The Witcher 3 director’s new RPG The Blood of Dawnwalker is different to that classic CD Projekt Red game in one big way

When Konrad Tomaskiewicz, the former director of The Witcher 3 and now the director of The Blood of Dawnwalker, tells me his new role-playing game has no main quest, I have to ask him to repeat himself because that’s an unusual thing for someone making an RPG to say.

So I ask him again and, “No, there’s no main quest,” Tomaszkiewicz repeats, when we meet in London before the Golden Joystick awards, the event he flew in from Poland to attend. “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.

“We want to bring video games closer to pen-and-paper RPGs and give you the freedom to experience what you want to experience,” he says.

The Blood of Dawnwalker was unveiled properly earlier this year. It’s an RPG that takes place in a valley in the Carpathian Mountains in the 14th Century, and concerns a main character – Coen – who’s half-vampire, half-human, hence his titular ability to walk around during the day. But unlike Marvel’s famous day-walking vampire Blade, Coen’s abilities change depending on what time of day it is. At night, he’s a vampire, but by day he’s human, which gives him two potential toolboxes of abilities to use. By day, Coen can talk to people and solve puzzles, and use his sword, if needs be, to settle disputes. Whereas by night, as a vampire, he can walk up walls and scuttle along the rooftops, and drink blood.

But while The Blood of Dawnwalker won’t have a main quest in the sense of a main storyline that pulls you through the world like an invisible rope, it will have a very clear and overarching goal: for you, Coen, to save your family before 30 days and 30 nights go by. And every significant thing you do in the game world will have a time cost.

How you approach that overarching goal, then, is up to you, and it’s this sandbox approach – this letting go of a player’s hand approach – forms part of a niche in the RPG genre that Tomaszkiewicz wants to carve out for his new studio Rebel Wolves. “We wanted to take a step forward with the evolution and bring something new, and create our own area in the genre,” he said.

Therefore while there are similarities to The Witcher 3 in the game – you need only watch a few minutes of The Blood of Dawnwalker gameplay footage to pick up on them: the tone, the presentation, the dark fantasy – there are major differences here.

To me, The Blood of Dawnwalker seems like a slower experience as you play detective while in human form, talking to people and looking for clues, and then stealthier when you become a vampire by night and stalk the rooftops looking for ways to infiltrate. At times it actually seems closer to a sandbox simulated RPG experience like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 than The Witcher 3. But that’s not quite right.

“Kingdom Come Deliverance is not a bad example, but still they have the main story…”

“It’s for sure less guided but I would say that simulation is too far,” Tomaszkiewicz clarifies. “We’re taking from our previous experience [The Witcher 3], the things we feel that makes the quest cool – how to build the storytelling in a way that you are engaged and you are immersed, but giving you more freedom.

“Kingdom Come Deliverance is not a bad example,” he adds, “but still they have the main story that develops; you have the open world and the main quest which is leading you. In our game it’s different. 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.”

It’s almost like I didn’t hear him the first time.

The game’s distinct time mechanic is a way of giving shape and urgency to your experience, and of ensuring you spend time in both human and vampire form – a change that’s brought on by the change of day into night. Were there no time pressure, you could skip parts of the day to play in your preferred form always, but this way, with a limited amount of time, you won’t want to. Which is good for experiencing the full range of things the game wants you to experience.

But there are concerns about the time mechanic, too, and how it might restrict us when exploring the world. I know from first-hand experience that RPG players like to do everything, and this system seems to be directly opposed to that. But don’t panic: time won’t dribble away while you explore. Time will only move on at very clearly telegraphed moments, and you’ll always be told by how much before you make the decision to do it.

There’s even a neat-sounding wanted- or infamy-like reputation gauge that builds as you adventure, depending on how much you upset or loosen the antagonist’s hold on the valley region you’re exploring in. The more effect you have, the more the gauge will fill; and the more the gauge fills, the more actions the antagonist will take against you, such as passing edicts to close shops and sending assassins against you. “We wanted to create a world which reacts to what you are doing,” Tomaszkiewicz says.

The most important thing to note about time ticking down, though, is this: “Even if the time ends, this is not the end of the game…” Tomaszkiewicz says, but doesn’t elaborate for fear of spoiling it.

The Blood of Dawnwalker looks and sounds like an exciting prospect to me, and I’m particularly encouraged by it not simply retreading the same ground as The Witcher 3 in order to win over some of the same fans. Comparisons will be inevitable, though, and I wonder whether Tomazkiewicz is anxious about the expectations they might bring – this is, after all, Rebel Wolves’ debut game, not the third game in a more established studio’s series.

But Blood of Dawnwalker’s team is roughly similar in size to that which made The Witcher 3, Tomaszkiewicz tells me. The Witcher 3 team apparently averaged 160 people – a number bumped to 205 with the help of the Cyberpunk 2077 team – and the Rebel Wolves team is currently 155 people.

“For sure we are not creating the game [that can be played] for 200 hours,” Tomaszkiewicz adds. “We cannot do it in this scope and budget. But it will be a big game. I think one playthrough will be around 40 hours, maybe 50 hours, it depends, and you will not do everything so you have things for other playthroughs. But in the meaning of gameplay, or the story, or the cut-scenes, we are close.”

Oh and incidentally, just like The Witcher 3, The Blood of Dawnwalker will be self-funded – something else that surprises me for a studio’s first game. The money was apparently raised by selling a quarter of the company to NetEase, and Namco Bandai is on board to help with marketing and publishing duties. “But we are independent,” stresses Tomaszkiewicz, “and we are doing everything from our own money.”

The Blood of Dawnwalker is in development for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series S/X, and it’s due to be released sometime next year.