Just How Choice-Driven Is The Blood Of Dawnwalker?
Platform:
PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC
Publisher:
Bandai Namco
Developer:
Rebel Wolves
Release:
Rating:
Mature
For this Game Informer issue cover story, we traveled to Warsaw, Poland, to visit Rebel Wolves, a studio co-founded by The Witcher 3 director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, to learn all about the company’s debut game, The Blood of Dawnwalker. During the trip, we spent plenty of time drilling into how the team is capitalizing on the choice-driven style of gameplay that various members of the studio delivered with masterpieces like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Cyberpunk 2077. As it turns out, Rebel Wolves may be taking the concept of player choice even further than those landmark games.
For Tomaszkiewicz, after leaving CD Projekt Red following the release of Cyberpunk 2077 and founding Rebel Wolves in 2021, he knew exactly the type of game he wanted to make. As a fan of vampire media like Dracula, True Blood, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, and Legacy of Kain, Tomaszkiewicz saw an opportunity to capitalize on the immortality facet of the bloodsuckers and tell a saga that could expand over the course of different time periods. However, he also knew that player choice needed to be a massive part of whatever he and his new team at Rebel Wolves did.
In examining his previous work, Tomaszkiewicz realized how integral into the overall experience and impactful seemingly optional content ended up being for players. The Witcher 3 masterfully folded sidequests into the main storyline, allowing players to chart their own path through an overarching narrative. Fast forwarding 11 years from the release of The Witcher 3, Tomaszkiewicz wanted to take that concept to the next level.
“We felt in the past that the sidequests are more rewarding and better than the main quest,” he says. “When we talked about it, we decided that we want to step in another direction with our game, and we want to create the structure of it differently. We don’t have the main story, which is quest after quest leading us to the end; we created it differently. We call it narrative samples. What it means is you have one goal, and all the quests around it are satellites, and you can do them in any order you want to, and you can build you own idea of how you want to beat the game and achieve the main goal: You can do that by playing the quests to gather allies, you can build yourself and do it by yourself. You have a lot of other options in the game.”
Rebel Wolves re-examined the way it approached designing quests for The Blood of Dawnwalker. “Almost every quest in the game is like a sidequest, and they are meaningful,” Tomaszkiewicz says. “They are creating one whole experience for the player, but we are closer to a pen-and-paper RPG where the Game Master is deciding how he wants to lead you and deciding what he wants to do. In our game, you create this choice to achieve your goal by yourself.”
Though The Blood of Dawnwalker takes place over the course of 30 days and 30 nights, similar to games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, one of the choices you can make is to skip all the game’s quests and opt to just storm the antagonist’s castle. It won’t be easy, particularly with no allies and being under-leveled, but you can try.
“To finish The Blood of Dawnwalker, all you need to do is storm the antagonist’s castle, face them in combat, and rescue the family,” lead quest designer Rafał Jankowski says. “There are no additional requirements or prerequisites that you need to tick off, which means that all the stories that we prepared for the players are somewhat optional. Of course, we do encourage the players to follow these narrative threads, to explore the world, to learn all these stories, to experience what we prepared for them, which will make the attack on the castle much, much more approachable.”
Rebel Wolves pulled heavy inspiration for implementing choice from pen-and-paper RPGs, as well as CRPGs like the original Fallout games. Despite not having a custom character like most CRPGs, players take control of Coen at a very young age, during an extremely pivotal moment in his life, as he transitions from human to Dawnwalker. Because of this, player agency plays a massive role in how Coen’s story progresses.
“It inspires a lot of choices in how much freedom we allow you to make Coen your own Coen,” creative director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz says. “There is plenty of wiggle room for you to shape him in the way you want him to be. You can choose how far he goes in terms of the vampire corruption. You can choose to make choices that kind of desensitize him to violence, for example. Or, you can stay true to, ‘No, I want this to be a character that stays true to the human side. I want to do good things. I want to avoid delving into this darker side of things.'”
But it even goes deeper, as it also tracks how you interact with characters, whether something seemingly low-stakes as dialogue options you choose or high-stakes as attacking them. The Blood of Dawnwalker tracks your interactions through an infamy system, as well as individual relationships based your actions and dialogue towards characters. You can read more on infamy, relationships, and romance here.
“We have a number of systems around this; some of them are kind of exposed to you as a player,” Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz says. “The system we have in place for that, we call ‘infamy.’ And this system tracks your actions throughout the game and how known you become to the vampiric court and to the people of Vale Sangora in this negative way. This can be done in multiple ways: If you go on rampages, if you just kill people, if you steal things and people catch you, you, of course, get this bad rep. But also, like, quest choices and just choosing to go after Brencis, his retinue, and their organization will definitely bump you up on their ‘bad people’ list. There are consequences to this, negative and positive.”
“We track your choices individually on a more detailed level,” Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz continues. “Because of that, we have a lot of reactivity to your choices in the quests. NPCs might remember certain things you do and react to it in other places.”
In extreme cases, you can kill NPCs (on purpose or accidentally, either through the consequences of your action or inaction, or through not managing Coen’s hunger and losing control) resulting in entire questlines being cut off. Your choices and actions truly sound as though they impact not only the trajectory of the story and the characters therein, but the very state of the world.
“We have this narrative sandbox structure of the game where we let you out into the world, you have the main goal, and then you have all these different quests and activities – on purpose, we don’t call them main or side quests, just quests – some of them are bigger, some of them are smaller, and they can chain together, or not,” Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz says. “If you don’t watch for Coen’s hunger, you might cut off some stuff or kill off some NPC that you actually care about. It can be controversial, but at the same time, what’s really important to us is to make you feel like you actually have to deal with this vampiric hunger all the time. It’s always present with him, and I feel, without it, you’re basically kind of just a superhero with some special traits. I think it adds an additional layer of weight and darkness to his adventure.”
It all looks and sounds wildly ambitious, particularly for a debut game from a fledgling studio. However, with the pedigree of the talent present at the studio, as well as the hours of gameplay I’ve seen, Rebel Wolves appears poised to pull it off.
For Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, there’s really no other way for him at this point in his career; it’s basically second nature. “The philosophy of consequences and choices is something we’ve created – or co-created – a lot of times,” he says. “We just know how to do that; I don’t know how to explain that. There is no recipe, like for cake, how you should approach, step by step, to achieve that. I think you need to think about every choice and about every consequence separately and be really aware what you want to achieve with this. You cannot copy this scheme, because if you do more than once, people will be aware of that, and then they start to feel artificial when they’re doing the choices. It’s also important to sometimes surprise players with the consequences of some choices, because I think, with life, you’re doing some choices every day – smaller, bigger – and not always can you predict the outcome.”
Everything I’ve seen of The Blood of Dawnwalker has led us to be more and more excited about it. I can’t wait to get my hands on the final product and see all the ways I can craft a vampire story all my own when it comes to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on September 3.
