Rebellion’s upcoming survival RPG, Atomfall, will feature serious consequences for reckless players. In an interview with Digital Trends, Rebellion confirmed that players will be able to kill every NPC they meet.
Atomfall is a single-player nuclear RPG in the vein of Fallout 4 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 set in a fictional version of the U.K. ravaged by the Windscale fire. As you might expect from a game set in such a brutal world, death is a big part of the story — and players can choose to be stone cold killers, if they desire.
“You can kill absolutely everyone. You can kill no one,” Rebellion Head of Design Ben Fisher told Digital Trends during an interview at an Atomfall preview event in London. “It’s entirely up to you. There are characters that offer you ways out of the quarantine zone if you do a job for them. It’s up to you to decide who to trust.”
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I played over an hour of Atomfall at this preview event and confirmed that Fisher’s comment was truthful. Even when I was speaking to an NPC that seemed extremely important to the major narrative beats, like the Captain of Atomfall’s militaristic faction, the “takedown” option appeared as I stood near them. The only time I ever used it was to kill a baker who was withholding information from me, but I later learned that there was a less violent way to complete that storyline.
In general, NPCs are very reactive to the player’s actions. Some will ask you to step back before attacking you and won’t start attacking if you listen to them. The guards in a village will get mad at you if you brandish a gun and start running around town. Atomfall is shaping up to be a survival sandbox that reacts to the player, and Fisher emphasized the importance of that sense of freedom.
“Sometimes, one character might want you to kill another, and when you do that, you’re closing down leads,” Fisher says. “So you can kill absolutely anyone. That’s to give you that sense of freedom, and maybe the situation will get out of hand anyway without having to kill anyone.”
Atomfall will be released on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S on March 27 and be part of the Xbox Game Pass catalog from day one.
