Deep Dive Into Atomfall | Official Xbox Podcast

ANNOUNCER: Ratings for games in this podcast are pending.

[XBOX SOUND]

- Hello, and welcome to The Official Xbox Podcast. I'm your host for today's episode, Tina Amini. And it's a very special episode that we've got for you today because we're going to dive deep and do a walkthrough into a highly anticipated game from our friends over at Rebellion. It's unlike anything they've made before, so be excited.

But before I introduce our special guest for our special episode, I have another fairly special guest. I'd like to introduce my fellow co-host, Editor-in-Chief of Xbox Wire, Joe Skrebels. Joe, thank you so much for joining as our officially sanctioned UK correspondent for today.

- Yeah, Britishness consultant on site. And actually, I really appreciated the Britishness of "fairly special."

TINA AMINI: [LAUGHS]

- That's how-- that's how we'd do it.

- This is just the years of working with you. It's rubbed off on me. So I appreciate you too, Joe.

[LAUGHTER]

And as I mentioned, we do have our special guest to introduce, Ben Fisher, the creative director on Atomfall. It's so great to have you, Ben. Thank you for joining us, and I'd love to just hear you introduce yourself a little bit.

- Sure, no problem. I'm Ben Fisher. I'm Creative Director on Atomfall and Associate Head of Design for Rebellion.

TINA AMINI: It's good to have you to talk about the high level of what this game is. We obviously revealed the game together at Xbox Game Showcase earlier this year. So we got some snippets of what the game is. We understand it's a single-player survival action game. We've gotten hints of what's going on with Britain's post-war setting for the game.

We had more footage at the gamescom live stream recently, just last week, actually. So we're going to dive into the context of that and what we're about to see today. But I'd love to hear just more context from you on what Atomfall is, for anyone who's unfamiliar and newly initiated.

- Sure. I mean, so like you say, it's a survival action game set in 1950s North of England, inside a quarantine zone where a nuclear disaster has had some weird impact on the surrounding environment. You wake up in this disaster zone. You've missed the major disaster itself, and you're seeing people trying to survive and get by. So the game involves piecing together clues to understand what happened and then how you relate to it and how you can escape.

The origin point for this idea, like you say, is unusual for Rebellion. And really, the idea was Jason Kingsley, one of the founders and owners of Rebellion, noticed that there's lots of what you could call quarantine fiction, lots of stories set in kind of post-nuclear disaster environments where reality is distorted a little bit.

But the first major nuclear disaster in the world was in the UK, and there wasn't a game set in that context around the Windscale disaster. So we took that as the kind of start nugget and then considered what it would mean to make a kind of post-- like, retro post-apocalyptic survival game using the kind of design, language and creative language at Rebellion games tend to feature.

- I think one of the interesting things about seeing that vision for the game, as well, is you've got this really peculiarly British influences in here as well. You can you can feel things like The Wicker Man. There's a little bit of The Prisoner. And was that a big part of how you folded in the kind of the influence language here?

- So yes. That's a very interesting question because the team has a blend of people who are from Britain and people who aren't. So that gives us a very useful perspective in that there are things that we don't notice are uniquely British, I suppose. So it's useful to have people to say, dry stone walls are weird. And that becomes a detail you make sure you put it in the game.

Our start point was to look at the setting of the game and say, so 1950s Britain, what was the fiction of 1950s Britain? What is the cultural reference points that, if you were telling a story in that era, if you were an actual writer of that era, what would be the language you would use to tell your story?

So we looked at something like the Quatermass series of movies. And even if people don't know the references directly, they'll know the kind of knock-on effects, ripple effects that those have had on storytelling. So it's been a really interesting process of finding those bits and pieces of storytelling language and then finding a combination that allowed us to build a sandbox for the player to explore.

- And obviously, part of that setting is, as you mentioned, the 1957 nuclear disaster at Windscale. It is set in that same environment. Can you-- because as far as-- I'm no historian, but as far as I understand, those fires had burned for three days. And what we're looking at is a fictionalized version of that. So what elements did you and the team build off of versus what is kind of more of that fictionalized environment?

- So we wanted to be respectful to the actual disaster. So that was that was one of the things that we factored into our creative process. So the way that we looked at it is stories of the era. Often, they would tackle an anxiety or a worry that was impacting the world at the time.

