Making Atomfall: Risk & Reward | Ben Fisher (Head of Design)

In today’s episode, I speak with Ben Fisher, Head of Design on Atomfall and Sniper Elite: Resistance. Ben is a key figure at Rebellion, and we break down how Atomfall’s opening establishes tone, pacing, and player behaviour in its open-world RPG design.

We get into the granular detail of how players are guided through environmental cues, limited resources, and design decisions that steer the player away from a “run and gun” attitude. 

We also explore the game’s core philosophy: designing for uncertainty. Ben talks through the iterative process behind Atomfall’s systems, from dynamic loot and environmental storytelling as well as the risk he and the team took on their “leads” mechanic that replaces traditional quest structures—encouraging players to act more like detectives than objective-followers. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

We wanted them to feel like they were in a hostile situation they didn't fully understand, to some extent to become a detective. So you end up tuning every single aspect to amplify an emotional tone, even if those run counter to a player's expectations going in, and then there's work to do to untrain the player from existing behaviors. So making the game not feel just like a shooter, a load of the mechanics in the game and some of the sort of friction in the early experience of the game is intentional to make you re-evaluate your assumptions.

SPEAKER_00 0:39

Today we're talking with Ben Fisher, head of design for Rebellion, who recently last year released Atom Fall, brilliant single-player RPG, open world RPG. And of course, he's worked on the Sniper Elite series as well. I love my conversation with Ben. I had so many questions about Atom Fall. I feel like it was such a great game for kind of trying to reset people's expectations about the way they're going to go in and interact with the world. And I just love the way he spoke about it. It's a brilliant conversation, as usual. I say that every time, but it it always is. Please subscribe. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ben, for joining me today. Um, I obviously spoke to you, reached out about this idea of talking about, you know, world building and sort of making sure that a space and environment that gamers are going to play, spend hours and hours in is sort of um evocative and interesting and dynamic. I want to get to that, but I'd love to just get a little bit of background on you first. I'd like to sort of go back and just hear. I don't know if there's any really specific, kind of gamer-centric, early days uh image in your head that sort of defines you as a gamer.

SPEAKER_01 1:44

Oh, that's a good question. Yeah. Well, yes, Riven by Cyan is one of my formative games. Um the fact that they built a sort of coherent world where you had to learn the history of a place to be able to navigate the game was deep and textury and revelatory. So many puzzle games of that era and still were a little bit your eccentric uncle has locked the door and you need to complete a chess puzzle to open the door. But to actually immerse yourself in a world and understand that world to navigate it. Um I personally found really satisfying. And it was a great fit for problem solving at Rebellion, because it fits with what we like to do. We like to build sandbox worlds and give the player as much freedom as possible to achieve a clear goal. So those two things can kind of vend together really nicely. That that was a real influence on Atomfall, and it's been an influence on so many games that I've worked on as well.

SPEAKER_00 2:39

That's now that you say it, I can sort of see it, but it's not one that had immediately sort of come to mind. Rivens, and and I was actually talking with Nina Freeman the other day, who has done many, many good games recently, Lost Records, um talking about Mist being one of her. And it's I I won't ask your age, but the the the one's ability to engage with a game like Mr. Riven, um, you don't have to be like old enough to get your head around it for it to be an extraordinarily like evocative game. And when I first played Mist, I can't I don't remember how old it was, but I was too young to really know what I was doing, but I could still navigate that space and still enjoy the world. Exactly. I mean that's sort of like in some ways, isn't that how we all start with gaming? Like, I think you know, unless you're playing something that's literally has been made for the you know, like um preschoolers or something, you're usually in a space that you don't understand, you don't know what's going on, you don't know how to interact with the world, but you're absolutely um captivated by it nonetheless.

SPEAKER_01 3:44

So a real interesting thing for me actually is I grew up using Apple Mac computers because my dad had one for paperwork for work. Um and for sort of Mac cultural reasons, games would often come with the editing tools that the team had used to make the game in the first place. So a lot of the time you could take the game files and um open them in the editor and tinker with them and try again and you know change the game as effectively part of playing the game. Um so I I'm sure that's why I'm doing this as a job as well. So Marathon, the original marathon by Bungie was a big influence as well. It's where I cut my teeth of uh level design and to some extent that um immersive storytelling, uh, because effectively classic marathon um was the same era as things like Doom. Um but you could interact with computer terminals and read little chunks of world building that would give you your objectives and also help you understand the context of what you were doing. Then the actual shooting experience was as low fidelity as classic Doom, um, but that extra layer added so much immersion to the experience. That's been a big influence as well.

SPEAKER_00 4:57

I sometimes wonder because as uh as just a player rather than a a dire a creator of games, um if if you all are ever just I mean, do you find yourself kind of trying to create something that you yourself as a kid would have just loved to have had with your hands on?

SPEAKER_01 5:12

To some extent always. Um I mean at the same time you're you're try I find it most uh easy to navigate the creative process when you're trying to make something you would think was cool, but not just making something for yourself. Um you want to be thinking of an emotional tone you want the game to have. Depending on the sort of game, you can be thinking about a particular audience segment as well. Um but it helps to try and depersonalize it and build around a set of creative pillars or something like that. You to some extent you have to um build up a spidey sense, you have to build up a set of uh instincts that help you solve creative problems, you have to be able to interrogate your solution so it's not just because I like it, you have to be able to unpack where a solution came from so you can communicate it to other people, so you can refine it. Um but that does mean that that spidey sense, that that urge of oh that would be cool, that often comes from your like inner child, and then you're saying, Well, why would why would ten-year-old Ben like that solution? Um and in the case of Atom Follow it, I mean I did in a tongue-in-cheek fashion refer to it as mist with guns a couple of times internally when helping people get their head around what we were aiming for.

SPEAKER_00 6:31

I love missed with guns. That's that's a mod that someone needs to know right away. Um I guess there must be times then when those those solutions and those things you would love to put into players' hands at some point you you sort of realize that this isn't gonna work or this isn't this isn't as as as wonderful as we thought it was gonna be in our imaginations, and you have to be prepared to like ditch these things, right?

