At first look, you may mistake Atomfall for a Fallout-style game. Perhaps, even, an precise Fallout game set in a post-apocalyptic England quite than a post-apocalyptic America. Atomfall is first-person, it’s post-nuclear (it’s referred to as Atomfall for a cause), and it has an alt-history design, as Fallout famously does.
Ryan Greene, artwork director at developer Rebellion, completely understands the place the Fallout comparisons are coming from. Not solely that, however the growth group knew Atomfall can be in contrast to Fallout as quickly as it was revealed.
“Once you play the game, you realize it's not Fallout, but yes, we knew,” Greene informed IGN.
“And one of our owners, Jason Kingsley, he's a big Fallout fan, so inevitably there was going to be some parallels in that any kind of survival in the apocalypse, immediately Fallout's going to come up as a thing. And those guys are great at what they do. And that's cool.”
But Atomfall isn’t actually like Fallout in any respect. This is one thing IGN identified August final 12 months after we reported that Atomfall is something much more interesting than a British Fallout.
Indeed, Greene warned that the Fallout comparability is “misleading.”
“Once you play it for a bit, you're like, oh, this is its own thing for sure,” Greene mentioned. And, Greene identified, Rebellion isn’t Microsoft-owned Bethesda. The independently owned British studio behind the Sniper Elite franchise has created an formidable game, relative to its different video games, however we’re not speaking about an Elder Scrolls or Fallout-sized expertise right here.
“The reality is, here’s this very successful franchise and we're version 1.0,” Greene continued. “To be compared to those guys… thank you very much… Yes, we appreciate it because that’s a skillful team that's making that stuff.”
An average Atomfall playthrough, Greene mentioned, is “probably 25-ish hours.” However, completionists can stretch that “a long way.”
To discover out how the game plays, be sure to try IGN’s most recent Atomfall hands-on preview, during which our Simon Cardy went off the deep finish and killed everybody during his playthrough.
It seems, you possibly can undergo the whole game killing everybody and it’ll deal with that. “You can kill anyone or everyone if you choose,” Greene confirmed. “That's fine. We have multiple finishes to the game, so some of those would shut down if you were supposed to work with them throughout, but you'll find multiple other routes to finish the game and achieve a result.”
Atomfall doesn’t have a principal quest or a facet quest within the conventional RPG sense. Rather, “it's a spider web of connected story,” Greene defined.
“So even if you sever one thread, you can usually find another thread that leads you back to the overall mystery.”
Conversely, you possibly can play via Atomfall with out killing anybody. At least, Greene is “fairly certain” you possibly can. “I've made it about nine hours in, probably close to halfway running at a pretty fast dev play speed and killed no one,” he mentioned. “I'm fairly certain you can do it and there's no gating of having to kill anyone ever.”
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can attain Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].