But in order to make it more accessible, in order to make it like an enjoyable piece of fiction, they would make it something either otherworldly, either meaning kind of extraterrestrial or meaning kind of mystical to some extent, and explore that as part of the story of the game. So we took exactly the same approach as the contemporaries of the era would have would have told the story. The place that ours differs a little bit is that it's a great big sandbox game. It's, effectively, like an entire serialized drama box set in one great big go.

- Is there anything else that we should talk about before we dive into this gameplay, just anything around the narrative of the game, like who are we, where are we, what are we about to do, just setting up context for what we're about to see?

- OK, so yes. But it's difficult to answer because it's a mystery.

- Mm.

- The footage that we'll look at skips ahead a little bit into your play experience. So it skips ahead of a like a start sequence of the game, which trains the player a little bit and provides with-- provides them with some context.

So they wake up not knowing where they are. There's a person in a hazmat suit leaning over them, bleeding, asking them for help, and knowing they don't have much time left or trying to provide whatever context they can. They let you know that all of the disaster that's befalling the area is rooted in the Windscale plant, and the way to get there is through a facility called the Interchange. So you've got these pieces, these scant clues to try and jigsaw together to try and find your way into the game.

We don't tell you who you are. We specifically don't tell you who you are. So there's no indicators of age, ethnicity, or gender. The protagonists got gloves. They don't make any breathing sounds, so you can't infer any specific details about them.

And this is all intentional. During development, we tried different things out, and what felt like the best fit was the idea of the player being this blank slate, the player being this mystery because your journey through the game is one that's almost like a detective. You're finding clues and piecing them together. And the perspectives of the people who are within this quarantine zone differ as well. So you have to choose who you trust, whether you think they're telling you the truth, whether their perspective on things is accurate or not.

And then we never cast judgment. We never tell you what's right and wrong. We never tell you how to play the game. We just we provide you with a context and then let you have at it.

- Well, I love that you're talking about this so poetically. But these are actual concrete gameplay mechanics and systems. So why don't we get to it and get to the good stuff because I know our viewers are anticipating that.

And just a little bit more context for me is, last week, at gamescom, we had you on the livestream. And we went through a very similar but different direction for the demo. So essentially, for gamescom, I believe, we went left, and now we're going right.

And that's not to say there's any major differences between the two of those, aside from-- from my understanding, but correct me if I'm wrong, Ben-- it's just a different part of the map that we're going to explore and then different areas that we're going to fall down the path of because we're choosing to go in a different direction. All right, well, let's get to it.

So Ben, what is the area we're finding ourselves in on this particular map?

BEN FISHER: So this is Slatten Dale. This is an old, disused sort of mining facility. And you find loads of these in the in the Lake District, so it's very typical of the area. But this one's been impacted by five years of being trapped in a quarantine zone.

So it's mostly been picked clean by people scavenging for resources. What you find when you head down here is one of the few kind of immediately openly hostile factions, bandits that are picking the area, showing off that they're powerful and that they don't want to fight.

[WATER FLOWING]

But we let you avoid those fights if you want. We let you get into those fights if you want. And there's a mechanic in the game where you've got a little bit of time before the fight actually fully clicks in. They might see you, and say to you, like, I don't want to fight, but if you do, I'm ready. You've got a bit of time to back off and either sneak around and take them out from somewhere else.

You can play stealth style, sneak up, and break people's necks. That's absolutely fine, too. But if you find a group of three or four enemies, the combat is high stakes enough that your chances of survival are pretty slim.

JOE SKREBELS: I was going to say, having played this demo a few times and not being a necessarily stealth-inclined player, yeah, one of the first takeaways is you will die very quickly unless you're prepared for these fights, which is refreshing, you know? You expect to come into these and find random bandits just as cannon fodder or obstacles to get to things. And it's-- it's a real adjustment to have that moment where you're like, oh, OK, I need to be thinking about every single interaction I'm having with these people and maybe not engaging with them as I [LAUGHS] tend to do.