SPEAKER_01 6:55

The entire process is trying to find something new, having a sense of what direction you want to go in, but not knowing exactly what the right answer looks like. Um if you try if you go, I know exactly what this game is supposed to be, everyone just listen to me and leave no room for discovery. Um you're gonna be wrong. I've not heard a game where somebody you know planned it on paper and then just executed it and it was perfect. It's it's the interaction of a game is part of the identity of a game. So you're always going through that kind of revelatory process, trying to find something cool, trying to uh work your way towards something that feels like the tone goal you were aiming for. But the way that I like to try and get there is effectively make choices now that maximize your chances of finding the right answer, maximizing your options of how to get forward. That can even be building a design system knowing that you're going to be twiddling some numbers later down the lane, and that'll have a huge impact on the overall tone of things. Like the way that we did loot spawning in Atomfall was designed with the assumption that we would be fundamentally wrong at the start, so we couldn't manually place everything. So we built a system that would allow us to mark up places where things ought to spawn and then tune how many of them were used and what proportions were used and what kind of loot you would find. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_00 8:22

It does. So you're bit you're sort of building in room for your own misgivings and mistakes.

SPEAKER_01 8:27

And places where you can't make an accurate assumption up front because you don't have enough information to make that assumption. Um so to drill into one random example, if we placed a bookshelf in a ruined building, we would make sure the player is going to assume they would find some loot on a bookshelf. So we'd mark it up and say, you know, if the player finds loot, it'll be these places. But at that stage, we don't know how many bookshelves we'll have across that map, and we don't know how many maps we'll have. We don't know how much raw material the player will need to do crafting because we don't know how many recipes we're gonna have. So there's a whole like a chain of assumptions you have to make to get to any one decision. So very early on you make choices that allow you to make adjustments further down the further down the road.

SPEAKER_00 9:15

And my guess is that every time you sort of learn from a uh a mistake, which I'm you know in in this industry can suck up monumental amounts of of time, right? That next time around you sort of uh you get better at putting in these these uh better planning, right?

SPEAKER_01 9:32

Yeah, exactly. So you get you get more used to trying to make an assumption that seems perfectly reasonable, discovering the consequences of that assumption, and then next time building in a trapdoor that allows you to pivot.

SPEAKER_00 9:48

I suppose the trick is not to be so practical that you don't sort of write out the uh you know, the the desire for sort of creative risk or to try things that you don't know how they're gonna work right. You you sort of know that you're gonna get yourself into trouble at some point down the line. Yeah if you're gonna try and do something different or special or you're yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:05

Exactly that. The more things you're trying to do that are new, the more you have to assume your first assumptions either aren't gonna be right or you're going to discover a couple of things which harmonize harmonize in an unexpected way, and you want to be able to take advantage of that. Which is good, that's the game, right? That's the whole that's the point of the whole process essentially.

SPEAKER_00 10:26

And so I feel like from having played Atomfall, that's a game that's literally full of those decisions, right? Like there's a lot about this game which I feel like there must have been a lot of creative risk that you were taking, not just the fact dealing with a new IP, but there are a lot of mechanics going on in that game that I don't know. Again, clearly it sounds like you don't know whether these things are going to work or not until you sort of start diving into them.

SPEAKER_01 10:53

Um you that's absolutely true. You start to recognize patterns that are leading towards the creative goals you set for yourself, and then you try and amplify those patterns. But you ultimately have no idea until it's actually out in the marketplace. So in the even in the case of Atomfall, you do some play testing, you watch how people play the game, you watch their reaction, you make some adjustments, and hopefully their reaction goes more in the direction you wanted. Um, but it's the sort of game that has to sit with you a little bit. Um, because it's got those new mechanics, you have to try them out for a bit and then think about how you felt about the game and then maybe play again. And and you I've noticed people playing at a load of different times and getting different experiences as a result. This is all good, this is all healthy stuff, but it does push the point where you're going to discover whether the game's hit the target further and further down the road. When you're trying to make those creative decisions as well, uh I've found it's critical to have creative pillars you're aiming for, because they have a huge influence on every decision you make that touches on those creative pillars. Uh like the amount of ammunition, the length of reload time, the position that a character holds, their gun communicates uh whether the game is a shooting game or it's a game that has guns, right? Um, so it's not doom with puzzles, it's missed with guns. That's why the player holds the gun in a way that doesn't say your main verb is shoot. Um it's it's carried in a kind of offhand fashion so that you don't assume you're supposed to be killing people. Um the the mechanic in the game where people tell you to back off for a good long time before they actually get into a fight, and when you get into a fight, the stakes are incredibly high. The way that enemy placement is always slightly unpredictable and slightly wider than you can fully view. Um, every single aspect of the game, you're making choices that are feeding into an overall tone. In the case of Atomfall, we wanted the player to be slightly on the back foot because we wanted them to become analytical, because we wanted them to feel like they were in a hostile situation they didn't fully understand. So to some extent, to become a detective. Um we you know we tuned many aspects of the game so that your ammo wasn't quite what you wanted for a good long time, and when you talk to people you can fail the conversation, which which removes that sense of certainty and makes you feel like everyone's got something they don't want to tell you. Um the guns all look very rusty to give the impression that you've been there a long time, so that increases that sense of paranoia and tension. Um so you end up tuning every single aspect to amplify an emotional tone, even if those run counter to a player's expectations going in, and then there's work to do to untrain the player from existing behaviors. So making the game not feel just like a shooter, a load of the mechanics in the game and some of the sort of friction in the early experience of the game is intentional to make you re-evaluate your assumptions.

