The Blood Of Dawnwalker hands-on and interview – ‘for me it’s a piece of art’

GameCentral gets to preview four hours of the new game from the co-director of The Witcher 3, in an entirely new game world filled with vampires and monsters.

It’s curious that whenever a group of people leave a developer, after having worked on a famously successful game, nine times out of 10 they end up working on something that is very similar. From the various attempts by ex-BioWare staff to make a spiritual successor to Mass Effect, to the seemingly endless parade of people who claim to be the co-creator of Halo, it’s very rare that anyone wants to leave simply because they’d like to work on something different.

Of course, being in charge of your own destiny, and your own IP, is a huge motivation, but there’s no getting away from it, The Blood Of Dawnwalker is a lot like The Witcher 3. That’s because Konrad Tomaszkiewicz was co-director on the game, before he left CD Projekt Red and formed new studio Rebel Wolves. But while some other Witcher veterans followed with him, the majority of the developers have no direct involvement with The Witcher.

Nevertheless, it’s hard not to think of the series when playing The Blood Of Dawnwalker, which has a very similar fantasy setting and open world structure – even the hero, Coen, looks reminiscent of Geralt of Rivia. At the same time though it does acknowledge some of the flaws of The Witcher 3, most obviously the combat, and tries to add unique features of its own.

The Blood Of Dawnwalker is set in an entirely original game world, that’s not based on any existing IP. It’s not even based on mythology or set in Rebel Wolves native Poland. Although the 14th century southeast European locale is vague enough that it could be anywhere, even if most of the character names will be unfamiliar to British players.

We played four hours from the very start of the game, which doesn’t spell out a lot of what’s going on but gradually paints the picture of a community being terrorised by vampiric creatures called vrakhiri. But rather than just picking on random households whenever they fancy a drink, they’ve created their own feudal society, where humans donate a pint of blood every week and then drink vrakhiri blood, that has the ability to cure most illness (but doesn’t turn you into a vampire).

Nevertheless, your mother is ill with an unidentified malaise and there’s vague talk of a plague sweeping the area, as the ruling vrakhiri use human soldiers to keep the peace, along with horned goat people, that we didn’t catch the name of but are another sapient species. The game world is filled with monsters and supernatural elements, but much like The Witcher the everyday life of humans is implied to be much as it would’ve been in the real 14th century. If it weren’t for all the damn vampires, anyway.

You play as Coen, who after a few hours of gameplay is not only turned into a vrakhiri but also makes friends with a witch who teaches him how to use magic. As the game’s name implies, something goes wrong with Coen’s transformation (because of all the silver in his lungs, from working the mines) and while he transforms into a vrakhiri at night he turns back into a human during the day, which apparently isn’t how it usually works.

There is no automatic day/night cycle though and time only moves forwards, in clearly indicated segments, every time you complete a quest or story moment. The story has a limit of 30 days and 30 nights, after which the head vampire completes his coronation and your kidnapped family are sacrificed. This means you can run around for hours doing busywork but once you do something more significant the clock ticks forward.

Although there’s a lot of combat in Dawnwalker there’s also a lot of interactive dialogue and almost Telltale Games style decision making. Sometimes this is trivial, like taking an offered drink and your dad smelling it on your breath, and sometimes it’s more vital. The first day builds up to Sunday mass, when the vrakhiri arrive in church to collect their blood, and as the day slips through your fingers the tension builds up nicely.

The only vital goal beforehand is to get medicine for your mother, so she’s not dismissed as infirm during mass, but if you’re not paying attention to how it should be prepared a mistake will later lead to her being killed. There’s also a number of side quests you can pick up, with one involving a woman that had been tasked with weaving a banner for the vrakhiri. It’s stolen and she asks you to find it, but we never did (you can track footprints but we lost the trail) and so when we got to the church she’d been strung up from the rafters.

Once you’re transformed into your quasi-vampiric form you gain the ability to teleport short distances and use your claws as weapons. We also assume there’ll be offensive and defensive magic, but in the initial hours it’s used for more story-orientated abilities, like interrogating recently created corpses. The teleport power is neat and you also have the ability to walk on certain walls, which is slightly janky in the build we played but still interesting and useful.

