hello friends and welcome to episode 225 of the noclip uh podcast podcast this week no crew cast uh we're all too busy playing oblivion i'm guessing that's what's happening i've personally put in like 20 hours in a week so i am i am oblivion pilled like a sicko we put a little video up on the on the youtube channel we have a youtube channel you know noclip has youtube channel we dabble in youtube and we put up footage of our 2018 bethesda documentaries documentaries uh basically we did a roundup i needed i needed an excuse to stop playing oblivion so uh spending my i spent saturday afternoon i
had like a free afternoon and i was like i could do yard chores a bit of gardening but nah decided to cut together a little oblivion video instead we're not going to talk about oblivion today though um i got a special developer interview i was managed to get some time with ben fisher who's the head of design over at Rebellion who put together Atom Fall which you may remember back on episode 219 at the end of March I was talking about Atom Fall Rebellion of course a studio with a long history of making first person games all the way back to Alien vs. Predator of course in more modern days the Sniper
Elite franchise has been sort of their bread and butter but Atom Fall you know new IP different type of game open worlds uh rpg basically but designed really economically and smartly and with some really fantastic world building and i've got a lot of questions for ben because i think i talked about it in my sort of uh impressions on the podcast that it was a game that was making a lot of just very smart design decisions to try and create something that was really trusting of the players intelligence and it wasn't overly you know systems heavy or or you know everything had a light touch like the inventory
was was had a light system and the combat would had a light system and and it made for like a kind of a breezy experience i'll be honest kind of like play not to be just bring everything back to oblivion but you know oblivion when you play it in 2025 as well it feels like it's from a different era of first person rpg where you just didn't have like 10 000 things that you could do all the time and adam fall strikes a really interesting balance um kind of more so than like the metro games but like less so than i don't know stalker you know what i mean it occupies a sort of a very unique space and i
had a great conversation with ben which you're about to listen to where we dove into a bunch of that and and really just how the history of rebellion and the games they've made really the sniper elite series sort of informed a lot of those decisions um so yes it's a very fun interview i had a blast talking to ben and i hope you enjoy it too and i want to do a special shout out of course to all all of our incredible Battle Pass holders, I did not ask Ben to read them out.
Apologies. You'll have to have me do it again.
The Irishman. Yut! Dwayne the Rock Lobster.
Anthony Thomas. Nico Bassettieri.
It's -a me, Ferrari -o.
Penelope Hayes. Senator Armstrong.
Harry Flanagan. Joosh.
Arno. Jose R. Matt Pearson.
James Brown. Mark Ross.
Tucker Morgan. David McGarry.
Sven Hooster. Pez. John Akers.
You and Nate. thank you all so much for your support of our work here at no clip what's coming in the pipeline line uh disco elysium is getting worked on currently um and our everbloom series as well will be premiering that one uh so make sure that you are a patron supporter to watch the patron show all about them or even better become an early access fan and get access to uh you know extended early access of all the docs and also extended interviews like our um todd howard and emil pagarello ones that are in the bethesda video from 2018 or new stuff like our bonus feature from our recent dwarf
fortress series there's loads of stuff in there we're doing our best over here trying to make these documentaries so we really appreciate any support you can in these difficult times not as difficult as the poor people stuck inside that atom fall situation and which we're going to talk about right now.
Ben Fisher, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast this week.
How are things over at Rebellion?
You know, it's been, has it been a month since Adam Fall came out?
Very nearly a month.
Yeah. I think it's in two days time, it's a month.
Okay. Little party.
Yes. Yeah. We're having a little party next week, actually.
Yeah. And it's great.
it's um everyone's very pleasantly surprised by the reception to atomfall you're always optimistic you're always hopeful um but there's aspects of the game that were very experimental when we were developing them and they seem to have struck a chord with people so you never really know until the the game comes out so we're all very happy still kind of evaluating what that means because it's such a such a um like a positive reception yeah it's it's i think it it pleasantly surprised people who were playing it as well because it is this sort of interesting combination of of design choices that really
had me on my toes like a game like this you're sort of expecting to easily put it in a box with some other type of you know first person shooter slash rpg thing and it somehow managed to sort of uh defy that those expectations and and carve out its own um its own its own idea idea, I guess of how to play one of these games.
And let's go back to, I mean, as early as you can on, on this project, you know, the studio was known for a couple of different franchises, sort of historically.
I mean, I grew up in, in, in Ireland playing, you know, classic rebellion games, uh, in the, in the nineties and early aughts.
