The Blood of Dawnwalker getting a new difficulty option, combat changes and more in game’s first “big” patch scheduled for early October

Speaking to Eurogamer, The Blood of Dawnwalker game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz has discussed several game improvements coming in a “big patch” currently scheduled for early October – including a brand new difficulty option, combat targeting changes, and making it easier to escape from battles by running away.

Tomaszkiewicz also told me in an interview that the studio is exploring a New Game Plus mode – “Yes, we are,” he said smiling but not saying anything more – and potentially adding new enemies to improve variety. “There is a chance but I don’t want to speak about it yet,” he said. “We will have the proper beats with our publishing team and if I tell you more, they will kill me.”

The game’s new difficulty is not a harder difficulty, by the way – Rebel Wolves feels Duelist difficulty, without directional attack indicators, is challenging enough. Instead, it’s an easier one – the easiest one. It doesn’t have a name yet but it effectively replaces the game’s current easiest difficulty, Story mode, and takes that name. The existing Story difficulty will be renamed as a result, so Dawnwalker will have five difficulty levels: Story, Story-renamed, Fair, Challenging, and Duelist.

“We will introduce an additional difficulty level, but an easier one” -Konrad Tomaszkiewicz

“We will introduce an additional difficulty level,” Tomaszkiewicz revealed, “but an easier one, because many people are asking for a more easy difficulty. The Story mode which we have right now will be a different difficulty – we will call it Demanding or something like this – and we will add a new Story mode which will be even easier for people who don’t want to experience the combat, they just want to learn the story and go through the game without this gameplay challenge.”

Where combat is concerned, targeting and the camera are being worked on, as is that annoying quirk whereby Dawnwalker switches your target when using a stun-like crowd-control ability. Surprisingly enough, this wasn’t a bug, but rather something working as Tomaszkiewicz personally intended it. “That’s my fault,” he said, “because it changed. It worked differently.

“When I was playing in some of the gameplay reviews, I wanted to stun an opponent and then switch to the other one, but because I was locked on him still, I hit him by mistake and took the stun from him, and that’s why we made it switch for the other character. But people complain about it, and in the newest patch we will lift off and we will see.

“There will be three hits you need to take off this stun,” he added. “We will see how people will react to that because, as I said, it can create another bad feel, but we will see. Maybe people will switch between targets fluently and if they want to just stun, it will be fine, and if they want to stun and hit a few times, it will be also fine. We will see.”

Gameplay performance is being addressed – it being a major area of feedback in player reviews on Steam – though there have been incremental hotfix patches already to improve it (as well as things like problematic controller support). As to why it didn’t work brilliantly at launch, Tomaszkiewicz cited there being “a lot” of PC hardware combinations, too many to test. But he said: “We’re observing this, we’re trying to ask people about the hardware, and we are trying to do the fixes.”

“It’s like, I understand [FPS concerns] but the game is about something else. It’s not a shooter – it’s not a game where it’s so important”

And he added: “But yes, when you see that the game works well – over 60 FPS – but people still complain that it’s not 120, but 90 or 70…” He exhaled here in an exasperated kind of way. “It’s like, I understand that but the game is about something else. It’s not a shooter – it’s not a game where it’s so important. But people want to have good performance or performance above good: it’s fine. We’re working on it and we will still work on it.”

As mentioned, making it easier to run away from fights without getting stuck on scenery is also being tackled. This was overlooked because Rebel Wolves devs don’t tend to run from fights, heroes that they are, however by watching people stream and reading feedback, they’re learning how other people play it. “Right now we’re doing the fix where when you run or escape, you will ignore the nav mesh and it will be fluid – it will not be clunky,” Tomaszkiewicz said. “We’re working on escaping from combat and running in combat and it will be a big change for people.”

This extends to enemy animal behaviour, so animals won’t “hard-catch” you if you aggravate them while whizzing by in fast mode (wolf form or witch-sprint mode). They will try to hit you, but if they don’t manage to, “you are safe and you can run and explore the world freely”.

However, what isn’t being addressed is enemy sponginess – enemies taking a long time to defeat – because so much of your experience apparently depends upon your character build. “It depends a lot on how you develop your character and what gear you have,” Tomaszkiewicz explained. “You can create builds where you’re killing them really fast. If you create other builds, they will be more spongey. It’s really hard to balance between these because if we decrease the health too much and you create a really strong build, you will one-shot everyone.

“If we decrease the health too much and you create a really strong build, you will one-shot everyone”

“And we had these problems,” he said. “That’s why we were between those things and tried to compromise between those things. When I played and my human form was [invested] in sword, with some perks in the magic and I had this AoE skill with the crows which was hitting everyone, I was clearing even higher-level opponents really fast. They couldn’t do anything. I was too overpowered with this.

“And we didn’t change this balance. You can do the builds like this. It depends strongly on you. I know there are some people who don’t develop the character and save the perks because they want to do more content, but if you don’t spend those perks, the enemies will be more spongy because you don’t develop your character.”

Tomaszkiewicz said he couldn’t remember the rest of the things Rebel Wolves was working on, having already reeled off a fairly long list, but said “there is a lot more which I don’t remember right now because it will be a big patch”. As to when this patch arrives, he said: “It’s quite close. I think that it will be somewhere in the beginning of October. It will be the big patch which will deliver a lot of upgrades for people.”

The Blood of Dawnwalker arrived in early September and scored four stars on Eurogamer. I reviewed it and praised its novel time-limiting structure and freeform approach, as well as its enjoyable quests and characters, and its two-sided hero Coen, who’s both a witch and vampire. “CD Projekt Red alumni create a familiar dark fantasy adventure, but one with bold and provocative ideas of its own, that’s mostly, enormously successful,” I wrote in Eurogamer’s Dawnwalker review.

Rebel Wolves has already talked quite openly about a desire to do sequels which, with 1m sales already achieved, it seems able to go on and do. The plan is to follow Coen across different eras and locations, but we might not see the return of the divisive time mechanic, intriguingly. “We are also considering and researching some other crazy ideas which can make the RPG genre different to surprise people in the future,” Tomaszkiewicz previously said.