You can also fight with a sword, and no doubt other weapons, as a human but the controls are not quite like anything else, as attack and defence is controlled by the bumper buttons, LB and RB, and you also have to push a direction to determine exactly how your blow is aimed. Or at least you have to do so to block successfully (with the enemy’s direction of attack indicated by an on-screen indicator). You can just jab the RB button to attack in a random direction but clearly the game is hoping you’ll put in more effort than that.

After leaving the village, the game opens up to reveal its open world, filled with optional side quests that can be tackled by day or night – with the former offering more opportunities to talk to people and figure out non-violent solutions to at least some of the situations. That’s all good stuff, and there’s a nice variety of combat and dialogue-orientated obstacles, but it’s surprising how closely the game sticks to the Ubisoft formula, even to the point where it has towers you have to climb to fill in more icons on your map.

There’s no getting away from the fact that The Blood Of Dawnwalker feels very last gen, if not older, in terms of both gameplay and graphics. There’s nothing wrong with that and apart from some rather skittish movement controls the whole game looks and plays well, but it also looks and plays a lot like many other games from the last decade, and not just The Witcher 3.

We enjoyed our time with the game, but we have to admit we were more impressed talking to director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz and environment artist Adam Payet afterwards. Tomaszkiewicz spoke with passion about the project, and gaming in general, which gave us confidence that the game’s more generic or clunky elements might be evened out by the overall experience, which is set to clock in at a substantial minimum of 50 hours.

It’s always good to see a new developer and a new IP, and even if The Blood Of Dawnwalker still seems rather familiar it’s got enough unique ideas, and a good enough pedigree, that it automatically becomes one of this autumn’s most anticipated games.

Formats: PC (previewed), PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S
Price: £59.99
Publisher: Bandai Namco
Developer: Rebel Wolves
Release Date: 3rd September 2026
Age Rating: 18

GC: So, are both you guys ex-CD Projekt?

KT: No, I am the ex-CD Projekt…

AP: And I’m the fresh blood in Blood Of Dawnwalker [laughs]

GC: What about the rest of the team, are the majority of you former CD Projekt?

KT: It depends on the stage. In the beginning, all of us, but later, when we started to recruit, it changed. Right now, when we have 160 people, I assume it’s around 20, 25 people, maybe.

GC: How did all this come about? Were you working on The Witcher 3 and thinking there were things you wanted to do, or do differently, and you realised that would require setting up your own studio? Or did you set up the studio first and only then think about what you wanted to do?

KT: The process was a little different, because I felt like I wanted to do something which in 10 or 15 or 20 years people will remember. And I started to think what would be the best approach to do that. And I felt that the best approach would be to try to build on the know-how I have, and my colleagues have. But to try to create our own branch in this open world RPG genre, and we tried to deliver something really fresh.

And I started to think about the protagonist, because we are doing storytelling games and when you’re doing storytelling games, or story driven games, let’s say, then the approach to production is slightly different than the other games, because many games we first create the world, the gameplay, and so on. And then think about the story later.

When we work, and how we work from the beginning of our experience in the industry, we first create the story. And when the story is good, this is our foundation to create the gameplay features, to create the world and so on and so on. Story’s first and this is the foundation. And when you’re working this way, you need to be careful because when you want to change the story later, you change everything. And this is a tricky thing.

In the beginning I start to think about the protagonist, because it was really important for me to create some protagonist which will be unique. And there was the movies and books, the games, about the vampires before. There was the books and the movies about the werewolves, about the different creatures. And I wanted to have some unique character. And I thought, okay, what would happen if we will take, let’s say the werewolf but who is a vampire – like human at the day and vampire at the night. And we thought that was an interesting idea, also risky one because it’s costly. Because when you decide to do that, you need to create two gameplay loops, which are almost two games in one.