Um, but in sort of more recent time, it's been sniper elit and, and, uh, the evil genius series as well of course and where where did the idea for you know not just doing another shooter because you sort of already have a pretty well established one and come from and also a new ip which is always a bit of a risk in and of itself uh well a couple of things fed into that one is that although rebellions well known for sniper elite primarily um you know evil genius obviously did well as well but um zombie army series strange brigade we're always trying something a little bit interesting on the edges
of that kind of core stuff just to see what sticks to see what's exciting we always want to try new ideas and see what's fun so that's one aspect of it the other was um jason kingsley one of the founders and owners of rebellion um notice that there are a load of different games in what you could call kind of like a quarantine genre right a load of kind of post -nuclear nuclear devastation games where the players finds themselves in that situation and they're trying to survive so you notice there's a few games in that category but none set around the world's first major nuclear disaster which was the windskill
fire so that's better known in the UK than it is in other countries so it's understandable why it wasn't a trigger point for anyone else so we looked at that theme and that setting and the sort of games that Rebellion makes are are typically kind of broad and pulpy, with a British slant to the tone and the fiction.
We prioritize sandbox freedom for the player, not telling the player what to do, maybe giving them an objective and then giving them freedom on how they achieve it.
So we had this kind of melting pot of influences.
It also felt like, well, very early in production, actually, it was more like a kind of skunkworks project, a very small team looking at that brief and saying, well if we wanted to do a game that was like an rpg we would need a conversation system we would need an inventory system we would need to have npcs that aren't just nazis trying to shoot you because in sniper elite you're either carl or you're a nazi right so to have a system where there are legions and factions and stuff like that it's like a a new tool kit so before we even had a coherent idea of what the end result would look like we
were building these tools to allow ourselves to explore and then from a aesthetic perspective as well um you know sniper elite is set in world war ii battlefields and then zombie army is kind of derived from that to some extent strange brigade was derived from that as well so we obviously didn't have like the lake district that we could just pop out of the flat pack and start assembling so part of the the process was visiting the area uh gathering like i'm doing photogrammetry so gathering 3d scans of uh assets in the lake district itself also looking at how we would make environments that had
that tone so lots of kind of chopping up ingredients to get ready to cook one of the things that sort of at least from my sort of layman's perspective felt like it probably emerged from the sniper elite stuff is the fact that you don't have one open map you have these sort of uh i think it's five is a distinct sort of areas and then obviously you've got sort of subterranean and other hidden aspects in the game um is that the case is that something that just came from the way you guys have historically sort of made games was there ever a a push to to do one big open world um because one of the things
that's really interesting from playing adam fall is is is you you think you might like lose something by not having it as an open open world but you actually gain quite a lot of sort of uh um uh specific sort of design tools from actually having them in these distinct locations that are sort of boxed off but yeah where is that where that came from uh it's a good question um the answer is a little bit indirect i suppose in that when you're like i was just saying you're going to make a like a toolkit of what you want to use to build the game that you're trying to make.
So you're always trying to balance what have we already got, what do we know how to do, and where do we want to try something new.
And that seemed like a place where the obvious answer is to do one connected sandbox.
But in order to do that, you need to make the areas very large to be able to then have breathing room between each of the beats of the game.
If you look at Sniper Elite, what we know how to do is densely concentrated, interconnected sandboxes where every detail matters.
So from that experience and from that lineage, we sort of said, what does that look like if it's a sandbox?
Look at RPG. It meant that each of the maps could be strongly themed.
It meant that we could double down on detail and content, make it all interconnect, make it all matter.
So by looking at it in that sense, since um it triggered it started to trigger some of the most interesting ideas in the game of it being this sort of spider web of everything connected to everything else there was actually a version of the game that was structured more like a metroidvania game early reproduction so if you think of those sandbox maps um the flow of the game at the time was something like you would enter one of those sandbox maps and uncover a tool or a key or some information that would allow you access to the next sandbox map in the sequence.
And each of the maps would have what we called at the time quest dungeons, like major locations which would progress the narrative.
So over time, it would gradually unfurl.
We got the game sort of running in that state, and it had a more traditional quest system at the time as well.
So it was really building with elements that you might recognize from other places because that was the fastest way to make something that connected together coherently when we played it it felt too guiding for our like creative pillars that sense of player ownership that sense of freedom it felt too much like we were telling you what the sequence of the story was we were telling you that other people had had a cool adventure and you were kind of turning up after the fact and unpicking someone else's story you didn't feel so much of a sense of ownership that's when we said well what happens if we
just just philosophically, just unlock everything and let the player piece it together in their own way.
What happens if we remove a traditional quest system?
And that's when we got into the really juicy problem solving stuff.
