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I’ve been thinking about The Blood of Dawnwalker ever since I had the opportunity to play it several weeks ago. From the early hours I experienced, it’s delivering expertly on the promise of a true branching-path RPG, one where your choices have significant consequences on both protagonist Coen and the wider world around him. During my preview, I had the opportunity to ask Game Director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, Environment Artist Adam Payet, and Coen’s Voice Actor Will de Renzy-Martin about player freedom, how your adventure can evolve, and the prospect of launching into such a busy fall schedule.
Tomaszkiewicz previously directed both The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, and is one of several members of Rebel Wolves who moved over from CD Projekt Red. That heritage is immediately apparent running through The Blood of Dawnwalker, and comparisons to The Witcher in particular are inevitable. “I believe that people create the games, not their companies,” he tells me. “I’m really proud that our game is compared to the things we created before.
“To be honest, it wouldn’t be possible to create this game without the know-how and experience we gathered creating those games,” he remarks. “We are proud of being compared to one of the best RPGs out there, which was like a milestone for the industry.” With Dawnwalker and its planned sequels, Rebel Wolves hopes “to create something which will be remembered,” Tomaskiewicz says. “When you are 20 years older, you will remember the particular feeling you have right now. We started from that point, and we tried to create our own branch of the genre.”
While Dawnwalker’s Vrakhir are fundamentally vampires, they’re an intentionally unique creation for this world, one that Tomaszkiewicz explains is a fusion of werewolves and vampires, hence the day/night dynamic. “Coen, as a young man, was working in the silver lines – he has silver dust in his lungs, so the change into a vampire cannot be completed.” With that concept established, Rebel Wolves began building around the cycle of days. “When we started thinking about these loops, we knew it would be cool to have some stake in the game – and we added the 30 days and 30 nights.”
You can continue to take on tasks in the world once that time runs out and the main goal of rescuing your family is put to rest, but you won’t be able to see everything, or unlock the entirety of Coen’s skill tree. That’s true even during the prologue, but once you set out into the world proper, beyond some initial leads to get you started, you’re given total freedom. Tomaszkiewicz says the team tried not to assume anything about how players will progress, or whether they’ll choose to embrace Coen’s vampire or human side more.
“I don’t expect anything. I expect that players will choose what they like,” he remarks. “It’s a different philosophy of making games, that you create the content, but it’s not expected that the player will play the content; they can, but don’t need to, and giving this freedom is putting into the hands of the players their way of shaping the character and their own experience through the game. I think that this is very important.”
“On the one hand, of course, you need to accept that people will not see everything we created in the one play through – that’s for sure,” Tomaskiewicz continues. “But on the other hand, it gives a lot of possibilities; a lot of replayability potential; a lot of conversations between the players, what they saw, how they played, and so on. We cannot wait to read and see what people will do in our game.”
Payet adds that he’s enjoyed watching players at the hands-on previews. “You get everything from people going completely naked with fists, fighting everything, seeing how much they can squeeze out of the combat system and how good they can get. Then you’ve got people who focus as much as they can on the story and avoid combat at all costs. I’ve even seen people who spend a significant amount of time, as soon as they get control, just opening the glossary and reading it back to back.” Had I not been keenly aware of my tight schedule, I probably would have been doing that last one myself.
“The really interesting thing is I think that people will feel very differently about Coen depending on how they play the game,” Renzy-Martin says. “They will experience a very different world when they play through the game and make their choices, make their mistakes that they have to live with. It’s going to be very different for each person playing.” He notes that Rebel Wolves staff were on hand to help him navigate this non-linearity and provide context where needed: “It was great to be working with a team who did really know their stuff, and were on the calls and ready to answer questions.”
Renzy-Martin tells me he was given the freedom beyond the initial setup to shape Coen, who has been thrust into a bizarre duality between forms. “When he’s Vrakhir, he’s got that power that he can draw from, that slight monstrosity and ferociousness, but that’s really just a vehicle for where he is. He can feel fear as a Vrakhir, but it might come out as aggression; but when he’s a human, that fear comes out – he’s more likely to run and hide.”
Coen is very much a character thrust into the limelight against his will. “He’s a nobody in this world,” Renzy-Martin remarks, “there’s no reason why this stuff should happen to him, and yet it does. The result is someone “not necessarily equipped to deal with a world that is much bigger, and much scarier, and full of stuff that they’ve not even imagined.”
By presenting you with just a single main quest and making everything else optional, The Blood of Dawnwalker evokes The Witcher 3’s beautifully integrated side quests on a grander scale. In order to preserve that, Rebel Wolves won’t just point you at all the cool stuff. “It’s not obvious, and sometimes smaller things are more important than bigger ones,” Tomaszkiewicz muses. “We try to mix those things, to not give you the recipe for a playthrough, but just give you toys.”
“There are definitely situations that are sort of, ‘A quick adventure, in and out, five minutes,’ and then five hours later, ‘Oh my god, I did not see that little thing that I started unfolding into this whole story,'” Payet teases. “There’s definitely lots of that.”
Of all the ways The Blood of Dawnwalker looks to elevate itself in the space, its combat is one that immediately got its claws under my skin. At its heart is a directional system of attacks and blocks that rewards you for responding accurately to what your opponents are doing. If you aren’t as action-minded, however, Rebel Wolves provides the ability to block ‘neutrally’ and ensure you’ll still stop enemy hits from landing, albeit at the cost of more stamina.
“I think, rather than a concession to players who are not as mechanically inclined, it’s a reward for those who are,” Payet explains. “The baseline is the omni-attack and omni-block, and if you choose to engage with the more advanced system, there are rewards there, rather than punishments for not doing it.”
Tomaszkiewicz recommends everyone give the directional combat a try. “In the end it’s like Guitar Hero – in the beginning you have problems hitting the buttons, and after some time you’re playing really difficult songs. If you learn that, the action is a lot better – it’s not like in other games where you’re just pressing two buttons and watching cool animations, you are really there, because you’re observing the opponents. You can turn off the indicators and observe animations, and it’s you who’s defeating them, not just the system.”
The prevailing emotion I sense from Tomaszkiewicz and his team at the preview is one of pride. “I believe we’ve created something really unique, which gives you different emotions from RPGs that were created so far, and with this nice sandbox, which previously was used in the first Fallout games from the ’90s, which gives you a lot of freedom and totally different feelings.”
He compares the vibe to pen-and-paper RPGs. “Whatever you are doing, we adjust and allow you to finish the game in many, many ways with different endings and different states of the world – that was the idea to create our own identity, our own brand.”
The Blood of Dawnwalker arrives on Monday September 3, putting it right at the start of what’s become an extremely busy period on the calendar for big releases. Rebel Wolves is resigned to that challenge, but believes the game has what it takes to cut through. “We cannot do anything about it,” Tomaszkiewicz replies, “and if you move for the beginning of next year, other games can land there, or some games – big ones – can move again. You don’t have control over it.”
“I think that our genre is quite unique, you know? There are a lot of people who are waiting for good open-world RPG games, and there are not these kinds of games this year. I think that the game is good, and it will defend itself.” It’s certainly sitting at the top of my priority list, and if you’re a vampire enthusiast, RPG lover, or a fan of the developers’ previous projects, it should probably be high on yours as well.