And we thought, okay, if we have the guy who works as a young guy in the silver mine, and he has the silver dust in his lungs, the silver stops the change. And in this way we created the Dawnwalker. When we had the Dawnwalker we start to think, okay, when we have the human and the vampire, then those looks needs to be different. We start to think about the combat, about how to create different choices and different ways to complete the quest, and the day and the night. And step by step it grows to what you experienced today.

GC: And this is an entirely original IP? It’s not based on a book or anything?

KT: No, it’s totally original IP.

GC: Is it based on folklore? I hadn’t heard that word for the vampires before.

KT: No, it’s something totally original. I mean, Jakub Szamałek, who is our main writer, he has huge creative power and he created this lore by himself, and with his team, and the vrakhiri, which are the vampires in our world, they work differently. They look different; they have a lot of fangs in their mouths and when he wants to change the victim into the vampire he takes off the fang and puts it into the heart. And there is a lot, lot more interesting lore behind it. And it’s really worth to explore this lore, while playing the game, because it’s connected not only with this particular game and the creatures you’ll meet, but also with the future games we will deliver.

GC: Future games?

KT: Yes.

GC: What interested me with your intro this morning is that you said you were founded in 2022 and yet now it’s 2026 and you have a game out in early September. That’s a very quick turnaround. Was ensuring the game didn’t turn into some seven year long trawl one of your goals before you started? I assume that’s not an accident.

KT: It’s not accident, no. We just know how to do these kind of games and we love the open world RPGs, and we know how to progress with it. And there’s a lot of things which lead to this efficient production. And the one of them is what I meant before, that when you create some story, you cannot change this story. Because you lose time and you change everything, and the product you play today is the product we create as a vertical slice to show the potential investors when we tried to secure the budget for the game.

The idea for The Dawnwalker, the idea for those loops and so on, it was created from the beginning, from the first presentation we showed to the investors. I think that you need to be really… not only consistent but also consequent when you’re doing production to iterate stuff and make it better, but don’t delete stuff which is already made because this makes those delays. It’s possible to create games like this, but you need to be really careful and you need to think about every decision this way.

GC: Do you look at the industry today and see a lot of mistakes being made, in your opinion? Because development taking too long is far from the only issue.

KT: Yeah, for sure. For sure. There are a lot of mistakes. I can talk about a few, but there is a lot more. But it’s always difficult, because people have different ways of working and different ways of creating the vision for the game. From my perspective – and that was also the core decision when we start to work – was that we don’t want to create oversized games. Because sometime ago, when you wanted to go to the market and make the interest around the game you were always showing that it’s bigger, better, and so on.

And I think that’s a one way alley, because big games needed big teams; big teams are problematic in many ways. It’s hard to communicate and they had too many people working on the same things and there are too many areas which overlapped and create the problems later.

Game development is really hard because every department impacts other departments. Like for example, Adam working in the environmental team. His team can impact into the boss fights, with the arenas, and they impact into the dialogues which are set up on the location. They can impact into the cut scenes and if they change the landscape the wrong way they will impact into the quest which are implemented there. And, let’s say, the encounters with monsters or the animals you have in the game.

And this is only five examples, there are more of them and every department has these connections. And if you imagine that there are video games created by 5,000 people, there are so many of those interactions that it’s impossible, almost, to manage these amount of people. And that’s not to mention the amount of managers you need to have. This is the first thing.

The second thing is when you have a huge game it’s really hard to test this game, because you need an army of testers who will play all the time. And when you play the game, there are still bugs you need to fix. The amount of time you need to test it, it’s also big, which prolongs the creation of the game. In bigger games, there are so many bugs that even big teams have problems to fix them. And what is important, is that when you fix one bug you can create another three, because you are not aware that something else is here.

But when you have a company of our size, it’s easier to communicate, it’s easier to speak, it’s easier to learn from each other. Today I am working with people, fixing bugs, implementing requests or creating the bosses and I’m working with guys and explaining and showing stuff. It’s a totally different way of communicating when you compare it to 5,000 people, or even 500 people, when you are.

GC: I know when I started to see teams get bigger and bigger and more and more I was talking to managers rather than developers… it all seemed so unhealthy. Where does the artistry come in?

KT: Exactly, exactly.