So to come back to your initial question, building those densely concentrated sandboxes and then making each of them strongly themed gave us a really interesting context to then come up with what an atom fall was.
that's remarkable that it had this more sort of um you know unlock it in the in a specific order uh which which again you would sort of assume like that's sort of how a lot of games work and obviously from a design perspective it allows you the guardrails of making sure that the player is sort of having the fun you know at the right times i i did think it was an incredibly sort of brave um decision to let you go um anywhere like like was did it was it always that binary that it was sort of like this oh we have this version where you know um you have to unlock specific areas in a specific order
to hey let's let the fuckers go wherever they want because like i i yeah it was i i guess to a certain extent there's only so many places you can go at the start of the game but but that seems like a really difficult design challenge, especially because your – sorry, excuse me – your opening is pretty short.
Like, the part where you have the player on sort of guide rails in that initial area is only a couple of minutes long.
We wanted to get the player to the sandbox as fast as possible.
And, yes, again, it's a very fair question.
We had the more guided version of the game, And we wanted to give the player that sense of freedom.
So we kind of said to ourselves, what's the fastest we can get the player to that sandbox freedom?
What's the openness that freedom can be?
And then, you know, set that boundary and then retreat from it if you have to.
And we found that there was a solution where we didn't have to.
So, you know, that was the bit that was risky.
So I'm glad that it comes across as brave because that was kind of like let's try it and see what happens there was no guarantee players would even be able to engage with it so it was definitely a big risk but it felt like a legitimate risk to tackle because it was the most honest expression of the creative pillars of the game and of rebellion in general so like you say with that opening we spent a lot of time doing two two things.
One was location scouting.
So by this point, we had a selection of sandbox maps and the reason we've got like subterranean interiors as well as that it gave us the building blocks that you could kind of shuffle them around a bit.
It's easier to move the entrance to a bunker than it is to move an entire interior.
So it was a good bit of flexibility.
So with that structure in mind, we wanted to find the best opening location that gave you access to a load of interesting places, that gave you a sense of unguided you know, you come out and you can go up or down the hill at the most basic level but also you can see the overall objective and you can see steps towards it so it builds on all this learning from Sniper Elite but we scouted around the game to try and find the best spot.
At one point it was the back end of Castafell Woods um just because there was a nice spot down there and and you fed through a spooky wood and those sorts of things so we tried different structures that gave you a different emotional experience and that seemed to the best fit and then the content of the interior itself um we went through a fast aggressive iteration process of what's the smallest version of the emotional tone that we want atom fall to have that gives the player enough of an understanding the mechanics of the the game that when we let them go they have a they have enough of an understanding
of what's expected of them um so having that character appear immediately and present you with um to some extent a moral quandary like you can help him or not you can kill him or not um you know you can blackmail them you know making sure that you've got this sense of tone range and then having a character who's trying to kill this guy you've just helped and doesn't necessarily want to get in a fight with you but maybe you want to get in a fight with him because you you liked the guy you just crossed paths with.
This kind of murky complexity seemed like the most distilled version of the core pillars of the game.
And then we let you out into the sandbox and go, right, now you know what an atom fall is.
Kind of good luck. So it was definitely a risk, but it was the cleanest expression of the pillars of the game.
So it seemed like a reasonable risk to tackle.
Right, yeah. Thank you.
Well explained. i think i sort of also see how you know in a game that's giving you so much player choice the last thing you want to do is have this extended sort of guard railed thing at the start it's sort of it's sort of lying about what the game is i guess to a certain extent and how did you guys i'm just going to say the earlier in the experience you are the larger an influence every single beat has on your interpretation of what the whole game is about because you've not got anything else to go on um so if you set up the wrong set of expectations when you let the player loose they'll be
playing the wrong game um and then they won't have an enjoyable experience so there were versions that had more combat there were versions that told you exactly what to do more and we found that when we did that when we took the the leash off players just sort of floundered a little bit and for some players there's still some of that because it's unusual usual for the game to be so open um but we've structured the game in a way that means you have to confront that a little bit and kind of decide whether the game's for you at that moment um so yeah there was a lot of a lot of nudging about this exact
specifics of every single detail on that in that start sequence to frame the right mental model in your head right it's like raising a child, you know, just like in a 20 minute period.
Um, uh, how did you guys come up with the, uh, with the themes for the various, uh, sandboxes?
Um, I, it was one of the aspects that I enjoyed the most. It felt, it felt like sort of, um, you know, channel swapping between different sort of BBC sci -fi movies or something, or, you know, not to say that they were direct to TV, but it just had like, you know, it felt very, they felt weird but sort of grand and familiar in other ways.
Yeah, how did you come up with the vibes of each area?
That kind of, that layered up over time.
So, there's two different answers to that.
You're asking great questions that have fractal answers or like holographic answers.
No, you're just a kind and considerate interviewer.
You don't give the easy answer.
or you're giving us the sort of the more thoughtful one.
Interesting answer, yeah.
