a lot of work, but it really seems to have worked, so we're sort of happy with the result. In terms of your previous games, you mentioned the Sniper series before, and the kind of open-ended level designs. What were some of the things you could, how can I put it, export from your previous project into this one?
So that's a really interesting question, because I can talk about the things we brought across, and then also the things we had to stop ourselves from doing. So the things that we brought across were, we understand how to make sandbox maps that feel exciting for the player to explore."
"A Sniper Elite sandbox isn't just an open field, it's really a sequence of kind of landmark locations that are densely interconnected with one another, so you always feel like you're driven towards these key landmarks, and that every location you find matters, it's all crafted by hand.
So we know how to make that kind of location well. When we were changing the way that quests worked in the game to this leads mechanic, we looked at Sniper Elite and its objectives and methods as a structure for the game. So each mission has a clear objective, and then you've got a lot of freedom in which methods you use to achieve the objective, and as you explore through a mission you'll find more methods that the game suggests to you. So while we were trying to solve the problem of how do you guide the player without a quest, it looked like that was an option that we could take the structure of a Sniper Elite mission and lay it over the entire game as one great giant template, more detailed but the same structure, that seems to have worked really well."
"Now one thing that we had to avoid taking from Sniper Elite is, really Sniper Elite's a puzzle game, it's a stealth puzzle game, you'll find a location that's got patrolling Nazis and there's a couple of weak spots, you kill them, you don't get seen, and then that opens up more weak spots and you gradually clean a location of enemies. When you've completely emptied a place that's the sort of best solution possible, and the soft fails when you get seen and stuff like that, but you're working with perfect knowledge, you're the tiger in the undergrowth taking these enemies down."
"We found that we were accidentally populating atomfall encounters in that style and that made you want to play the game like you're a stealth assassin, and if you're playing like a stealth assassin you're not thinking about this scary situation that you're trapped within and you're trying to piece together an understanding of the game world because you're at an advantage."
"So we had to mess up our way of populating enemies, it had to be much more unstable, there's still some structure to it but it's less predictable and you're usually working with imperfect knowledge which means that you do the best you can rather than thinking there must be a perfect answer to this. So there were places where our knowledge hurt us as well as helped us."
"Yeah and a final question, I guess you can't reveal any sequels or DLC or switchboards or whatever, but in terms of the future, is atomfall a setting you feel you are done with or do you think there are more to explore in this kind of universe?
Definitely, I think so. We built the story so that we could expand into other parts of the game lore if we wanted to, it tells a story in itself but also suggests a wider world, and we're really happy with the result and we'd love to make more atomfall content if that's DLC or that's a sequel, they're both options, and we'd love to, you know, double down on what we've learned from the first game and really refine it in a sequel."
"We also think that the lead system works well enough that we could apply it to other games that we might consider in the future, so it's informed what we want to do with all Rebellion games.
Yeah, thanks for sharing all these kind of interesting thoughts about the game, it was a pleasure.
Sure, happy to help."
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