BEN FISHER: There's lots of space to avoid them. And they die quickly, too. The combat is high stakes. So one of the kind of reference points we had is we wanted it to feel like gritty, desperate survival. It's like a it's like a nasty pub brawl--

TINA AMINI: [LAUGHS]

BEN FISHER: --rather than like a hero shooter. So like you say, there's lots of space to avoid those fights entirely if you want to. If there's one or two combatants, you might survive. You might take a couple of licks, but you should survive. But if there's a group of three or four, just like if you met three or four people with knives and baseball bats in the real world, you'd say, you know, my chances are slim here.

So we wanted you thinking in those terms. We wanted you to observe and plan and piece together what was in front of you. That's not to say that you can't play the game in a more typical sort of shooter style because, outside the gamescom demo, we have options for differing play styles. So you can tune the combat intensity. You can tune the guidance of your overall quest. And you can tune the sort of how scarce resources are, because we've got an idea in mind of what we think is the best Atomfall experience, or the most optimal experience, from our design perspective.

But we don't want to stop people playing their way. And we don't want to stop people who need extra support from being able to play the game as well. So loads of accessibility options, loads of tuning options that you can fine-tune the experience.

TINA AMINI: So that guy that we took out earlier, we took him out stealthily. But I noticed he had a cricket bat. And I think, at the time, we were unarmed. So in that situation, if we were face to face, I imagine we might want to be like, actually, you know, Simpsons gif back into the bushes because he's got the upper hand in that case. So what does-- how does that connect back to the threat system in the game?

BEN FISHER: So that's always an option. If you start backing off, the threat will de-escalate. If you wander into the middle of a heavily occupied location, it's not easy to back off, because you're surrounded. And there are locations that are strongholds for the enemies. So it'll tell you that you're trespassing, and you won't get that chance to back off. They'll-- they feel like you've walked into their home, so they're going to go for you. But you've usually got the opportunity to back off.

But I mean, like you say, they've got a cricket bat, and you've got nothing. You've still got your bare fists. You've still got a kick button to stagger them back. So there's some options there. And if they've got limited resources, as well, it's-- your chances aren't great, but they're not nothing.

TINA AMINI: Mm-hmm.

BEN FISHER: And if you approach with a gun, you may well have an empty gun, but you can point it at enemies, and they'll-- if they've not got a gun, they'll put their hands up, and they'll back off. So lots of opportunities to avoid that combat and lots of opportunities to try something desperate to survive.

TINA AMINI: Well, now we've got a gun.

BEN FISHER: If you've got a cricket bat, you can throw it. You can throw you can throw your melee weapons to hit targets across the room as well.

JOE SKREBELS: And we're seeing here the opportunity to assign different items to hotkeys. And that naturally sort of limits you on what your loadout is going to be at any one time. You will have access to everything in your backpack. But in terms of hot swapping and being able to deal with the situation live, you only have those four options. Is that a pretty intentional choice from you in terms of you've really got to be thinking in advance about these things?

BEN FISHER: That's exactly it, yeah. So because you've got access to a load of different options simultaneously, you can get hit by analysis paralysis by being able to choose too many at any one point. So we wanted you to have enough options that you can think about different strategies available, but not get overwhelmed by choice. And we want you to feel a little bit desperate and a little bit forced by circumstance.

So you'll find ammo in numbers of one and two bullets. You might have to swap from a pistol to a shotgun, not because it's optimal, but because that's all you've got ammo for. You might throw your cricket bat to stagger somebody to earn yourself the time to reload your gun. So we wanted you in that kind of-- that desperate mindset, that kind of like desperation for survival.

Yeah, and your backpack is quite limited, as well. The amount of inventory you can find, even if you avoid all combat and spend the whole time scavenging, you're still quite limited on how much you'll find and how much you can carry at any one time.

TINA AMINI: So we actually just picked up a lead, which is another one of the gameplay systems. Can you talk about like what's the difference between a quest and a lead?

BEN FISHER: Yes, I can. And I think it's really exciting. This is a mechanic that emerged by itself during development. We tried different models of giving the player an overall quest and even-- what we found is that, if you've got a quest, it suggests a backstory. It suggests you have a relationship to characters in the game world. And that was leading in a direction that we didn't think was the best fit for the game. So we sort of said, what do you do? How do you guide the player if you've got no quests?

And we tried a few things out. And then the one that really started to light a fire was the idea of leads. So you won't be told what to do. You'll just be told what other people's needs are, how they relate to the world. You might find some clues that help you understand a story that somebody is telling you. But there's no guarantee that story is true or not.