SPEAKER_00 14:06

Um I loved it here in that laundry list of those, just again, those kind of micro decisions that you need to build in. I guess what it makes me wonder in testing the game, like how did you w were there early experiences where players seemed to just be kind of going straight to that running and gunning and you had to kind of quit to because you made me I never thought about it, but it it to to sort of blend this idea of paranoia, mistrust, and threat whilst staying um passive and not just going into every um interaction with violence is a pretty that's a that's a interesting tightrope to sort of try and get players to walk.

SPEAKER_01 14:46

For sure. And a difficult one because so many games, like your main verb is fire, right? Um how do we give you that as an option, but how do we make it clear to you that that's not your only option? Um and that's why it's a long time before you find ammunition for a gun. Uh you might find a melee weapon before you find a um gun, you might find no melee weapons for a while, and um there's a character you meet right at the start who uh wants your help. There's a character who tells you to back off rather than get into a fight, and if you do get into a fight, he's punchy rather than shooty. So lots and lots of tiny reframings to try and help the player digest what's going on. So in those early playtests, absolutely, we would find assumptions that we didn't even realise a player might have, um, because there are so many layers of assumptions in the basic mechanics of a game. Like you want to get into that groove that you recognize so you so you can get to enjoying the core of the game, um, and play tests would s effectively highlight a bundle of them at a time, and we would unpick those, either by changing a conversation at the start of the game, ensuring there's no ammunition, changing more micro details. Um things like when you reload your gun, we only show you your ammo count while you're reloading the gun. That increases your sense of paranoia and it stops you thinking that that this game is about ammunition, because in a shooter it you know there's ammunition in the corner, there's a crosshair on the screen, your gun's pointed towards a crosshair, you're constantly being subconsciously cued that this is a game about shooting people and watching your ammo go down. So we you know we even strip those things away, um, only tell you about your ammunition when you're reloading, and if you try and reload when your gun is full, we'll do a check. Because some players, you know, a lot of players, including me, reflexively reload just because you want to keep your gun ready. So we didn't want to fully punish you for doing that, we wanted to give you feedback that said, yeah, I'm good. Um but not make it a complete freebie because then you would start hammering reload and start thinking that it's uh a shooter. So lots and lots of tiny little nudges like this where you watch how someone plays and you went, Why did he shoot that character? Because that's a friendly character, but he won't know that because he shot him before it's the the second he saw him. So that's why Nat's got a lovely guitar. Like one of the sorry, Nat, one of the characters very early in the game's got a guitar, um, and he says hello from a great distance. Um he tells you that there's not many friendly people around, so keep your keep your guard up. So there's all these cues to say some people are friendly, um, some people will seem friendly. So don't evaluate things on face value, take a second. Um it's difficult balance, and you just yeah, you have to iterate and play test, discover things you didn't expect a player comes programmed with, and then try and try and build a new framing for the player.

SPEAKER_00 17:47

I guess that makes me want to, you know, to drill in more to what you're talking about there. I think about I forget, you know, I think Todd Howard refers to it like the kind of coming out of the vault moment or whatever in a game, you know, which in this game you literally have the coming out of the bunker moment, right? And I'm interested in you know, what are the things that you need to like start sewing into the player within obviously the game begins then, but I'm thinking that moment when you sort of you're out in the world, what are they needing to pick up on in like the first 20 seconds, the first two minutes, and the first 20 minutes? I think I remember there's it's you're not far away from there's the helicopter crash, and then again there's the guitar, and well yeah, to just answer that question. I guess you're thinking out the gate, right? What are what are they needing to be clocking as soon as they leave this space?

SPEAKER_01 18:37

So let's I'll quickly run through that vista and the mechanisms built into the environment that ripple out from that vista. Um one of the things that we aim for in rebellion in general is to get the player into the sandbox and get them as free as we can as quickly as possible. So one of the th one of the problems you have to solve is figuring out what as quickly as possible means. Because it can't just be nothing, because then players don't have any context. Um we agonized over the length of that start bunker, uh, the number of rooms in it, the function of each room, the lighting level in each room, the conversation with the character that talks to you as soon as you wake up, every single word of every single line was stripped right down to the essentials. The branch of every com uh every thread of the conversation you can have with the character was kept as lean as possible, framed for you the width of decisions you might be making later in the game, and at every stage showed you several different things you could be thinking of in parallel. So we were encouraging you to think about who you are in that context. So all of this gets packed into that start bunker. Um we made the assumption that in the very, very early game the player is forming a sort of disproportionate opinion of what the rest of the game is, and you know, just like years seem longer when you're younger, it's that kind of you're you're layering up memories essentially and an understanding of the game. So you make every single moment in that start section as tight as physically possible, then you come out to that vista that you described. So from that vista, as a quick aside, we scouted around the game to find the best spot for a vista that sold the things I'm about to describe to you. Um because we wanted to set the game up in the right way. Typically, we we want we want to give you a clear objective and then a sense of freedom and how to achieve it on any level or any mission in any of the games that we make. So we wanted a lovely shot of the windscale plant with this otherworldly sort of miasma swirling out of it. We wanted a spooky red phone box because it immediately says sort of britishness. Um the ringing phone gives you an immediate kind of call to action and an immediate sense of otherworldly paranoia and uncertainty. Is this for me? Um we placed it so that it framed nicely in the shot. The flow of the environment naturally suggests to you to go down the hill, and we provide the route up the hill so that if you want to go against the grain, if you want to forge your own path, there's an alternate path for you to take. Um and then in either of those paths we made sure there's a uh again, a clear framing of a few options. We wanted to make sure that there's a clear flank around the edges of these spaces, some old wrecked infrastructure of what used to be there. Um if you head down the hill, you've got a cheerful guy on a guitar, um, who seems perfectly happy about the fact that the the whole place is falling apart and he'll tell you anything he wants to you want to know from them, but you can fail the conversation. So when you're interacting with him, uh you can learn very quickly how to coax information out of somebody, or you can learn how to make them clam up. You've got the option to keep. Kill them straight away. Most people don't, everyone does on their second try, their second playthrough, just to find out what happens. There's a building there that's barricaded, but if you're canny, you can find your way in through a window. So that's there's a very, very simple, very clear traversal puzzle. Once you get in there, there's a bit of spooky environmental storytelling because you see a dead guy with some weaponry, a load of alcohol bottles nearby. So it's a stack of resources, but in order to digest them, you need to understand a bit of macabre on environmental storytelling. So the players picturing what happened in this world, um, they're understanding that combat is an option but not the only option. They can see a sense of how to explore a space, they can see a sense of the history of a location and what's happened to it since. And then as you get further into the location, you start uncovering things like bunkers or hearing a PA system from a concrete wall that's defending a village. So you start layering up these extra elements. Um you carefully choreograph a sequence of layered understanding. You want to help the player digest what they're what they're experiencing one step at a time. But because it's a sandbox, you can't go the entire way of just sequencing a series of um narrative beats. What we used as a structure was effectively the physically deeper into the environment you go, the closer you are getting to revelation of secrets. So when you go into bunkers, when you go into caves, when you go into castle basements, that's when you're really getting into the meat of what's going on. So we made it more challenging to get into those places, but more revelation when you did so. To come back to that vista, if you head up the hill, there's a crashed government helicopter, there's a bunker that when you go into it, it's got some spooky um feral creatures, but a load of a load of corpses in the doorway and a load of foreshadowing before you get to them and wake them up. Um there's an isolated bandit uh weing in a river, um, who's got their back turned to you so that you can skirt around them or you can take them on. Um Same for going down the hill, though it was an isolated bandit, so you could get into a fight or back off. So it's a little combat tutorial, but the stakes are raised because they've got weapons. Um the way up the hill is a waterfall, and stuff behind the waterfall, and that's because there's always stuff behind the waterfalls in video games, but that is training for the player to say if you make an assumption and test it, you're likely to be correct. Um and and then finally, um, the route up the hill leads into a mine tunnel, and when you walk into the mine tunnel, there's a friendly ex-miner in a little dark corner who will also give you some understanding of the game world and how it works. They'll give you different information to the guy down the hill, but in both cases it's a you've got an opportunity to gather a bit of understanding of how the game world operates before you start getting into proper conflict. At that point, we then more generously open out and let the player explore where they want. As far as possible, we try to layer an environmental storytelling that tells you you're going to enter somewhere dangerous before you enter somewhere dangerous. Um, but beyond that point, we then kind of trust the player to figure it out.