So the different answers to that question are when we researched the area, we wanted to make sure there was kind of almost like a theme park distillation of the details that make somewhere feel Lake District -y.
So having like rolling dales, having a little nice little village with a tea shop and a church up the hill and a pub beside the church and phone boxes and all that that's like an agglomeration of three or four different real villages into the most concentrated version having those kind of woods, having the rolling farmland as well, it was like an exaggeration of the real kinds of locations you find if you go through the Lake District so that was layer one then we went through quite a long iterative process of finding a framing that felt right that had those kind of pulpy beats that kind of define
rebellion games but also felt coherent so we had concept art and visualization for different factions but not quite a match for exactly where they would go in the game so we're building these pieces individually and trying to find a configuration that's slotted together and what we ended up doing is layering on top of the sandbox maps the quite realistic sandbox maps we had with these um like pulpy storytelling beats so an example being in castorophile woods there's a great big castle ruin um and there's kind of like maple bunting that comes out of it but to draw you into this sort of folk horror environment.
And then these druids practicing some kind of nefarious rituals and what looks like stuffing mushrooms in the mouths of people that they've got strung up.
So those kind of local details we layered on top of a landscape that we'd built.
And the creative challenge is kind of what I called boiling the frog.
and that is taking the player on a journey that allows them to build up an understanding of the space in layers so that it feels natural when they get to the more outlandish stuff.
That kind of plot trajectory you get in an episode of Doctor Who where they get to the weird spacey stuff at the tail end of the episode, right?
But you've acclimatised by that point so it seems reasonable.
Like the most visual example of that being the village itself where we had a lovely village and it was like a realistic village but it didn't have that kind of 60s speculative british sci -fi british speculative fiction twist to it and it felt like having the big robots stomping about in the village would be the perfect fit right if you turn a corner there's a great big robot standing there you're just gonna go why is there a robot there and it seems stupid right so we didn't want that reaction so as you make your way into the village you have to go through those great big concrete walls there
are various checkpoints you step through there's guys in kit bashed armor that makes them look like they're defending the village from something outside because they're all facing out and then wearing this sort of ridiculous armor so it's like why why are these guys wearing this and defending a tea shop and arranging the details in a way that made that seem coherent means that by the time you get to the robot it's kind of it's easier to accept how the overall fiction fits together in fact um i didn't expect this to become a relevant point of reference for me but i looked at um the history of and photos
of the troubles right um because it's an occupying yeah um i can totally see empire force um it's effectively effectively you know it's as if Doctor Who in the 60s was trying to tell the story about the troubles right so you have to treat it delicately because it's a serious matter but also using that sci -fi that pulp storytelling lets you tackle those issues in a kind of in a in a context that makes it easier for people to not become guarded about so we use that same philosophy to build up these layers of legitimate history and then sci -fi versions of that history and have all slotted together
but it was a very layered process a very built up a step at a time so that it felt like it slotted together um it fit very nicely with the philosophy of letting the player go anywhere because it meant that the overall narrative was like a jigsaw and you were piecing it together right um the other trick we used is that the aspects of world building that require you to understand the world a bit more are physically deeper in the ground um so that not only is that got that kind of metaphorical value of being uncovering the truth but also it means that we can assume the player has enough of an understanding
of the game um that once they get down there they understand the mechanics of the game and they've have enough of an understanding of the lore of the game to you know understand why this stuff is cool and interesting yeah so again a lot of trust it does about to say trust is the word like you're it's a lot of you know i've lots of other questions just about the design side but just on that trust like what does that look like from a production standpoint are you doing a lot of like is it internal qa are you you doing play testing with with folks like how are you gauging it because so much of this seems
to be trying to figure out what the player's first time through sort of feels like yeah we did a lot of internal play testing primarily because rebellions um we've got several games on the go at one time right there's enough of us that we can bring in fresh people that haven't seen the game there are fewer of us than you would expect i think given the scope of games that we produce but enough of us to be able to legitimately playtest and then also compare people's playtest experience to the philosophical pillars of Rebellion that sense of openness and sandbox freedom and player agency a lot of targeted