So there's no goodies. There's no baddies. There's just information about the world. And what we've done, as far as possible, is we've kind of pieced together everything into a giant interconnected web.

So at the heart of it, there's the Windscale Plant. There's the mystery that what caused this disaster. And then there's the mystery of what happened to the science facility that was surrounding this disaster. And then there's the mystery of what happened to the people surrounding this facility when the disaster happened, and all of these little sort of micro stories that piece together into one giant story.

TINA AMINI: And that goes very hand in hand with that kind of detective metaphor that you were using earlier, like how you're pursuing leads, what you decide is the areas to emphasize on and then the people to trust as kind of piecing things together as you come upon them and as you pursue them, which is very interesting.

BEN FISHER: Yeah, so the structure of the story is almost like a sequence of little vignettes. So a lead-- there's little webs of interconnected leads that tell one story. And once you've found them all, you kind of play the story in your head. Or you build an assumption about what the story is, and you think you've got a perspective on it.

But as far as possible, wherever possible, we make sure there's no right and wrong person. There's difficult moral quandaries. There's difficult situations where people have been pushed to make choices that they might not have otherwise.

And you can you can draw that thread to a conclusion. And there it feels like an ending to that little story. But there's not a right ending and a wrong ending. That's not a good guy and a bad guy.

I mean, that's, that's quite typical of the storytelling of the era, as well. If you think of something like The Wicker Man, although it's-- although what happened is horrific, everyone is presented in a kind of neutral fashion. There's no official confirmation by the story that-- OK, I mean this is kind of spoilers, but also, it's been a while.

[LAUGHTER]

There's no official confirmation that the magic in the story will really happen, that by sacrificing someone, they'll secure a harvest. And there's nothing in the story that says, whether these guys are right or wrong in their pagan beliefs. That's just a conflict between two people, and you have to kind of decide who you think is right and wrong.

So we've gone we've gone deep on that in this game because we've got a pagan faction. We've got a faction called Protocol that think they're restoring law and order and keeping the place stable. But they're getting quite draconian about it. They're getting quite tyrannical.

So you've got to decide, do you think their iron grip is worth the cost, or do you think that's not good for the people that they're controlling? Do you think there's a better way? And different people have different perspectives. So it's a writing challenge, but it leads to a really interesting textural world.

TINA AMINI: And we did see the protocol actually in our gamescom demo, which brings me to another point, which we saw some bartering, some trading, and actually got a lead even from that kind of NPC character as well.

BEN FISHER: Yeah, yeah. So you'll find them by exploring. But yeah, like you say, you might find a trader who's willing to trade some information or trade a lead or trade a key or something like that. Because these people are surviving in this post-apocalyptic environment, money has no value to them because there's no bank they can lean on, right? So they're trading for resources.

That's another mechanic that kind of emerged by itself during development. We were just kind of following the worldbuilding, right? We were asking ourselves like, what would these people trade with? Wouldn't it be interesting if it's barter?

And what that allows us to do is have different traders value different things. So if you try and trade a gun to a pacifist, they're not going to be interested in it. But if you find yourself in the kind of pagan woods, and you've found some crafting materials that let you make exotic potions, that might be more valuable when you're in that end of the end of the map.

TINA AMINI: So part of, obviously, finding leads through traders is because of dialogue. And so you can pursue, if you're interested, asking them more questions versus just trading and bartering for items. So what is that dialogue experience like with other NPCs that you're finding? I assume you can also find leads through them and maybe develop some of your perspectives on the factions and what's going on in the world. But what is that system like?

BEN FISHER: When we were developing the overall lead system, and we wanted to make sure the player could follow whichever routes they choose through the game, that brought us to the conclusion that we could make conversations more interesting if they worked more like a real-world conversation.

[GUNFIRE]

So you don't have a list of topics that you gray off one at a time to learn about the game world. The person that you're talking to, they have something that they're interested in. They've got their perspective on the world.

You might get different information from them based on whether they like you or not or whether they think you agree with them. So effectively, you can fail conversations, right? You can you can lose a lead that you might otherwise have got by choosing the wrong thing to say.

