Ambitions are clearly quite high with The Blood of Dawnwalker, a grim, gothic upcoming RPG from fledgling studio Rebel Wolves. But despite the team boasting talent from CD Projekt Red who helped ship The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, their aspirations are more contained, focusing on creating a distinct, dense experience rather than competing directly with other games when it comes to their RPG's size.
"We were very much aware of the fact that we can't and we don't want to challenge other projects or companies in terms of the vastness of the world," Rafał Jankowski, lead quest designer on The Blood of Dawnwalker, tells GamesRadar+. "[Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, game director and CEO] wanted to keep it smaller. So from the very start, the idea was to make a smaller but dense – deep – world, and focus on the player's agency and the player's freedom, offer them many different choices with high stakes."
Indeed, the central choice of the historic tale, set in the 14th century, is a perfect example: do you help your vampire kin take over, or work against them on behalf of humanity? As a half-human, half-vampire, the protagonist Coen walks a thin line, and eventually he'll have to decide where he stands. There's a large emphasis on open-ended storytelling, encouraging you to approach quests how you see fit, broadening the spectrum of design choices available.
"This goal, this simple goal, the idea to just put it up there in the world, available for the player no matter what happens on his path towards achieving this goal. This was what allowed us to really double down on choice and consequence elements of the game, non-linearities," Jankowski, who was a quest designer on The Witcher 3's Blood and Wine expansion at CD Projekt, continues. "This is what allowed us to make NPCs killable."
He credits it all to the scaling early on, and given the current precariousness of the industry, Rebel Wolves CEO Tomaszkiewicz, who was game director on The Witcher 3 and second director and head of production on Cyberpunk 2077, definitely seemed to have the right idea in more ways than one. "Being smart at the very beginning of the project, starting with this strong foundation for the very open structure, was a good move that allowed us to offer our players a lot of freedom," Jankowski adds.
You can see which side of the fence you prefer when The Blood of Dawnwalker arrives on September 3.