playtests and then careful analysis of how people reacted to the game and some of it as well I would say is is uh some of it comes from the creative philosophy of jason and chris kingsley who want the player to have that sense of freedom and openness i my hypothesis would be um if i was working somewhere else and i was working for an external client they would be much less likely to be comfortable with saying maybe the player will finish the game in half an hour and that's just fine right because like places i've worked in the past and historically if you're working for an external client they
want to guarantee a specific runtime for and that all players see all of the content to justify the dev cost kind of thing yeah so to say if to say that player agency and freedom is more important it's like a it's a very rebellion thing and and it was it was great to kind of take advantage of that and then run with it go as far as possible in that direction just to see what it's like an extension of that and i think one of the elements that definitely sort of surprised and uh delighted players i think surprisingly delighted them is how you guys tackle quests i guess or the sort of i don't say
lack thereof but just i think players are so used to a very particular way of engaging with you know quests and rewards and story that when somebody out there decides to do it in a in a slightly different way it's it's remarkably novel um and i guess it sounds like it's part of that same philosophy of trusting the player and sort of giving them the power to to solve it but can you give us an idea of you know elevator pitch the way you guys approached quests i guess you call them leads right is that what it was yeah um this was one of the most difficult creator problems to solve so i'm more than happy
to yeah like i said before we had a version of the game that had something more like a traditional quest system and you ended up doing that thing that it's so easy to do of just like watch the quest marker jog in the direction of the quest marker and not engage with the sandbox and it felt it felt like you were the player would by default be missing the most interesting stuff in the game just that instinct that kind of you know you've acclimatized to other games that use that structure that have got 300 hours of content and the whole point is just to consume lots of content quickly but but we
wanted like a more concentrated experience uh where every detail mattered so we had to fight against that instinct we had the version with traditional quests we took took them out and then we had the problem of right how do we how do we give the player something to do in this sandbox if you give the player a sandbox and no guidance um it's really hard to motivate them right they want that structure um so we took a i'm not saying this was easy this was like i say one of the most challenging creative problems to solve in the game took a lot of trying stuff out and iterating but we looked at sniper
elite and said how have we solved this problem in the past because in sniper you've got an objective but you're also kind of given freedom and how to achieve it so how how did we motivate the player in sniper elite towards the end of sniper elite 5 some of that structure had started to form a very interesting shape where you had an objective you had methods to achieve that objective and as you explored the environment you might find more methods so you've got to you got to blow up a great big nazi um wonder weapon and there's a a way that you arrive knowing about and then there's three or four
hidden in the map and you may or may not find them so that was like that's the structure of one sniper elite mission so um we looked at that and said what happens if we make the entire game one super giant sniper elite mission so like like uh increase the resolution of the fractal by one more iteration so even to begin with you've not got an objective we wanted to we wanted to not tell you who you were we wanted to not tell you how you relate to the other characters and that comes with the problem of like how do you get started even so this is why we've got characters telling you like you're trapped
and you're gonna you're trapped and there will be people that can tell you how to find a way out and then also the kind of optional but everyone goes for it lead of um oberon must die that gives you a couple of things to explore in the game world um but we don't tell you what to do about them.
This was the kind of philosophical shift of how do we tell the player what to do without telling them what to do was to tell them the facts.
So they're an investigator they're exploring and if the metaphor was you're making notes about what people have told you.
So someone might want you to cover up a murder for the sake of argument.
A traditional quest system would say go and talk to the guy to cover up the murder.
but that that tells you something about the quest that tells you whether it's the main path or an optional it tells you whether it's sometimes whether it's the goody or the baddie path and all these kind of clarifying details but we wanted you to evaluate legitimately take a second to evaluate how um like how the ambiguities resolve because it feels like folk horror because it feels like 60s british sci -fi which had that kind of cold war edge how do we make the player stop and take a second and go i'm i don't i'm not sure about this um so we framed each detail just as a fact and it's up to you
how you resolve that fact one of the ways is to shoot everyone because the structure of the game means that there's not main characters and therefore you can kill anybody you like or you can ignore them the you know the situation has received as has resolved into a kind of stability, and people welcome you into the conversation because maybe you can do something for them, maybe you can tip that instability.
So you're not a superhero, but you're a variable in a kind of unstable equilibrium.
And it was a big chunk of work.
And once we had that structure in place, we had to make sure that there were interconnections between every part of the game.
