Dawnwalker Interview Blood: Kill Time and Major NPCs in New RPGs Developed by Previous CDPR
Blog Andrew Joseph 30 Aug , 2025 0
If you have played more than a few role-playing games, you will know how the hero’s journey usually works. In the Prologue, there will be a terrible thing to happen – this event requires you to act quickly to prevent the Revelation or defeat the omnipotent evil. Over the next few hours, you will spend 90% of your time completely ignoring the coming threats, instead helping you meet at the bar and collecting loot from dungeons. But that doesn't matter, because the big bad guys will always wait for you. The world is swaying on the edge of extinction forever until you are ready to fix it.
Not so Dawnwalker's BloodThis is the first RPGs from Rebel Wolves, a new studio founded by former CD Projekt Red employees. Its activities give you a time: You have 30 days and 30 nights to save your family from evil vampires.
Creative Director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz said with a smile. “I wouldn’t say that’s the only reason, but I would say it’s definitely the starting point for a conversation.”
To properly understand the time pressure system, it is best to start with the blood of the Dawnwalker campaign. It is called the “narrative sandbox” and it does not follow a linear sequence. There is no task, task two, task three.
“After the prologue, you can go straight to the castle. You can try to rescue your family right away,” Tomaszkiewicz explained. “You can take part in a variety of tasks. You can ignore them, and you can do it.
If Dawnwalker's Blood is a book, then you'll read the first chapter and you can jump straight to the end. As for the optional chapters between these two points, you can read them in any order…but you need to look up the page first. “You're not going into these plot lines,” Tomaszkiewicz revealed. “You have to find it alone (in the world). Of course, we do leave the crumbs behind, but we want to make sure it doesn't feel like 'this' here' these three plot lines, and go there, and go there,' right? We want to enhance the sense of exploration and find these stories in the world.”
This brings us back to the time system. You have 30 days and 30 nights to explore Vale Sangora, a 14th-century kingdom located in the Carpathians and do these plot lines as needed. That time element evolved from Dawnwalker's protagonist Coen. A man suffering from two silencing drugs and He is a curse of a vampire, living like a mortal during the day and becoming a vampire at night. “Time channel is at the heart of the character,” noted Tomaszkiewicz, especially because your vampire abilities give a very different supernatural play style after dark.
A clock that never ticked
Perhaps the most important thing to know is that Dawnwalker's blood does not have a real-time ticking clock. From the moment you start a new game, minutes don’t start counting down. This is not Majora's mask or outfield. “We think that if time flows naturally, it can be unpleasant. The play style will change constantly (from humans to vampires to humans) without your input,” Tomaszkiewicz explains. “That’s the time to think as a resource.”
It is better to think of Dawnwalker's blood time as a currency rather than a stopwatch. A bar chart is divided into eight sections and displayed above the screen, representing your daily allowance for the currency. Performing a significant action marked with an hourglass icon, such as completing a goal or having certain conversations, will “spend” a portion. Similar to Deathloop, so simply exploring or completing lower-level tasks will not be progressive. In theory, as long as you don’t do anything with the hourglass symbol, you can stay at noon on the seventh day at noon on the seventh day.
The Rebel Wolf is so excited about the way time shapes Dawnwalker's choices and mission designs (where you can learn more Our recent preview), Tomaszkiewicz realizes that many people will be skeptical of the system. “I know there are a lot of players who are afraid to miss it, so we absolutely won't cut too much content,” he explained. “We at least in the average average gameplay, your goal is to enable you to complete 80% of the content.”
Rebel Wolves have twisted the rules of time to achieve this, especially when it comes to handling time-sensitive events. For example, a storyline involves a burning house, but the flames will burn indefinitely until you actually discover the building. Only then will you need to take action before spending too much time bar. You don't have the chance to find a house you never knew one day, now a pile of rubble and ashes.
Of course, no matter how tasks and time are handled, there is always an imminent pressure: 30 days and 30 nights to save your family. But at that deadline, there are unwritten nuances. “Don't think of it as a game,” Tomaszkiewicz hints. “It's more like a choice and consequence.”
Here's the crucial takeaway: You may have time limits to save your family, but there are There is no time limit to finish the game. After this, you can continue to play indefinitely. Who said saving your family will even be the most important part of your story? Dawnwalker's steam page blood states: “Go into the pursuit of saving family, or vowing to avenge your father and destroy everyone standing in your way.” Perhaps that story of revenge would provide an alternative journey for the main campaign? I asked Tomaszkiewicz to explain in detail, but he refused. He said the steam description was enough.
