Blood of Dawnwalker instantly became one of my most anticipated games after four hours of play

The Blood of Dawnwalker doesn’t feel like the first game from a new studio. There’s a level of experience in the bones of this game that is evident from the opening moments. While its developer’s pedigree is unimpeachable, ‘the new thing from the guys who made the amazing thing’ is rarely as impressive as this.

So, in an industry where hits are harder and harder to come by, and developers of all sizes are feeling the financial pressure, why did Rebel Wolves founder and game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz decide to start with such a massive project?

“From my perspective, I don’t know how to do others,” he grins.

“Really… it’s like when you work right now for over 20 years doing the triple-A RPGs, like with open world and so on, so on, you know how to do these particular games. And from my perspective, I love the RPGs. RPG is the most important genre for me.

“I started to adventure with the RPGs from the pen and paper…After that, I was lucky to get into the industry to start to work at CD Projekt on the RPG games, and to be honest, I don’t want to do other games because this is what is in my heart and this is what I love to do.”

Those RPGs he previously worked on? The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Cyberpunk 2077. The Blood of Dawnwalker comes from the strongest of RPG stock.

The Blood of Dawnwalker follows Coen, a young man afflicted with a vampiric curse. His village, buried deep in the Carpathian Mountains, is subservient to a clan of vampires that requires one pint of blood as a tax on the remaining human population.

From what I got to play, Coen seems like a compelling character, though there will also be RPG fans asking why they can’t create their own half-human, half-vampire to play as.

“It’s really hard to tell the story when you just create your character,” Tomaszkiewicz told me.

“You need to create a story which is quite open, and in the beginning, we prefer to tell the stories which are more connected with the character, and I believe that this way you can create better emotions and connections.”

If you didn’t know that Rebel Wolves was made up of CD Projekt veterans before you played The Blood of Dawnwalker, you would after only a few minutes. However, where the game impressed me is in just how quickly it answered some of my issues with The Witcher series.

Firstly, the game’s combat. While it retains Geralt’s love of swordplay, things are more complex here. Players have an omni-block, which shows the angle at which the enemy is about to attack. If the player times their block correctly and picks the correct position, they’ll parry. There are only four directions, but things get complicated quickly. While a perfect parry won’t take stamina, chaining those together when multiple enemies are attacking from all angles is tense.

The Blood of Dawnwalker quest system and branching paths are also impressive. Players only have a set amount of time every in-game day in order to complete their tasks. This timer moves when missions are completed, and before you take on a mission, it’ll let you know how much of your day it will take up.

That means that, inevitably, there will be quests and content that you will never get to see, unless you play the game again. I asked Tomaszkiewicz and the game’s environment artist Adam Payet how they reconcile so much hard work on content that players may never see.

“It’s really exciting for us,” said Tomaszkiewicz.

“We’re thinking about the game and doing it with a different purpose. We want to see those conversations between the people. We want to see those YouTube videos and read about how different the playthroughs were for different people, and show them that it’s worth playing the game again and again to discover some new cool stuff.

“When we spoke about the game, our goal was to create, you know, the game which of course would be the piece of art, but also a game that in 10 or 15 or 20 years from now will be remembered as something special.

“When I think about the past, I have the games which you made some impact on me, and we hope that we will be able to create something like this for other people.”

Payet told me that while he was initially hesitant about the potential of fans missing out on something he’d spent so much time on, his love for the work of Hidetaka Miyazaki changed his perspective.

“In the beginning, I had that little bit of… not being upset, but being anxious that I’m building all those cool things that I really love and that people might not see it unless they do a specific set of objectives.

“Then I started thinking about the games that I absolutely love. I’m a huge fan of FromSoftware games, so all of the Souls games, and their DNA is basically: “We’re building a game. If you don’t find the things we’ve built, fine, this is how you’ve played the game. But when you do find them, the discovery is that much sweeter.”

“That’s how I chose to start thinking about it, that what I’m building is gonna be that much more fun for people to find if they do make the right decisions. So I think it’s just a matter of perspective: it’s not that somebody’s gonna miss it, it’s that somebody’s gonna find it and it’s gonna be very unique for them and very memorable. So that almost motivates me to go the extra mile on those things that I know might be harder to find because it’s that much more of a reward when somebody does find it.”

It was impressive to look around at the screens of the others in my demo session and see cutscenes and characters that I’d totally missed. Pivotal scenes that I’d assumed were a chokepoint for the story, playing out totally differently to how I experienced it.

I confess to being someone who rarely has the time to actually play through a game of this length multiple times, but the scale of the divergent paths might just tempt me.

When I was let out into the open world, while I was impressed by the vista stretching far beyond me into the distance, I wasn’t utterly daunted by the idea of exploring it. According to Rebel Wolves, the game’s world is around the same size as Horizon: Zero Dawn. So it’s large, but not absolutely massive.

But for Payet, the size of the map is far less important than making sure it’s an adequate stage for the game the team is trying to build.

“We look at it like: how much room does any particular story need to play out correctly? And we build the environment to that story so that there isn’t too much space between things so that the world feels alive, feels confident, and it feels that wherever you go, there’s something to do that meaningfully impacts the main story.”

I asked if he felt there was an arms race or obsession with larger and larger spaces in open-world games.

“I don’t know if there is an obsession; maybe I don’t participate in the discourse enough. Maybe that’s on me,(laughs), but I think there’s just people who enjoy it.

“Both me and my wife play a lot of games, and she experiences games completely differently. So when we’d be playing Red Dead Redemption 2, for example, a famously huge, beautiful map, I’d be more focused on the gunfights, the heists, and all that and she’d be out for days in the wilderness just, you know, traversing and experiencing the world.

“Crimson Desert is, I think, one of the record-breaking maps in terms of size of recent times. Because there are people who absolutely love it and they’ll lose themselves in the world, and then there are people who prefer smaller worlds where the story pans out over, you know, 10, 20, 30, 50 hours.

“I think there’s room for all of these, and if there is a lot of discourse about those games being advertised with the size of the map, then I’m guessing there must be enough people who want this from a game. So I think it’s a matter of preference. I don’t think one is necessarily better than the other. They’re just different experiences.”

After four hours with The Blood of Dawnwalker, it’s instantly shot up the list of my most anticipated titles for the rest of the year. It is, of course, releasing in September alongside every other piece of software not named GTA 6.

For Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, he’s not worried.

“To be honest, I’m really confident, and I’m not worried about this September. Game dev is hard, and it’s really hard to choose the proper date. Something can move to the month you want to release the game. There are big games which have huge budgets, and to be honest, there is no good time. I think that you just need to create a good game, and the game needs to defend itself.”

“I feel good about this September.”

It’s easy to see why.