all right okay we didn't have to do this but if this felt like the most natural way to make leads work as a system no matter where you engage with this kind of spider web of leads everything connects to everything else so eventually you'll find your way back to the windscaleplan and resolving the mystery regardless of what route you take so we then had to make sure for any kind of local narratives that happen they somehow connect into the bigger picture might just be a couple of little threads um one of the pleasant side effects we found is that that changed your perspective on like a like a what would be
a side quest in another game as you keep investigating the leads you learn more and more about the game world and go well what he said sounded reasonable but now i know about who what faction he's working for maybe i don't trust them and that changes how how you make decisions um and then the last piece of the puzzle was making sure that regardless of what the player does they're going to stumble across some leads eventually so we seeded leads everywhere we possibly could and we have mechanisms like the um pa system in the village or the pa system in um like some of the uh bunkers as well unavoidable
leads so even if you you go on a killing spree um there's still a source of some clues that can get the ball rolling and help the player investigate through the game a phone might ring somewhere that requires a guy on the far end of a phone yeah exactly it's funny i was that was my next question was how you resolved i guess sort of narrative cul -de -sacs but it sounds like that was a big part of it was was connecting all this stuff up and and and making sure that there was always sort of a way back to the interchange which i guess was always a sort of central mystery what i what i loved about the lead
stuff and it it really made the the the sort of multiple sandbox thing work even better was um you just gained i just was surprised how much you gained from that from having these distinct areas because like you the leads then are sort of somewhat divided up so you you kind of know when you're in an area what to be looking for it also allowed you to sort of not waste map size by having these transition points like you could it made sense that like oh the druids are in control of this because there's only like a couple of doors into this area so that's why they're so comfortable here you know what i
mean whereas in an open world game it would be ridiculous to have them wandering around like feet from the the village you know there was all all these additives that you got from uh from each one of them and uh you mentioned it already but the fact that like you said like even all the the esoteric druids or any of the other folks in the prison and stuff it all every time you did a side quest it felt like you were understanding more about the world which was sort of the main quest was just understanding what was going on i guess like knowledge then deciding how you relate to it exactly yeah yeah um
so that was part of the 60s sci -fi vibe also like the john wyndham cozy catastrophe of somebody kind of stumbling into something cataclysmic that's already happened arriving as people are trying to pick up the pieces and then seeing how they fit into it we didn't want to tell you the correct interpretation interpretation of the environment.
We found it more interesting and more aligned with the British storytelling traditions to make a messy, ambiguous situation where there aren't any goodies, there aren't any baddies.
Everyone's got a perspective and they're all right from their perspective and you've just got to decide where you fit into that.
So as a result of that, what you say is true that every lead you uncover helps you have a more complete picture and then it's up to you how you relate to that picture all the different people have got different you know the people that will offer you an escape from the quarantine zone effectively require you to align philosophically with their outlook in order to and then you prove that you align and then that's how you escape um so yeah that was a that was a conscious choice of you have to decide that they are the least of several evils how did you guys approach um combat because obviously sniper
release very combat focused game you know sort of weaponry focused range focused game and i i assume there were very you know sort of clear design reasons why you didn't necessarily to have a high powered sniper be the the main character of this game but um yeah tell us about the puzzle i guess of figuring out the the combat in here how much ammo you want to give the player how much inventory space and then how much melee was going to be in this yeah that that wasn't straightforward either um that was one of the cases where our existing knowledge worked against us to some extent because the team
knows very well how to make sniper elite encounters um sniper maps feel like an open sandbox but really they're six or seven arenas interconnected in multiple different routes uh and the core loop is you're the tiger in the undergrowth right you're observing you're targeting the enemies you're piecing together a strategy on how to take them down without being seen so it's a puzzle game from a certain perspective um and to begin with we kind of automatically made that game because we know how to do it and it's um and we know it's fun right so we had to work against that we had to change how we
populated enemies so that there are a random sprinkling of placed enemies and then roving patrols that are in very very random routes so there's never a perfect solution you're always working with incomplete knowledge doing the best you can in a situation a murky situation because that was that was the um one of the kind of philosophies of the overall structure of the game we just covered how that of relates to the elite system we wanted the combat to feel the same in sniper late you're a superhero effectively you're like a 1950s you are a sniper rifle like like to the extent that the master chief
isn't really a character he's just a you know an effective killing machine a walking gun exactly yes carl fairbairn's not dissimilar right he's a world war two sniper rifle um and we wanted you to relate emotionally to this differently we wanted to feel like 60s british speculative fiction and more often than that more often than not you've got a kind of quater massish figure or like number six in the prisoner some kind of outsider who's thrust into a situation who's trying to piece it together um you also get a lot of not necessarily specifically british and 60s but like detective fiction is a kind
of an everyman who's got an iron will reptile who thrusts his face in situations where it's not welcome and he takes a beating for it um but in the pursuit of a murky truth which when uncovered makes everyone feel a bit worse but at least the truth's out so that kind of that tone of you being more like a normal person instead of a like a like a superhero like a trained um trained military character um you You know, it's not a war zone, it's more like a pub brawl.
So we wanted a messy mix of melee and ranged combat.
It felt more British as well.
Like you're in rural Britain, there might be farmers with shotguns, there might be an occupying military force which has guns because they've occupied this place and they're trying to keep the peace.
So they would have arrived with guns to enforce the peace.
But every fight isn't going to resolve with a gunfight.