SPEAKER_00 25:29

And um as some as you feel like you sort of succeeded in that ambition.

SPEAKER_01 25:36

Um I for the most part, yeah. I think uh some players had a bit of trouble getting their head around the fact that it wasn't just a shooter, and we'd start off effectively trying to play it like Far Cry um and then die a bunch of times, and at that point kind of recalibrate and go, well, this is something different. Um while we were making it, it always felt like the places that the game innovates um might be easier to digest if we ever did a sequel, right? Because the the context of what an atom fall is is now better established now. And the way that it innovated with the mechanics it innovated with um now that there is one in the marketplace might be easier for people to understand. I have heard I have had people in the games industry say that they like the leads mechanic and they intend to steal it, and I'm very happy about that because I'd like to play more games that use objectives in that fashion.

SPEAKER_00 26:33

I think that was I mean, and was that one of those things, you know, you were saying how you don't really know if it's worked until the game's been released, but people spoke very positively about the leads mechanic, and you know, there's there's a way, you know, there's a version of the game that gets that totally wrong, and then there's the version that gets it right.

SPEAKER_01 26:52

That was potentially the biggest risk because it was the biggest leap. Uh we got to we set ourselves on internal alpha, and we got there, um, and the game had a more traditional quest system, I suppose. It was structured more like a Metroidvania. Um so you'd have a sequence of sandbox maps, in each of those sandbox maps there would be a major dungeon, um, and you would find a tool or a piece of information that would allow you to unlock the next sandbox map and get to the next dungeon and gradually unpack the sandbox over time. Uh that was easier. We well, we spent a good while building the toolkit that would allow us to make a game that had an RPG-like structure, but we didn't want to make a 300-hour game, we wanted to make a 30-hour game. Um so by the time we had that toolkit, um, we set ourselves an aggressive target of an alpha to bring everything together into a game. So that Metroidvania structure seemed the most achievable. When we played it, it felt too guiding for the emotional tone that we wanted the game to have. We wanted that sense of detective freedom, that kind of um cosy catastrophe of a John Wyndham novel, um, where the protagonist is often a kind of gentleman scientist that has free reign to wander around and try and understand what's happened to the world. So it felt a little bit like an exciting drama had happened off camera and you were um doing interviews with people that had witnessed it and then doing favours for them almost. Um so the biggest leap was to say, well, how do we give you the biggest sense of freedom from where we are right now? Um the largest leap we could make is unlock all the doors. All these places where we've um sequenced your progression. What if we just let you do any of them in any order? Um we'll need some way of uh guaranteeing you have developed some kind of mastery before you get to the ending of the game. But let's assume that's the workable minimum. What does the structure of the game look like at that point? So that's where the interchange came from, and the structure of the interchange was to say, well, how about we have essentially a final lock and you need to collect four batteries to power up that lock, um, and we make sure there's a supply of batteries everywhere, so every player might find a different route to those resources, and they need a tool to um like the rewiring tool, which allows them to wire those batteries into the lock effectively. We can plant a couple of those in the game world so we know you're gonna find one or another of those, and then from that point, um there were a couple of references that I looked at to try and bring the system together. This was all this is an abridged form of months of high-pressure iteration and thinking, like, is this gonna work? What models are there in the marketplace for this sort of thing? Theoretically, it sounds like it ought to work. How can we make progress towards understanding that? As we're kind of piecemeal nudging forward. So the two main reference points I ended up looking at were actually um Dark Souls, because that's a game where you're given a load of freedom. Um you've got to past a certain point in the game, you've got to defeat four bosses to power up a chalice sufficiently to open the final door. So it's like that's a workable model. What's a version of that that we could look at? It's a game where you're given complete free reign to wander around, um, and if you find something that will kill you, it's very clearly telegraphed. Like there's a graveyard that's full of undead skeletons, and when you kill them, they come back and kill you. Um, so there's lots of cues that say to you, This is too much for you, and if you try and take them on, you discover that the cues are correct. Um so we learn from that as well. Um the other big griffin's part we ended up looking at was actually sniper elite, which we discovered quite far down the road where we're like, what is a version of this structure that we know makes a nice rebellion style game? Well, what about sniper? Because in a sniper mission, you've got a clear objective and you complete the objective and secure an X-fill. And there might be a couple of X-Fills to choose from, there might be a few options on how to achieve the objective. So that's the broadly what a sniper elite mission does. So we said, well, how do we take that structure and expand it so the entire game is functionally one giant sniper mission? So what that means is you have to discover your objective, uh, which gives us the option of giving you a few objectives to choose from. And you can have multiple X-fills. The way that you um qualify for an X-Fill is you complete your objective. So that said to us, well, what if different people offer different object uh different X-fills if you complete their objective? We pinch all of those objectives through the windscale plant so that we could assume that the