Control your dark impulses
Even if you move only in a specific action, like sand sliding across your fingers, it is easy to see time. As something you lost. However, it is important to remember that progress time brings you closer to one of Dawnwalker's most exciting features: Coen becomes a vampire at night. As the moon rises, you can unlock the ability to walk along the walls and ceilings and teleport to the roof and balconies within the range. Such skills unlock opportunities, not to mention a more invisible play style. So, if you want, you can skip the days and just play at night. Tomaszkiewicz confirmed that it was a “fully viable way to play”, although warning that ignoring the day also means missing tasks only in the wake of time.
However, the supernatural powers and skills of vampires come at a price, and this is what we all know: swallowing a lot of blood. You need to regularly satisfy Coen's hunger, and the only truly satisfying meal is on the neck of a person. You can choose to ignore this feeling of hunger or feast on fewer animals, but this lifestyle has consequences.
“If you starve Coen, if you don’t feed him enough, and if you have important conversations, he may lose control and kill important NPCs,” Tomaszkiewicz revealed.
Rebel Wolves is not unique when creating games that can kill important characters, but it does it in its own way. For example, you can’t just strode to someone to cut a sword, it’s always about your vampire impulse. But you do have a choice. “Whenever it knocks on the door, you can decide to succumb to the nature of the vampire,” explains Tomaszkiewicz. But this is only possible when Cohen is just hungry. if you starve He, then every conversation is dice. Hunger can grab control, you have no choice but to watch him fall.
This system may be possible due to the aforementioned “narrative sandbox” activity structure. “In a game with a more stringent core narrative, you can't kill a character that's key to the story, right? Because the story will collapse,” Tomaszkiewicz noted. Since all tasks in Dawnwalker's blood (except the first and last) are optional, this means that anyone can be killed without derailing. On the contrary, those deaths Become story. You can punish your annoying characters, or be surprised to kill the Guardian.
This blood is part of a wider set of overlapping systems designed to make the Kingdom of Vale Sangora feel active. NPCs have routines that will cause alarms if you see you steal or feed on your neighbors. Competitive factions will quarrel with each other on the street. The evil Brencis looked at you from afar.
“When you get more infamous in the valley, just like what you do to Brencis, he won't stay passive,” Thomaskivic revealed. “He will make these ordinances that will hinder your progress. So he may send more soldiers into the streets, patrol the road, or enforce curfews. So it's more difficult to feed at night now.”
Initially, the infamous sounded like the GTA's wantedness, or the response of the Metal Gear Solid guards was constantly escalating. But this is actually more complicated than simple difficulty spikes. “Sometimes this can actually be a boon,” Tomaszkiewicz explains. “It's not just Brencis and his soldiers (the infamous reaction to yours), it's also people in the valley. They'll know you and are afraid of you. So, in some mission situations, it might actually help. Some factions fight Brencis and they don't like him. So, building infamous is a good way to win good claims.”
End and later
The narrative sandbox approach means the Rebel Wolf has to keep an eye on the ending of the story. The ability to skip every major mission or kill important characters means that each player will hit the ending with different knowledge. Some may not even know what the Dawn Walker is, while others will find solutions to all the major problems. So when I ask how many endings this story has, Tomaszkiewicz is not easy to answer.
“It's a very complex network of connections,” he said. “I can tell you what designers work on the ending is…assumption Memes for the Traditional Tape Festival (Charlie Day in Philadelphia is always sunny). Basically it's him. It's fun, but it's a lot to keep track of. ”
This is not the only thing the story team needs to consider. Steam Page claims the project is “the beginning of a brand new legend built with a love of the role-playing genre”, so DawnWalker's blood is just the first chapter. The Rebel Wolves may be building a game, but they also build the entire universe they plan to explore in subsequent games.
“We have ideas for Cohen's overall story,” Thomaskivic revealed. He said the sequel is certainly not guaranteed, but the team has ideas for the idea of a success in the first game.
“The IP in IP is not just a vampire,” he teased. “In the first game, we didn't deliberately explore the entire hidden world. We wanted to leave a lot of fuel for the sequel.
Such sequels and grand legendary ambitions are currently beyond the control of the Rebel Wolf, just as Dawnwalker's blood is beyond our own range – on Gamescom this year, we can only watch the demonstration rather than do it ourselves. Just as exciting and promising as this demo, it will really draw on first-hand experience of narrative sandboxes to really judge whether the studio’s bold approach to RPG design pays off. But, like Coen's blood desire for mortals, I long to taste more of the fascinating adventures of Slavic fantasy.
Matt Purslow is the executive editor of the IGN function.