The Blood of Dawnwalker has no main quest, apparently, and now I’m a lot more interested in playing it

I’ll be honest with you folks, as aware as I have been about The Blood of Dawnwalker, i.e. Not The Witcher 3 from some of the folks who helped make The Witcher 3, I have felt very disinterested in it. Sure, that recent look at gameplay certainly paints a polished at minimum picture, but at a cursory glance I have to admit I did just kind of write it off as vampire Witcher. Except I’ve now been quite quickly pulled in thanks to an important element of the game shared by its director in a new interview: there’s no main quest.

This comes from Eurogamer, who spoke with game director (and Witcher 3 co-director) Konrad Tomaskiewicz about this very fact. After clarifying that “no, there’s no main quest” in The Blood of Dawnwalker, Tomaskiewicz explained, “You build your experience from the quests you encounter. You know where your [enemy is]. You can attack this place anytime you want to. It’s up to you if you want to do it by yourself, or if you want to build yourself, find the powerful items, develop your character, or do some quests and find allies to help you do it.”

Here’s a line that I like in particular from Tomaskiewicz: “We want to bring video games closer to pen-and-paper RPGs and give you the freedom to experience what you want to experience.” RPGs as a genre is quite obviously popular, but a majority of them are ultimately quite constrictive in what you can actually do. There’s limits in the world of video games! Understandable limits, but I’m always curious to see how someone might try to break them.

This ability to attempt to achieve your goal isn’t exactly a novel thing technically, later on Tomaskiewicz compares it to Fallout: “Our game is more similar in this area to the old Fallout, the first and second [games], where you have a clear goal and everything is optional – you decide. You travel the world, you decide what you want to do. There is no main quest.”

Not to mention the fact that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild lets you seek out the final boss almost right from the start. However, Fallout is obviously quite an oldschool RPG by now, and Breath of the Wild sits in a weird place genre-wise, plus it does have a main story, so I’m keen on seeing how Blood of Dawnwalker tackles such a structure.

The Blood of Dawnwalker is due for release sometime in 2026.