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.”
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.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.