Making Atomfall – How British culture and Breath of the Wild inspired Rebellion’s new RPG

British game studio Rebellion isn’t known for deep RPGs. The Sniper Elite developer has created everything from Hitman-like stealth games to Super Villain base builders to boomer shooters, but an RPG has never been on the table. 

That changes with Atomfall, a post-apocalyptic RPG set in an alternate-universe Britain ravaged by the Windscale nuclear disaster. Often described as a British Fallout, the game’s DNA is far more than it seems with influences from across decades of games, books and classic British TV. 

Speaking to VideoGamer, lead designer Ben Fisher explained that Rebellion’s new game isn’t a Fallout clone. Instead, the studio looked at survival games like Stalker and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild to create a pulp-sci-fi adventure with the storytelling style of early Doctor Who and The Quatermass Experiment. 

How Breath of the Wild inspired Atomfall 

In early development, Rebellion’s upcoming adventure was more like a traditional first-person RPG. Just like Fallout, there was a main quest and side quests with a traditional format, but the studio itched for something different. Going back to the early sci-fi era of storytelling, Atomfall was first and foremost a mystery, and the entire quest system was ripped out and replaced. 

“We don’t have a quest system, instead, we’ve got a leads system, which is similar but different to a quest system,” Fisher explained. “We didn’t want the player to be told what to do the whole time as they’re investigating. We wanted them to feel more like a detective and have more of a sense of open freedom.”

For Fisher, the massive success of Breath of the Wild was a key “reference point”. With a massive open world, players were tasked with finding the story for themselves, or avoid it entirely. With this in mind, Rebellion took a similar design approach, albeit with smaller, far denser zones instead of a traditional open world. 

“We were asking the question of, if we open up this game, how does the player navigate it?” he explained. “How would it feel for it to be that open? We did look at Breath of the Wild because you can run straight at the final castle and then die immediately. So we knew that structure was OK. And if you look at all of the content in Breath of the Wild, it’s all kind of optional.

“You’ve got those overall objectives. The game feeds you towards taking out those four kind of Mega Bosses before you try to take out the central location. And then the tools you uncover help you do that. So it’s up to you when you think you’re ready for the final battle.”

Combined with the Metroidvania-like structure of Dark Souls and the ability to kill any NPC like in Morrowind, Atomfall’s gameplay structure is designed to be as free as possible while cleverly pulling players along a dense mystery. 

Inventing and Iterating 

In developing Atomfall’s unique gameplay style, Rebellion spent years iterating on the core gameplay to craft something truly unique. While the game started more traditional with enough guns to make the Lone Survivor blush, that didn’t suit the British countryside. While the game started with normal quests, that didn’t suit the investigative nature of the story. 

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

“It’s stressful as well, because you make paper plans and you don’t know whether those paper plans are right.”

ATOMFALL LEAD DESIGNER BEN FISHER

For a game as interconnected as Atomfall, Fisher explained that every system has a massive effect on everything else in the game. When working on something unique, it can be extremely worrying for a team, especially a team’s lead, as ripping out systems and iterating upon them, but Rebellion worked in a way that meant it wasn’t too hard to replace key ideas with alternatives 

“It’s stressful as well, because you make paper plans and you don’t know whether those paper plans are right,” Fisher said. “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. 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.”

An Inspector Calls 

While Atomfall’s gameplay has been iterated upon dozens of times to create the game we know today, the core of the title has always been the central mystery of the Windscale disaster. Over time, the in-game military quarantine you’re tasked with escaping has changed to become more authoritarian and dark, but that call to adventure was always the same. 

For Fisher, this is the exciting part of Atomfall. For all of its British iconography, melee-focused combat and RPG freedom, the game’s central mystery and how players choose to interact with it is the reason the game exists. The “interconnected spiderwebs” that Rebellion has laid out across the cutesy bungalows and expansive fields are begging to be pulled. 

“The game is a big interconnected sandbox of spiderweb leads that leads to different ways out of this quarantine,” Fisher told VideoGamer. “I’m hoping that players find the route that suits them best and then follow it through.

“I hope that some players play it more than once because they’ll get a drastically different experience if they do so. I just hope it works. What we did is we took the creative pillars we were aiming for and just ran with them.”

Atomfall is currently scheduled to release on March 27th, 2025 for Xbox Series, Xbox One, PS4, PS5 and PC.