player had enough of an understanding of what they were doing and why. Um then the rest of the details kind of flushed out of local world building and making the environment feel coherent and believable, and having a set of characters you wanted to spend time with. So this was building a set of raw materials that would allow us to then do what I described earlier of like fine-tuning how it all related to each other. You're right to say that we didn't know for certain this was going to work, but as we were making progress, um we could feel the structure of the game developing to match the pillars of the game. It was a big risk because it is such a change from what players might expect. In the same way that tuning combat to make you take your time and think, um, it was difficult to unpick a player's assumptions about how an objective system would work. Objectives so often tell you exactly what to do. So we had to find a language that wasn't doing that. You know, you might have an objective that's got an optional way of completing it, and you know, in a lot of games you're told the objective and you're told the optional. Um we didn't want that clarity because it caused the player to disengage and just like do the next objective, essentially. We wanted you to tackle more of a detective. So we changed the language so we only ever told you facts, we only ever told you what you definitely know. We never tell you what to do. If a character tells you to do something, we tell you that that character's told you to do something. Do you see the difference there? Yeah. Um, we're very thorough about that, and it took a long time to unpick a load of writing to make sure that that was always true. Sometimes it was hard to find the way of saying something that wasn't telling you what to do. Um but as we were making progress, it started it started to all slot together into like a coherent picture. Um, the only enemy was time, obviously. You know, if you're trying something, you you don't know how long it's going to take. Um, so we were quite aggressive with um prioritizing where we put our fidelity.

SPEAKER_00 34:14

Do you have a sense of why you think players found the lead system so satisfying? Because you can go into okay, you created it and you made it work, like it functions as was intended. But I think for the same reason that players often might not not like a mechanic, it it may not necessarily be clear based on the work you've done on it. And is that can that sort of be the same with the um I mean for me what I loved about it is anything that's kind of like firing up my imagination and increasing the level of agency I think I have, whether I have it or not. And there's games that I think are good at creating the illusion of agency. I can't think any off the top of my head, maybe they'll come back to me when you don't really have any in the first place. But I guess I just wonder if you've been able to sort of link the player reaction with the work that you've done on that particular mechanic.

SPEAKER_01 35:02

Sure. An example of a game that gives you the impression of lots of agency would be something like The Walking Dead, um, where they do a great job of having a forward narrative momentum and branching and collapsing back together in a way that makes it feel like you're a story. Um, but ultimately they've got a specific story they want to tell over time. Um one of the things we did that was kind of maximal, I suppose. We tried to be as as lean and efficient as possible, but this proved to be maximal, was um not to have a main story. So there's a sense of narrative escalation over time, um, and as you make your way towards an ex-fill, we try to make sure there was that sense of storiness, but there's not a main story. Like you can kill literally anyone in the game, and there's still a sense of a story. Um and I I think people I think people have connected to that side of things. The reactions I've seen have shown that people either have their like what's the best way of framing this? A lot of the time I've heard people having difficulty making the right choice when they're presented with their perceived choice in the game. And that means we balanced it correctly, we wanted it to be there's not a right answer, there's not a golden path through the game, um, there's not a like a correct route. Um every single person in the situation has their own perspective on what's happening and what's the right thing to do about it. You can and and they're all right and wrong at the same time, so you need to decide what your perspective is, which do you find the most or least agreeable and why. Um an example would be the uh effectively there's a murder mystery in the church in the village. I guess I don't want to spoil too much, but you you uncover a kind of like what feels like a fairly standard murder mystery, and as you learn more about the situation, um it interconnects to every other part of the game world, so the more you learn, the more you're learning how this game world fits together, and the decision of who to blame and why gets more difficult. So that's structurally intentional, and the number of people I've heard that found that difficult, like emotionally difficult to choose who to who to trust and who to blame um has been satisfyingly high. So people have engaged with it in the way that I was hoping.

SPEAKER_00 37:34

I guess that's the ultimate outcome you could, yeah, if you can sort of um make difficult situations for players, then that's uh it must be very satisfying.

SPEAKER_01 37:42

Yeah, I mean some people have said that. Um Sid Mayer, is that right, who said that games are a series of interesting decisions. Um so a difficult decision is one of the most interesting, right? Because you've like you really have to go, oh god, what would I do? If I was there, what would I do? So you start asking questions about yourself as a person, and that's like a a very philosophical state to get yourself into trying to complete a puzzle.

SPEAKER_00 38:08

And so then, you know, and the the obviously we spoke a bit in reaching out around the fact the game is set set, you know, in Cumbria. I guess that location would have actually been decided for you based on what you wanted the sort of central point of the story to be with the the nuclear accident, right?

