The Blood of Dawnwalker is, if done well, a game that might not land with everybody. For one, there’s the lack of a traditional main story quest, and then there’s the fact that you only have 30 in-game days and nights to beat it. Neither are necessarily massively novel, the brilliant Unsighted, for example, also forces a timer upon you, but this is still a notable AAA game taking a risk. This thing likely won’t have been cheap to make, and crafting a scenario where not everyone is going to experience the entirety of what it offers, on purpose, is certainly a touch bold at the very least. So it’s a good thing its director is happy with people missing things.
Speaking to PCGamesN, director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz explained that “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.” For Tomaskiewicz, the other side of this is that “it gives a lot of possibilities,” and allows for “a lot of conversations between the players, what they saw, how they played, and so on.” That’s something that I certainly miss from being terminally online; a sense of delight in the discoveries I didn’t make that friends share with me.
With all of this in mind, Tomaskiewicz isn’t expecting people to go one way or the other with protagonist Coen, saying that the team tried not to make assumptions about how people will play, and that he expects that people “will choose what they like. 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.”
As part of the same interview, Coen’s voice actor Will de Renzy-Martin also made a point of how the character might be received differently depending on how people play him. “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,” he said. “It’s going to be very different for each person playing.”
The Blood of Dawnwalker is currently planned for release on September 3rd.
