Blood. Blood. Bloooooooooddddddd. Sorry, I’ve just watched Rebel Wolves show off the first look we’ve gotten at someone playing vampire RPG The Blood of Dawnwalker, and I think it’s rubbed off on me a bit.
To be fair, you can’t blame the group of ex-Witcher 3 devs for having put together a game that looks to use the B word more often than someone who’s just gotten a nasty paper cut while handling some packets of the red stuff at a blood bank.
During a livestream this weekend just gone – June 21 to be exact – the devs delivered about 21 minutes of design director Daniel Sadowski demoing a “work-in-progress” pre-beta build of The Blood of Dawnwalker. He spent most of that time showing off a mid-game quest in the game’s biggest city, Svartrau, which boasts four boroughs. Also, in true medieval European fashion, it’s got a castle so big that even William the Conqueror would say ‘phwoar’.
Rescuing your family from that fortress, dubbed Griefberg and currently ruled by a powerful vampire called Brencis, is the key to the game’s main quest. You’ll need to recruit help or find ways to make it easier to storm, while a timer ticking down in days next to the objective, showing you how long you’ve got left to plan before it’s too late.
As for the quest Sadowski was showing off here, the main point of emphasis was the game’s calling card – a day/night cycle that changes gameplay, with Coen’s half-human/half-vampire nature making missions play differently depending on the time of day. For example, if you’ve got to get into a cathedral to look for clues, you might waltz in and meet a priest during the day, while at night, you’ll have to use your sneaky vampire roof jumpy powers to break in and find spooky people up to no good.
I’m interested to see which I’ll prefer when I get my hands on the game, but Sadowski was keen to emphasise that the choice and consequence goes beyond just having two options for each mission, with various paths depending on what you do and how exactly you opt to approach the scenarios the game lobs your way. One thing I am pretty sure of is that I’ll be pretty bad at Dawnwalker’s Kingdom Come Deliverance 2-ish sword combat at first, given fiddly directional attacking and blocking tends to really expose my unfortunate inability to press parry exactly on cue.
The demo ended with Coen getting into a boss battle with an elderly vampire called Xanthe and her blood guards, and towards the end of it, he just goes pop. No, seriously, Xanthe has a skill called boiling blood, and if you don’t beat her quickly enough, Coen gets blood explosioned. As in, he explodes into a big splatter of blood. Clean up on aisle seven.
The Blood of Dawnwalker’s still on for a 2026 release, so you’ve got a bit of time to mentally prepare to face the Dracula version of being Thanos snapped.