SPEAKER_01 38:24

I mean, so that was the gestation point for a load of the structural stuff we've just talked about. So the initial idea for Atomfall came from uh Jason Kingsley, who's one of the founders and owners of Rebellion. He observed that there are a lot of games set in like uh the consequences after some kind of nuclear disaster. So you mentioned Foller earlier, but there's also Metro and Stalker, um and it's like a it's like a little and there's you know Chernobylite as well, it's like a it's a little microgenre to itself, like kind of um atomic survival and the windscale disaster was the world's first major nuclear disaster, but there wasn't a game based around it. So the two things that we combined were you know, what would a game based around wind scale look like, and also what would a rebellion style like adventure RPG look like? And it was the combination of those creative goals that informed so many of the decisions in Atomfall. So the world building being an obvious example, um uh very early on, an art team uh went to visit the local area, and uh a lot of people are from nearby as well, because we're a UK developer, um and you know took photos, um did photogrammetry scans, so we did real 3D scans of of the environment, talked to locals, just spent some time in the environment to you know absorb what it feels like, look at what you might expect a like district town to look like. Um so we were building up this set of fundamentals at the same time as building a kit of um RPG mechanics like player inventories and conversation systems and all those kind of fundamentals. So we built this toolkit to bring it together into a game which emphasized the kind of unique Britishness, I guess, of um the era. We looked at um speculative fiction from the 1950s, nineteen sixties. So we're talking John Windham novels, but we're also talking early Doctor Who, we're talking The Prisoner, we're talking Wicker Man, um the Quatormasse experiment, a huge influence as well. To to to bring together all of the elements as they developed, we were looking at the storytelling style of the era, um, and what what action meant in a kind of action story as well. So kind of nudging all of these elements together, and then the way that you nudge them forward informs the rest of them, and it all developed in that kind of fashion. We looked at character tropes that you would find in 50s, 60s, 70s, British like what's become known as sci-fi and fantasy, but it was broadly like speculative fiction at the time. So we'd look at tropes that were appropriate to British culture, and then with those raw materials bring that together into a game experience. So even that was an influence on things like the amount of ammunition, because um if you're out in the farms in the Lake District, there's not going to be as many guns as you'd find in um the Nevada desert or whatever. Um and the guns would be either um a farmer's shotgun or military weaponry brought in by like a National Guard service who's there to try and keep the peace. So, you know, there's a lot of trying to find an answer that already exists and what influence that has on the surrounding mechanics and nudging everything together at the same time to try and find something new.

SPEAKER_00 42:07

And then, you know, it it I guess I wonder if you you know, beyond a game being well reviewed and then sort of, you know, reviewers talking about things like the Success of the Lead system and it's such an evocative space and all these things, what it is that you think captured the audience's imaginations when they were looking at making a buying decision of the game because it it did so well on release in terms of sales. I I guess I just wonder if you sort of have a sense of what really captured people's imaginations.

SPEAKER_01 42:40

Yeah, that's a good question. Um of the things we try and do is make sure the games that we make have a very clear, like punch you in the face, could figure it out from a YouTube video or box art or um like we've got uh the comic 2000 AD that's published by Rebellion as well, and we often do tie-in strips. Um so we make sure that when we're cultivating an IP that it's got that you immediately know um whether it's for you or not tone to it. So I think that clarity helped. The the exotic combination of that kind of um it's a post-apocalyptic game, but the apocalypse is in the 60s. Um it's about survival in those circumstances, but it's not a bleak wasteland, it's a lush green um biscuit in Britain, right? Um the like the fact that it uses iconography that people are familiar with, but that they haven't seen in this particular context, they haven't played a game of this sort. So romping around a green and unpleasant land, um answering a ringing red phone box, um, you've got your big stompy um retro sci fi. Robots and stuff like that. It's all iconography people either know from source or know references to it, but haven't experienced it directly. I think that increased the appeal.

SPEAKER_00 44:11

It's interesting because I grew up down in Dorset, which is uh you know is different from from Cumbria, but it it it's uh evocative of of you know a sort of a uh a rural countryside space, you know, and I always kind of grew up loving the idea of one day someone's gonna make a video game and uh I think everyone every everybody's gone to Rapture. Raptor is a nice example of a game that really uh evokes you know that that Britishness. So I guess you were able to kind of um exploit that. Um I guess I wonder how what is the balancing act of knowing and I I'm I'm assuming wanting to have someone latch on to the the sort of eye-catching headline of like Fallout in England. Like obvious just to be clear, obviously that's not the game, but for marketing purposes, um to draw people in with that whilst then not getting stuck underneath the shadow, the long casting shadow of that game. I mean, because you know, so many games get compared to Fallout New Vegas specifically. Yours is obviously gonna feel much closer to it than some of those other ones. Where's the strength in that, and then where's the thing that you need to kind of pull yourself away from it?

SPEAKER_01 45:23

Sure. I mean, so the advantage is that the Fallout games are um you've got a lot of freedom and you've got a lot of personal expression through the kind of RPG-ish mechanics in the games, um, and it is quite an exotic setting, an accessible exotic setting, so it's a weird combo until you're familiar with it, but an enticing combo. Um so it's a good fast onboarding for people to you know make them receptive to something interesting. Like you say, the risk is if people see it as fallout, but um you obviously can't directly compete with uh Bethesda on Bethesda's turf, right? So that would be unwise. So the way that we tried to tackle that was try to look at what we specialise in, what we as a studio kind of excel at. Um and so the main things that we value are that sense of uh high density, interconnected player freedom. Um like I say, Atomfall is one giant mission effectively, and that there's very high de high fidelity detail, and any choice you make has immediate consequences that ripple through the rest of the game. So that's a very, very rebellionish thing to do. Um if you tried to make a game that was equivalent to Fallout, you would have to make a 300-hour experience. Um, there's lots and lots of effectively sort of vignettes, right? It's lots of little self-contained um encounters in a huge landscape. So you'd have to absolutely match them if you attempted to compete on any level. So the way that we try to define that balance, like I say, is to try and look at what we can do that because of that structure they can't do, and then try and emphasize our difference.