And we decided to sort of run with that a bit it and see how that felt make you panic and mix up options and make bad calls because of time pressure because it aligned with the overall tone goals of the game the overall kind of setting goals so it meant that there was a real kind of economy design challenge of making sure if you got into a gunfight you had enough to get on with but you couldn't just fire completely completely freely that you had the tools to get out of a situation where you'd panicked and used your last of your ammo um and then at the same time we didn't want to enforce a particular
play style on the player so we wanted to give them these tools and then give them the opportunity to stock up on ammo and improve their gun and choose their moment to start off a fight and mechanics like pointing a gun at a guy who doesn't have a gun so he backs off so that you can choose whether to escape a fight or not it was all like just following the pillars of the game following the tone of the game and then adding these layers that felt appropriate another point of tone reference that felt interesting um was uh the movie children of men oh really okay yeah for from the perspective of and every
man trying to survive in the middle of a hostile and dangerous situation yeah um so we sort of we looked at that and said well that feels feels brutal and messy and like you're just trying desperately to survive and not like doing so with imperfect knowledge and without the resources you really need what if we lean in that way what do we find um so that's where some of the most interesting stuff came up came from on that side of the game i think well it was really cool like having patrol sort of tell you to go away and not just engage with you immediately you know yeah yeah effectively it's a detective
game right as the mechanics of the game became coherent um it became and the lead system is when it became clear that that's really what the game was about and in that structure like uh a detective you know whether they're whether that's like a bbc drama detective or uh like a film noir detective they don't start guns blazing they the more and more they push into a situation they get pushed back by people who don't want them entering there but that's not where it starts totally and we would also fall into the trap of making the player play but in their default style um if you follow the quest
marker and then there's some baddies firing guns at you you fire back and then you move to the quest marker right you don't engage with the process of forming your own perspective on the mystery and what you think is the the right interpretation of that mystery it's funny how how much you have to sort of unlearn things for players or don't give them the opportunity to fall into sort of established, um, habits.
Uh, I know another one of those, I guess is the often I'm playing right now, you know, they just dropped, um, oblivion's remaster, uh, yesterday, a time of recording, uh, which is a game that I forgot.
You can fast travel to places you've never been to immediately.
I totally forget like that.
Even that seems like something you don't do in modern you know you at least have to go there to first fast travel i was like oh this is crazy but i'm also like oh this was the first like large open world first person game they were terrified that people would be bored of covering ground um there is no fast travel in adam fall uh traditional fast travel i guess you do have sort of a shortcut system let's say that you sort of that emerges from players playing with the game i kind of think i know the answer to this now just because you've sort of laid out the sort of core pillars of this game and the design
ethos you were going from um so i won't ask you necessarily how you came to that decision but was there a tension to ever give a sort of a more traditional um fast travel ability to players especially near the end of the game where maybe they're doing a little bit more crisscrossing than they would have been at the start for any mechanic in the game where we did something that wasn't traditional there was tension and friction because it's it's easy to worry that players might need it um so the way that we resolve that is we said well what are the pillars of the game and let's make the choice that aligns
itself with the pillars of the game so in our case like you say you kind of you unlock a series of shortcuts but also we still want there to be unexpected instability in those shortcuts so there might be enemies we don't expect them before and you get new tools so there there's new things you can unlock and explore as you travel through a place repeatedly you might uncover new leads that you've not uncovered before so there's there is still layers of new things happening um but we didn't we didn't want to have that feeling of you kind of like sprinting to the next plot beat because part of it
is that being immersed in a difficult situation that kind of anxiety of being on the back foot of having to be observant like just the right amount of stress and tension on the player like sparks their attention makes them receptive to um leads essentially makes them receptive to engaging with the environment as they see it so giving them a an easy out um like a short like a fast travel system would undermine that a little bit that was inspired in part by prey which did something very similar right yeah the the arcane yeah yeah yeah which yeah easier to do in a in a space station where everything
is on top of each other i guess yeah you could just fly around with the jetpack outside and get that yeah so they had some advantages there for sure um but it was another case of like this is the most aligned with our pillars so let's try it and see what the result is right so so for some of what we've discussed as well it's worth mentioning that we've got play styles at the start of the game so you can choose to have a more guided experience you can choose to have a more generous economy so you can play it more like a traditional kind of like a guided quest sort of shooter if you want to um we
think the most interesting things happen in the game when you don't have that support structure so we kind of recommend you play without quest markers you can turn them on if you won't recommend without we think the game is the most interesting when you're scrabbling for resources a bit you can soften that if you want but we recommend that you don't etc etc you know much Much like we do with the sniper games where we give you loads of accessibility options and loads of customization options.
We do the same thing with Atom Fall, but in an even more detailed fashion.
This is a sort of a jerk question, which is why I'll keep it to one of the last ones here to ask.
