A few weeks ago, Mundfish released Blood and Crystal, the fourth and final DLC for its debut game, the single player first-person shooter Atomic Heart.
The game was very successful (it surpassed 10 million users about a year ago) and opened up a whole franchise, with an MMORPG spin-off titled The Cube and a full-fledged sequel with a much bigger world and an expanded RPG layer, as we discovered in our previous interview with Mundfish founder and CEO Robert Bagratuni.
Today, we have a fresh Q&A to publish. This time, it's focused on Blood and Crystal, the significance of Atomic Heart's success for the studio, an update on the progress of the two upcoming projects, and Bagratuni's take on hot industry topics, such as AI tools.
It's been over three years since the launch of Atomic Heart. How do you feel about it, now that enough time has passed? Did it achieve all your expectations, both in terms of fan reception and sales?
Robert Bagratuni: Looking back, it still feels a bit surreal. Launching a brand-new, weird, and highly ambitious IP is always a massive gamble, but it absolutely paid off. The game exceeded our expectations both commercially and in how the community embraced it. We've long surpassed the 10 million players mark worldwide and managed to establish the Atomic Heart universe as a recognized name in the industry. Seeing the cosplay, the fan theories, and the sheer love for our world three years later is the ultimate reward for the team's hard work. But, as you know, we have no plans to stop. Following the release of our fourth and final DLC, Blood on Crystal, on April 16, we celebrated the closing of this chapter, and the DLC team joined the rest of the studio in developing The Cube and Atomic Heart 2.
In hindsight, is there anything you would do differently about the development or the marketing?
If there's anything to highlight, it would probably be on the development side. First, we would definitely streamline our internal production pipelines much earlier. We spent a lot of time in the early years iterating and finding the best approach to building the team and structuring cross-department communication. Another massive lesson for us was the importance of playtesting. Now we start doing it much earlier in the cycle, and on a much larger scale, to see how all the pieces of the game actually fit together in practice, allowing us enough time to find the best solutions if fine-tuning is needed. But perhaps for us, everything happened exactly as it was supposed to, because going through these processes is what forged us into real professionals. And this, in turn, empowered us to launch the Mundfish Powerhouse initiative to help younger developers avoid the same hiccups we faced, enabling them to focus immediately on the actual development and creative processes.
You've also committed to more DLCs than usual for a single player shooter game. What was your goal with Atomic Heart's DLCs, both narratively and design-wise?
Having promised players four DLCs from the very beginning, our narrative goal was to start expanding the perspective through which we show this unique retrofuturistic world. We wanted to introduce new angles, bring in new characters, resolve lingering conflicts, and uncover remaining secrets, so that by the end of DLC#4, players would have a fully complete, definitive experience of the first Atomic Heart.
Design-wise, we made it a priority to incorporate player feedback. The DLCs allowed us to offer more linear, focused experiences in certain areas, test out new mechanics that we couldn't fit into the main game, and refresh existing systems. Also, this format gave us the freedom to experiment. While maybe not every single experiment landed exactly the same way, taking those risks is the only way to discover something truly special for players. If you put all four DLCs together, the total volume of content is practically the size of a standalone game, so we're incredibly proud that with the recently released Ultimate Edition, players can now get this extensive experience all in one box.
Are you evaluating a potential port of Atomic Heart to the Nintendo Switch 2?
Nintendo Switch 2 has certainly become an incredibly exciting platform lately, both for players and developers. And while we don't have any news here to share right now, we are definitely exploring all possible ways to bring our games to as many players as possible.
You just released the fourth and final DLC, Blood on Crystal. Do you consider it very important to the story, especially as a bridge to Atomic Heart 2?
Blood on Crystal DLC#4 isn't just a side story - it is the definitive conclusion to the first chapter of Atomic Heart and a direct bridge to the future, paving the way for both The Cube and Atomic Heart 2. And while hardcore fans will absolutely appreciate the deep lore connections and callbacks, we are designing our upcoming projects to be completely accessible to newcomers who are stepping into our universe for the very first time.
How goes the development of the sequel? Did you reach Pre-Alpha yet?
The development of Atomic Heart 2 is completely different from the first one. We have significantly shifted our approach and are handling the production process in a new way. We want to experiment with a lot of new ideas and truly improve upon the aspects we couldn't fully realize in the first game, such as the liveliness and responsiveness of the open world and the depth of the RPG mechanics that we discussed with you last time. As for the current status, our studio continued working on DLC#4, The Cube, and Atomic Heart 2 in parallel all this time and since summer, we haven't reached the next moment to
share new details yet. But it will take a few more years to craft something that is richer, even crazier and delivers a truly next-level experience, so stay tuned for more updates.
Do you plan to release Atomic Heart 2 or The Cube first?
As we hinted at the very end of DLC#4, The Cube will be released first. And we will start sharing more news about it soon - we are preparing something really mind-blowing.
How much did the team grow to accommodate these two new projects?
Compared to the small team in the beginning, we have grown significantly to accommodate our work on the DLCs, The Cube, and Atomic Heart 2, alongside our Mundfish Powerhouse activities. Today, we have a few hundred incredible talents in our worldwide development hubs, which is still a relatively compact team by modern industry standards. And that is exactly how we like it.
We have no desire to expand infinitely, as for us it is absolutely crucial to preserve our creative spirit and maintain direct communication between all departments. This is especially true for our new structure, which consists of several dedicated internal teams working on different projects in parallel. They constantly share information and technology with one another to maintain consistency across the projects. So, this way, we ensure that we stay agile, also allowing the teams to easily support each other with their tasks at any moment if needed.
The debate on AI tool usage in game development is raging across the industry. Where do you stand on this sensitive matter?
It’s true, there are a lot of differing opinions on this topic right now. We understand that neural networks and AI can significantly simplify the pre-production phase of projects, helping to iterate ideas faster and reduce overall development time. Because of this, we conducted extensive internal research to evaluate their potential for our workflows. However, at this moment, we have decided not to integrate them into our daily production pipelines.
We strongly believe in maintaining a balance between technology and human creativity. And despite the obvious advantages of AI, we are confident that our team can achieve massive success without relying on it daily. That being said, we continue to closely monitor the evolution of AI tech and don't rule out the possibility of adopting it in the future. Ultimately, we think many companies across the industry will implement it into their pipelines in one form or another. After all, AI is just a tool - it can never replace the genuine work of creative people, but should rather serve as an instrument in their hands.
On a similar note, the reveal of NVIDIA DLSS 5 was quite controversial. What do you think about the technology, and do you plan to support it in your games?
DLSS 5 is a very new and highly promising technology. As a studio that has always loved pushing graphical boundaries, we are currently closely monitoring its development. We will continue to carefully evaluate this and other major breakthroughs to see how such advancements could potentially benefit our players in the future.
Thank you for your time.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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