Atomfall Had to Go Through Many Iterations During Development – Lead Designer

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While post-apocalyptic survival action game Atomfall is still over a month away, developer Rebellion has started slowly revealing more details about the title. In an interview with Videogamer, lead designer Ben Fisher spoke about how the studio had to spent quite a bit of time iterating on its ideas before it started to coalesce.

According to Fisher, the team behind Atomfall had to figure out how to make its planned investigative gameplay work, with several iterations having taken place during the prototyping and experimenting phase.

“In the case of Atomfall, we were doing something so experimental in so many different ways.,” said Fisher. “We had to work in layers instead and kind of iterate the game over time.”

Fisher also spoke about how difficult the process was, describing it as stressful. This came down to the fact that, while it was easy enough to come up with plans on paper, whether or not those plans would play out when it came to actual game development was another matter entirely.

“It’s stressful as well, because you make paper plans and you don’t know whether those paper plans are right,” said Fisher. “As soon as you take an idea that you’ve thought through on paper and attach it to another idea that made perfectly good sense on paper, the way that they interact has these ripple effects through the game.”

“So you’d have to approach any piece of design, any piece of content, bearing in mind that you don’t know if that’s the right answer,” he continued. “It’s your best guess so far, but you’ll only find out once it’s actually in context. You absolutely have to leave room for iteration. But you also need to do the work in a way that allows you to iterate. That doesn’t come for free.”

Atomfall art director Ryan Green had spoken about how investigation is going to be an important aspect of the gameplay in an interview last month. According to Greene, Atomfall won’t even have a traditional quest system; instead, players will be trusted to figure things out on their own. There will, however, still be some lines of investigation that players can follow to uncover the plot.

Greene described the title as “X-Files in the Cold War Lake District,” referring to the classic sci-fi investigative series where the plot was largely driven forward thanks to its protagonists’ knack for investigation.

Atomfall also got a trailer last month that showcased its setting, and helped set the stage for its protagonist and story. The game is slated for release on March 27, and will be coming to PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. Players can also get early access to the game by grabbing its Deluxe Edition, more details on which are available here.

In the meantime, check out the trailer from back in October that also gave us a look at some of the various factions that will have a role to play in Atomfall‘s world, as well as the role the British Atomic Researh Division will play.