But why do you think people resonated with Atom Fall?
because the the the sort of reception to it has been you can you know games come out and people say oh that's a good game you should play that good game but i feel like the reception to atom fall has been more of a oh this is like a breath of fresh air like this is you know it's a very particular type of reception i think um yeah you know were you guys surprised by sort of how well well it it's done um i know there's public sales figures out there saying it's sold over a million and in quick amount and it's probably um far exceeded that now but were you guys surprised and and i guess were you
surprised by the tone of the reception or or was that kind of what you were going for again you're asking great questions um we were optimistic based on the initial reception of when we announced the game and when we demoed it at gamescom and things like that um the extent to which people have been excited by it was a very pleasant surprise so from a certain perspective at rebellion we make the sorts of games that we would like to play right and when people and you know when people engage with those games that's always very very pleasant as a a surprise that it happens to some extent um yeah i
think part of it as well as like you say people have commented on it as a breath of fresh air it's because it does some weird stuff um it's it's eventually it developed a kind of coherent um outlook a coherent perspective and as i've described a lot of that layered up over time and we kind of found what was interesting over the course of development um so because it's weird in some places you know there's a bit of a marmite reception to that as well where people that engage with it really engage with it and the people that aren't engaging with it are um in some cases bringing assumptions from other
games and then saying this game doesn't match these assumptions so i'm not interested and that's fine that's absolutely fair um but that's a necessary consequence of trying something new that that some people are very much engaging with but it's like i'm still um astounded like the extent to which people are engaging with it now that it's been a month as well since it's out and you guys have obviously you know gotten a bit of air from it and also watch people playing it is there any design decision you'd you'd tweak or or do something different with is there any thing that you see players either
not engaging with or getting hung up on that you're like oh i wish we spent a bit more time on this or you know nipped and tucked on this thing i mean that's always true for every aspect of every game i've ever worked on like all right you got yeah exactly yeah so there's always five times as many ideas as you've got time to make right um and that remains true no matter how many games you how many ideas you cross off the list right you've always got more ideas that you would like to do over time um so we've generated plenty of notes for things that we can nip and tuck while we're working on on dlc
um as well as an extensive list of things that we would iterate and improve and refine in um like a potential sequel or any game that we make that is informed by atomfall yeah that list is always always a nice big list um i would also love for people to make games that have a lead system instead of a quest system not necessarily us i want to play more of them i think it's a really interesting mechanic we've kind of discovered i suppose yeah absolutely you've on earth something really uh really cool um not unlike the scientists in in the lake district um my last question is on on uh on you mentioned
potential sequel stuff i i want to go back to something you said earlier which i found really interesting which was that like in another configuration of this development you might have an outside third party who is demanding like you said we want the player to touch as much of this game as possible yada yada yada in another in that situation as well you might have somebody who wants to make a game that is a bit more sequel friendly than adam fall is i'm not saying it's not i'm not saying it's the opposite that it's antagonistic to the idea of a sequel but certainly there are games where you could go
oh you know let the story continues whereas the beauty of adam fall i think in many ways is that it does feel feel very cohesive and, and, you know, relatively ties up some bows certainly in, in that area.
Um, was that ever a sort of, uh, you know, uh, a concern or, you know, I, I assume the Boffins at rebellion have, uh, have figured out ways in which you could spin this thing out into different places or different eras or whatnot.
But was that, yeah.
Was that ever something that was in your sort of um in in in your in your uh sort of coming in the pipe as it were so we never let that stop us um uh whenever we're developing something we always have an idea of how you would do more of it where you could go in the case of something like atomfall the nature of world building means you have to build more story than you have the opportunity to tell particularly in something and it's an interconnected mystery.
So there are plenty of plot threads we could pick up and make more of if we wanted to.
But like I say, if you try and build too much of a sequel hook, it can come across as kind of arrogant, I suppose.
Or like you've not finished telling one story.
So from my perspective, it's much better to make sure you're telling one good story.
and use what you've got, right?
Don't hold anything back for a theoretical sequel.
Just use what you've got and then that's a high class problem to have to solve.
If people engage with the game enough that they want more, it's better to make that first game as good as you possibly can.
And then there are ways that we could easily do an Atomfall 2.
And we'd love to. But you don't want to stop yourself making a cool first game yeah i think a lot of people would love to see it as well um ben thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today last question i've never been to the lake district what's the like what's the sort of the tourist insider like how should you do it should you go camping should you stay in like one of those little villages uh you know what's what's what should you be doing fishing out there just getting drunk in a local pub like i know what i'd i'd like to do you could camp if you want if you don't mind your tent
blowing away yeah it's a lovely area as you know any bit of rural uk it's very very nice you know maybe find a nice airbnb somewhere that won't blow away because it's made of sturdy stones and go and find a lovely pub nearby to have a couple of drinks smash it make sure you get the money from the lake district tourist cancel next time around.
Ben, thank you so much. I appreciate you taking the time to talk to us today.
Yeah, no problem. Thank you.