SPEAKER_00 47:11

I guess now that again the game's out and exist, you can sort of leverage your own game for another game, right?

SPEAKER_01 47:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 47:19

Um to have people want to draw that association.

SPEAKER_01 47:22

Sure. So the leads mechanic, for instance, if any game that we did in the future had something equivalent, we can refer to Atomfall as being like the lead system in Atomfall, right? Um Yeah, and also um if there were if there was a sequel or an equivalent RPG-ish game, it I think it might be easier to describe some of the specifics as being like Atomfall instead of Fallout butt or stalker butt or metro butt.

SPEAKER_00 47:56

It is a funny one because you sort of you know you know you have, you know, as a player, I sort of rely on comps uh to draw me in, and then you very quickly well, if the game's done right, and if it isn't literally trying to m mimic something, then you you quickly discard that and then you're you're playing a game that you couldn't necessarily have imagined even existing, and then you sort of, I guess we're then updating our own little library of um experiences.

SPEAKER_01 48:22

Yeah, you always want similar but different, right? You want to understand to some extent what kind of experience you're gonna have so that you're receptive to it. Um because life is tough, time is short, you need to you need to know what sort of experience you're getting into, but you also want that delight and that novelty. So it's a perfectly understandable kind of tension for people. I guess one of the other big influences actually on Atomfall is immersive Sims.

SPEAKER_02 48:45

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 48:46

Like that sense of interconnected systems where you've got a sense of freedom. There aren't many that are kind of sandboxy. They're usually more guided, and even if they are interconnected, it's often like a like a highly detailed interior or something like that. So it was like it was another balance between a few influences.

SPEAKER_00 49:05

Well, I think you were used the word dense, you know, and that's that that's definitely sort of what comes to mind with with with Atom 4, you know, in terms of those interconnected. I think I really felt that with the not the first ASX, but the first, you know, was it a human revolution? Or you may I can't remember, but Yes, yeah. It was dense of of of um immersion, you know. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 49:28

That was an interesting process actually because as I described before, the leads mechanic really came together past alpha. What we wanted to do is make sure that given that there was no main objective, that the player would inevitably stumble across the main objective and therefore start making progress. Because of the way the leads mechanic worked, we made the assumption that um as soon as you start finding leads, you will continue finding leads. The consequences of this were that every lead had to connect somehow to that larger spider web. Every location that looked like it ought to have some kind of lead, we would have to put a lead in. Um so all the kind of secondary landmarks that look like they merit some environmental storytelling, even if there's just a piece of paper that mentions a term that connect you to another larger landmark, we made sure it all all interconnected in that fashion. Um yeah, and then the last the last mechanic we discovered was necessary for doing something like a lead system was having like PA systems, um, unavoidable leads. So, you know, you can't you can shoot a guy who's given you information before he's given you the information. You can't shoot a guy who's on the other end of a telephone, but you can not answer the telephone. But you can't avoid um PA systems, Xerxes style blaring out environmental storytelling.

SPEAKER_00 50:51

Yeah, if everyone in in trouble to stick a big speaker in an area. I guess I'm wondering then, was there ever a point and again this sort of tied in with you know uh Cumbria as a as a space? It's it's not um it's it's not a guarantee that that's gonna be an interesting place for people to spend time in, right? And were there iterations of the game where it wasn't interesting? Um or what was the process to make sure that it's and you know, and it it's probably the thing that well, I I don't know it's the thing I see most, but often in reviews and people talk about like an open world game, they say like, oh, it's great narrative, great this, whatever, it's just not a very interesting space to exist in. That that didn't feel like the case with Atom 4, but I wonder how you sort of pull that off.

SPEAKER_01 51:37

Yeah, that's a good question. Let me just think about that for a second. Um so we made sure that each location in the game had its own unique identity that fit into that larger picture. Um, so for every sandbox they ended up owned by a particular faction, and the faction would have like a key area that was theirs, and then the local storytelling would be informing you on how this all fits together. Um there were times where a place was just like so Scathermoor, for example, very early on was just some rolling hills, because it felt like there ought to be some fields. Um so the the iterative process was then layering up environmental storytelling so there were points of interest that fit into that larger story, so that you were stimulated by that, trying to understand how this fits the how this place fits together. Um so I mean just having a giant military camp in the corner, and then having um minefields and torn down trees and blasted landscape, having bandit corpses that have been burned out, having um civilian cars in a big queue along the road, and then a military checkpoint, and then a load of corpses. That that makes a not like a um and everybody's gone to the rapture style location, it adds that extra layer of sort of peril and tension to it. So some of this is about the layering of the storytelling. Like how can you take a place that's not got anything in it and add some interest? And that could just be an exploding sheep corpse. Doesn't have to be too complicated as long as there's something.

SPEAKER_00 53:18

I guess and that's also one of those things I think you just really don't know if you've pulled it off until it's in the hands of the players, right?

unknown 53:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 53:26

Yeah. And it you very quickly lose objectivity because you can't be surprised uh for a second to them. You can kind of simulate it to some extent. Like a a skill you can develop is reducing the amount of time or you it's a skill you can aim to develop, is get close to having an authentic experience of something that you've just made. Um that can be like a month if you make something and then leave it and or go and look, pay attention to something else and come back, you might be able to understand how a fresh player might experience it. But like you say, you don't really know. Um when you're play testing, there are things you can only play test with a fresh set of eyes because somebody's perspective is immediately informed by what they've just done, so you can't get an immediate initial authentic experience. So it's a it's always a bit of a gamble until you're until you're out and you find out.

SPEAKER_00 54:22

This is um I mean what was the you know, it it it's so it's been it's just fascinating hearing about all of the attention and detail that's had to go in to make this game just work and succeed, and I guess my assumption is that maybe there would have been a slightly easier game for you all to have gone on to make than this one. Like what drove you, what drove the company, the rest of the team to say, you know, let's have a crack at this, because it's like r screams risk.