GC: I was no longer talking to the people that make the games but the people that tell other people to make the games.

AP: So interestingly, I can speak to that, because that’s also something you’ve mentioned in other interviews, how the way you art direct, or just direct the game, you don’t tell people what needs doing, just what you need to achieve. And I think it’s extremely special that, for me being an environment artist and in terms of seniority on the team, I’m the youngest in seniority. I’m a regular environment artist – so a step up of junior – and I had quests where I worked directly, one-on-one with Konrad on directly implementing something.

In bigger studios, I don’t think people even meet the game director, let alone work with them directly, exchanging messages, jumping in calls to sort out a particular quest, a particular area.

And that approach of him saying, ‘This is what I want to achieve, go achieve it’ is so much better than some people I’ve worked with in the past, when they told me specifically, ‘Do this’ and I did this, and it didn’t work because what they thought a particular art and environment was gonna achieve wasn’t it. They wanted a particular emotional beat or something, and they told me how to realise it. I did it, but it didn’t work because…

GC: Because they had something else in mind, in their own head.

AP: Yeah, exactly. So working that way, with people who have so much experience, it’s much easier to bleed that experience into the team, to learn how to approach those things and how to do them, rather than having 10 layers of management and never speaking to the person who’s actually directing the whole thing.

GC: Where did the 30 days and nights idea come from? Was that an attempt to reduce bloat or at least constrain the game enough that ordinary people would have enough time to complete it? Because, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, it’s a very busy autumn for new releases…

KT: Ah, that wasn’t the reason we did it.

GC: Oh, okay! [laughs]

KT: [laughs] The reason was to create a sense of urgency and…

GC: Because you’re a big Majora’s Mask fan?

KT: [laughs] no, it’s… the game is really long to be honest, because the 30 days and 30 nights sounds easy but in the end the average time of play when observing it right now is between 50 to 70 hours. Which means that it’s not like you think.

GC: So I haven’t nearly beaten it today?

All: [laughs]

AP: You have the option to beat it at any point. You don’t have to go out experience the entire world.

GC: Oh yes, they said you could just advance time to the end and let everyone die straight away. That’s actually quite neat.

AP: Say you have a weekend and let’s say you’re hardcore and you have 20 hours of game-playing a weekend, you can squeeze the whole game in that, you just won’t see all of it.

KT: Yeah, but to answer the question on the real reason was to create the stakes, the goal, which is real. You have time and it’s not like in other games that you have to rescue this person, and you can do whatever you want, and it’s waiting for you, all the time. You don’t feel this sense of urgency. The immersion is broke and you are not in this particular world then, because you are just an observer.

We are making video games and for me it’s a piece of art, to create the consistent experience which will pull you in and you will remember it after all those years. And you feel something really unique. That was the point of why we did it.

GC: Just to finish, I enjoyed the combat but that is fighting against decades of muscle memory. I was constantly pressing the wrong button, and I know other journos here were too. Were you not worried that people are going to be exasperated by it all?

KT: Of course I was! [laughs] I was worried that people will hate the time system. I was worried that people will hate the combat; there was many worries. And in the beginning, I was worried because I paid for nine months of development from my own pocket and I could go bankrupt. There was a lot of risks, but I think that this is the part of the adventure and this is the fun, to take a risk and see if people will like it. And I hope you like it, this new combat.

I feel that that we as players deserve a game like what we saw in the 90s, where every game that was released was different. Like, when you’re thinking about Stonekeep, when you’re thinking about Eye Of The Beholder, when you think about Ultima 7 or Baldur’s Gate. Those games were RPGs, but with different RPGs they deliver different experiences and give you the different learning curve and different systems. And that was fun because every game was a different adventure.

GC: You’re preaching to the choir there. I always want something different; it’s my number one priority. And I miss the days where playing a game meant learning a new skill.

AP: Making new muscle memories, right?

GC: Exactly! Well, thanks a lot for your time and good luck with it all.

TK: Thank you!

AP: Thanks!

Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter.

To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here.

For more stories like this, check our Gaming page.

Comments


Add as preferred source