So we followed this all the way through to a logical conclusion that, essentially, any character in the game could die, any chain of leads could be lost, based on how you play. And the game copes fine with that. So you've still got different ways to find out what's happened and find a way out of this disaster zone.

So it means that two different people playing the same conversation might get a different result. For every line of dialogue, you've got an intonation. We also didn't want the player to be surprised by a line read that varied from what they expected it to be because the stakes are high.

So we don't we don't call it out explicitly that you've lost a lead. We don't call out explicitly that someone's annoyed by you. We just apply those rules evenly everywhere. And so much of your play experience feeds through the lead system that it seems like a natural combination.

What we've noticed is that people, because of the balancing of the game, because of the way conversations work, you think of it more like a real fight. You think of it more like a real conversation with a person. And you think of it in those terms and those sort of stakes. So we try not to call stuff out in a kind of video gamey way unless we find it's unavoidable.

We're layering up some of the communication systems we've got, just now, just to bring them to the fore a little bit. But as much as possible, we want you to just observe and for your observation to be respected.

TINA AMINI: I was just going to say, we picked up an explosive lure after scavenging and found what looked like a lunch box. So that's a little bit we haven't talked about in terms of crafting. Like, we use the molotov cocktail earlier, but I imagine there's a couple more things you can build towards as the game progresses, as well.

BEN FISHER: Yes, there's a range of options of survival and combative things that you can craft, like fire resistance, and bandages will stop you bleeding if you've had a knife fight and you're still bleeding out. The explosive lure that you mentioned is because some of these places have got things like giant swarms of rats that will come and try and eat you if you head in the wrong direction.

TINA AMINI: Cool.

[LAUGHS]

BEN FISHER: Yeah, so the environment itself is against you as much as the bandits are.

[FOOTSTEPS]

[PHONE RINGS]

[CHIME]

[PHONE RINGS]

MAN (ON PHONE): Oberon must die.

[EXPLOSION]

- Well, is there anything, Ben, that we should talk about when it comes to that-- we finally found the convoy wreckage. So we're sort of-- I assume that's not the end of that lead, but perhaps a tease of the types of stories we can stumble upon.

- Yeah, that's just one example. So there's lots of little kind of narrative cul-de-sacs where you might find a situation and there's environmental storytelling that you can piece together and understand what happened there. But more often than not, those little vignettes have a little dangling epilogue that will lead you towards some other thread in the narrative.

And because of the kind of interconnected web of leads throughout the game, we feed you back and forth across these sandbox maps. And the population changes over time. So you become familiar with them, but then you can't rest on your laurels, because you don't know exactly where the bad guys are going to be. And as you poke your face into things, things escalate as well.

- And I think it's things like seeing that the village of Wyndham, which, obviously, we didn't see in this demo but you've shown before. It does have that-- it has a real sense of character. It doesn't-- I think the benefit of those dense, interconnected maps is you almost get a chance to sort of relate to a place as opposed to it just being terrain you're crossing over to get to the next thing.

- Yeah. I mean, so from a certain perspective, you could say that part of our creative process was to start building the location and then developing the mechanics of the game out of the worldbuilding. So the following leads, like I said, the brutality of the combat, those emerged by themselves because they seemed appropriate to the world that we were building, that kind of uniquely British apocalypse, the green, unpleasant land.

- [LAUGHS]

- I love how the team has just organically fallen into these systems in that worldbuilding. It feels like-- developers talk a lot about finding the fun. And it really feels like you guys met in the middle. You and the fun met in the middle, and it's just a kind of really perfect marriage.

So congrats so far on all of the reveals. And thank you so much, Ben, for spending your time not continuing developing on the game and spending your time with us. We and the audience really appreciate it. You've walked us through so much today. Is there anything else you want to shout-out for the audience to look forward to or anything they should be aware of?

BEN FISHER: Yeah, sure. The game launches March 2025. And I can't wait to see how people get on with it.

- I can't wait to play and compare notes with Joe. [LAUGHS]

- Yeah. Let's find out what leads we follow and which pagan rituals we do. I'm excited.

- [LAUGHS]

- And yeah, who we side with.

- Everybody needs a hobby.

[LAUGHTER]

- All right, well, that's all we have for the episode today. Thank you all for tuning in. And thank you again, Ben and Joe, for joining me for today's walkthrough.

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