SPEAKER_01 54:53

Yeah, yeah. It's the sort of thing that you I mean Yeah, you wouldn't do it anywhere other than Rebellion, I wouldn't say. It's the fact that Jason and Chris Kingsley, who are the owners of the company, are in the creative meetings with you. Um that you're showing them work and that they've made games themselves in the past. So effectively, um at Rebellion we make games that we would also like to play. Um and you just like you just accept that risk to some extent as being uh part of the sort of conditions of entry, I suppose. We try and keep the scope of the game under control because the risk is high, trying to make something a bit weird. Um and it's just a balancing act. It's just does it does it feel like it has promise? Does it feel like it's got a bit of a hook to it? Like, could you show this to someone and they would get what was exciting about it? And then you try and match the scope of the game accordingly. You're absolutely right that there would be a simpler game that we could have made out of the premise, but I don't think it would have been as honest an expression of the creative pillars of the premise. So to make it feel Wyndham-esque, um, to make it feel like nine like fifties, sixties, seventies British, to make it feel like the influences that fed into it. Um we didn't want it to just feel like like a boomer shooter that happens to be set in uh um the late district. Um so it all of the choices we made were based on the assumption that if we stick to the pillars that we've set ourselves, we'll end up somewhere interesting.

SPEAKER_00 56:34

I sort of like the way you because it you you know, you just make it say it sort of almost just sounds like an an inevitability that because of the ethos of the company and those at it, why wouldn't this be the thing that that you all would go on to do, right?

SPEAKER_01 56:49

Um so we would always make sure there's a balance as well. So we've all we're we're always making something new and that comes with that risk, alongside sequels to games that we've made before, because people ask us to make them. But that that they often give us the security that allows us to take these risks at the same time. And then we have sort of partnerships with um people like Microsoft that um um you know supported Atomfall on Game Pass on day one, and that allows us exposure and access to people that otherwise wouldn't even know the game exists. Um and and you know it really helps amplify the signal on the sort of the sort of eccentric games that we like to make, I suppose. It does mean that we've got effectively a like a positive feedback loop in that rebellion games all have a clear, consistent tone of voice. So it means if you like a rebellion game, you're likely to make like other rebellion games. Um so anyone that can kind of amplify our signal and help get a reb a rebellion game in front of people's faces, that helps as well.

SPEAKER_00 57:59

And I guess I was just wondering if there's any moments in the game that you feel either that through design or um that you've seen the way that a player's engaged with the game, specific moments where you sort of see okay, these are all the mechanics, everything that we dreamed of working, kind of coming together and you know, pulling off what we aim to achieve here.

SPEAKER_01 58:23

Valve had a nice quote on that, actually. Um they said you like you you keep play testing a game until the number of people that complain about it stops, and then you ship it, and then you're done. Like there's there's never a point where you're making it where you think this is it, we're sorted, we just have to keep cranking the handle. Like the whole process is getting closer and closer to something that works. And that's I mean, I've I've never experienced anything otherwise. Like, as you're getting it right, you get positive signals from people playing the game. And you also hopefully you you get a spidey sense yourself of what what shaped right answer you're looking for, and whether what's in the game feels like that right answer. So it's always a it's always an act of kind of trying to nudge towards that right answer, forming a hypothesis about how could we adjust what's in front of us just now to get closer to that pillar we've set for ourselves.

SPEAKER_00 59:18

And you know, just just coming back, you know, that that level of detail you went into the opening of the game, like how fine is that tightrope that you're walking as to whether you you're gonna sort of capture or lose a player, and especially I suppose if we're thinking about in those opening moments of a game. Because I, you know, I think if someone's certainly if someone's you know in in invested money in a game, they're gonna see through at least a couple of hours, you know, or an hour at the least, even if they're not firstly fully into it. Um but I guess you can't risk a player needing to wait too long before they sort of like get it, right? And I just wonder if you could sort of speak to that.

SPEAKER_01 59:58

Sure. So I mean a new player might be playing it on um a service like Game Pass where they feel like they've received it for free. Um so it's exciting that they've got something for free, but it means they're not financially invested in getting their money's worth out of that particular game. Um so you've got to start on a good foot. Or another way to look at it is if somebody's watching a streamer play a game on Twitch or on YouTube or something like that, they're effectively, you know, they're having a free experience of the game and they're forming an opinion straight away whether they like it or not. So you You want to make sure that you start clearly, start well, that you're expressing as efficiently as possible what the game is about and where the choices are and what's interesting about it. Um and and in something like Atomfall, the the intro part that I ran through, you go into excruciating detail to make sure every single detail is right. Over the course of the game, you do as well as you can, but there's always more game than there is time, and you've got to get sensible about um where your time goes and what your prioritization is. So you we might worry about the angle of some light falling on a broken barrel in the start bunker because you're training the player what to expect when they're gathering loot or something like that. Um but later on in the game it's not as important because you've already framed for the player what the game is. Yeah, so there's some of that just comes down to a judgment call. It's like what do we think is worth prioritizing? How many players do we think it's likely to hit? How much return do we get for how much effort? Um etc. etc. A lot of a lot of tweaking and juggling and balancing and making the best call you can with imperfect knowledge.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:52

And then until people stop complaining and then you're ready to Yeah. And then the new batch of people will complain regardless. But um But then a whole bunch of us will sort of uh be overjoyed by the presence of the game in their lives, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:06

That's the hope.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:07

Um brilliant. Well, thanks for your time on this. I've absolutely loved just getting into the kind of granular detail, especially just hearing about those uh those moments of uh you know capturing a player and directing them because I hadn't even thought about the fact that that was of course what was happening because it happened so fluidly that I was sort of like nudged into you know how runny and gunny I I want to be versus not, you know, in the that's the magic trick, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:31

It's to try and make it feel like it's the player's choice. I mean, if it is the player's choice, it's providing a context that makes the player that encourages the player to make the choices that frame what's most interesting in the game. So you can play it as a shooter, it's just really hard.