Atom Team released ATOM RPG: Plague Island and a major base-game update on October 15, as the studio marked its 10th anniversary. [1][2] We covered what the update asks of returning players on October 26. To find out more, we sent the studio written questions.
Alexander Chernyavskiy of Atom Team answered by email. Chernyavskiy describes a role covering public relations, writing, design and development, and spent five months this year on ATOM RPG 2 before moving back to the studio's older games. The biggest news is in the answer about player feedback: instead of starting the DLC it had planned next, the team is now expanding Plague Island.
The answers below are Chernyavskiy's own words. Our questions have been lightly edited for clarity.
Why go back to the original
North Line Gaming: What can you share about the DLC's premise and how it relates to the base game, without giving away spoilers?
Chernyavskiy: Plague's Island narrative and location in the world isn't anything crucial for the game as a whole, it's just a way to make our oldest game a bit bigger by adding a new region with new stuff which some players asked us to add for years. Thematically it expands on the Gwon-Jo, a merchant \ criminal faction from the base game. In Plague Island we get to explore one of their countless money-making schemes these thrifty guys got going, and learn that while they do exploit people for profit, they also care for them, at least enough to hire a free agent like you to help out a small settlement in need.
North Line Gaming: What brought you back to the original ATOM RPG for Plague Island? Was this a story you'd wanted to tell for a while?
Chernyavskiy: We didn't want to make Plague Island's story compete with the stories we already tell in the game, just widen the world a bit. As for why - the main reasons are our wish to return to the days of creating ATOM RPG. We have moved away from both the tools we used to use and even the prose style we wrote in, and for a change of pace and a breath of fresh air, we decided to return to them again. It was of course also influenced by the fact ATOM RPG is still being actively played with random spikes of up to 400 players online at the same time, and the fact our studio which owes its existence to ATOM RPG was turning 10. So, one thing lead to another, and we got the DLC going :)
Working in tight quarters
North Line Gaming: What did the island setting let you do that wouldn't have worked as well on the mainland? I'm curious about both the atmosphere and how you wanted players to explore it.
Chernyavskiy: We really enjoyed working in tight quarters. ATOM RPG's base map is huge and travel between points of interest takes time and sometimes fending off armies of random encounter enemies. Here, we could pepper the whole island with encounters and points of interest located closer to one another for a more saturated feel.
Talkers, explorers and two skippable bosses
A light spoiler warning: the next answer hints at a few of the island's story turns.
North Line Gaming: What kinds of decisions did you want the island to put in front of the player?
Chernyavskiy: We wanted to make the player's path through the DLC a bit subversive. An honourable character that turns out to be a coward who left his friends behind underground, two seeming professionals having a fling, one of the survivors in the pre-war bunker not being the psychologically regressed husk that she seems to be at first glance, a faction conflict that turns out to be nothing but a petty squabble between two immature people, stuff like that, all for the player to pry out and explore.
North Line Gaming: How much room is there to solve the island's problems through dialogue, skills or unusual character builds? Is there a quest you can discuss that shows how differently two players might approach the same situation?
Chernyavskiy: Like in all our games, we leave a lot of possibilities for different sorts of players. Talkers will find out more information, explorers can discover secret armory codes, people who enjoy playing with more subtle game mechanics can skip a whole two boss fights by hacking turrets or luring a boss monster into a trap. Skill checks allow to skip violence, most quests have different solutions, and of course we are as prepared as one can be for a player who just decides to gun everyone down!
Gasoline, combat and Special Armor
North Line Gaming: For someone returning to an old save, what would you suggest checking before they set off?
Chernyavskiy: I'd say bring weapons and gasoline. We made that new collection of maps pretty tough :) And gas will help you run that monster of an armor suit we finally added to the game!
North Line Gaming: What did you want the island's combat to ask of experienced players? Are there encounters designed to make a party rethink its usual tactics?
Chernyavskiy: While ATOM's combat system is pretty simple, we tried putting players in varied combat situations. You'll get to assault camps, fend off enemies from a well defended spot, gave more variety to enemy types: melee, long range, mid range, all mixed and matched to make combat interesting.
North Line Gaming: Special Armor is a big addition. How did you make it feel worth chasing without taking the tension out of the fights that follow?
Chernyavskiy: Tweaking combat is an arduous process, but for Plague Island we made it so after the point at which the player discovers their first Special Armor, the fights that follow this plot beat are those we tuned for players in Special Armor, meaning pretty tough. As for the rest of the game, we ran countless tests to make sure the Special Armour's addition doesn't take away from the biggest base game fights. And surprisingly, it didn't. Guess we had a passion for making tough battles back when we were making ATOM RPG…
The feedback that changed the plan
North Line Gaming: What feedback has been most useful or surprising? Has it changed any of your plans for the next update?
Chernyavskiy: Unfortunately, the biggest surprise was a bad one. Turned out, some players, presumably either very quick readers or those who just skip dialogues, found the DLC too short. It took our testers 3-4 times longer to get through the DLC, but they read every bit of dialogue to spellcheck it and such, so maybe that's why we have this discrepancy. This is why instead of working on the next DLC we planned, we are now fully working on expanding Plague Island with more fun things to do. While we do not agree that the DLC is short, we can do something about it seeming short to dialogue skipping players by making more general content for it, and that's just the thing we'll do in the next few weeks.
Where ATOM RPG 2 is heading
North Line Gaming: Looking toward the sequel, what can you share about where the series is heading? What should it carry forward from the original, and where would you like to see it take a bigger step?
Chernyavskiy: Since ATOM RPG 2 is quite the step away from its roots, being a 3rd-1st person real-time open-world game, we decided this summer to split the team in two: one part working on ATOM RPG 2, the other giving some love to our previous games, including new content, and maybe even a tactics spinoff or side-quel as they're sometimes called. We want to show our audience that even if one of our upcoming games is not a classic cRPG, it doesn't mean we decided to stop making those. We didn't and we won't
I was working on ATOM RPG 2 for 5 months this year, before deciding to get back to our older titles and give back to our cRPG loving players, and it was a long enough period to settle with the basics:
ATOM RPG 2 is going to be a new story of an unrelated character, based in the same world as ATOM RPG and eventually continuing the plot of Trudograd, though from an unexpected angle and with a new fish-outta-water perspective. You will meet familiar characters, hear familiar names and references to familiar stories, but the region, most factions, and most of the plot will be a new tale based around the Caspian Sea region.
Mechanically, the basics of the RPG system, dialogue interactions and I'd say humor and style will be closely related to its predecessors.
Playable demo: Neither ATOM RPG nor its Plague Island DLC currently lists a demo on Steam. [1][3]
Sources and reporting
- ATOM RPG - Plague Island — AtomTeam / Steam. Published or updated: date not listed. Supports: October 15, 2026 release, DLC status, supported platforms and no listed demo.
- Plague Island DLC is OUT! V.1.2.1 Finalized — AtomTeam / Steam. Published or updated: October 15, 2026. Supports: Plague Island DLC and base-game update 1.2.1 release.
- ATOM RPG: Post-apocalyptic indie game — AtomTeam / Steam. Published or updated: date not listed. Supports: Base game listing and no listed demo.
- Written answers to North Line Gaming’s questions — Alexander Chernyavskiy, Atom Team / ATENT GAMES, by email. Published or updated: October 26, 2026. Supports: All developer answers and statements in this interview; Chernyavskiy’s role from an October 23 email.
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