After years of quiet work, Rebel Wolves, a studio made up of ex-CD Projekt Red developers, unveiled a cinematic and gameplay teaser for its first project,The Blood of Dawnwalker. The game seems to bring back everything thatfans ofThe Witcher 3: Wild Huntloved, except the protagonist has the powers of a vampire, rather than the spells and mutations of a Witcher, and the game takes place in 14th-century Europe during the time of the Black Death. Described as a dark fantasy, narrative sandbox on its website, it feels a lot like a CD Projekt Red title.
Players will take control of Coen, a Dawnwalker, which seems to be similar to a dhampir in classic fantasy (a half-human, half-vampire) and poses the moral question of how much the human soul is worth compared to the power being a vampire gives the protagonist.With complex morals, a dark fantasy world, and a super-soldier-like character with long, tied hair, it feels like a checkbox of everything fans loved aboutThe Witcher 3, but there is one feature in the game that both sets it apart and has proved somewhat controversial.
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With the developer’s previous work onThe Witcher,The Blood of Dawnwalkerwill likely be a long and expansive open-world RPG, with plenty of side-quests and the rest of the works to make the world feel alive. Although not mentioned in the cinematic and gameplay teaser available on the officialPlayStationYouTube channel,the game will have a mechanic that hasn’t featured inThe Witcherseries—a 30-day time limit. It seems that the story will only take a month, although this could just be the start of the story, given thatBlood of Dawnwalkeris described as the first of a role-playing saga.
There will be a full gameplay reveal forThe Blood of Dawnwalkerin summer 2025.
The 30-day limit simultaneously does and doesn’t make sense as a feature. As far as the game is concerned, limiting the player to 30 days seems like an odd choice for an open-world campaign, especially if there are a lot of little details and side quests for players to get stuck into.It does make sense for the story, however, giving players a narratively fitting feeling of tension and distress, since most RPGs don’t tend to have a great sense of time. Many games bend time to fit the player, rather than the player fitting and working around the game’s time schedule.
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The game’s narrative is clearly a focus for Rebel Wolves, as the trailer’s description on YouTube states that this is the developer’s intention. The 30-day time limit may have come as a result of this, with the developers wanting its players to understand the timeframe the events of the game take place in. Games likeThe Witcher 3orBaldur’s Gate 3don’t make it especially clear how long the story takes, especially withThe Witcher 3’s lack of clarity regarding how long it takes Geralt to get from place to place.
The Blood Of Dawnwalker Time Limit Does Force Players To Rush
Time Passes When The Player Wants It To
Although the game takes place over 30 days and nights, it seems that it won’t have a finite number of hours in which players get to go through the campaign. When asked on X, the admin forThe Blood ofDawnwalkerXaccountconfirmed thatthe game won’t have a hard time limit and won’t rush players in their exploration of the world. This seems like the best way to get players to feel time passing without forcing players to run through the game at an uncomfortable pace, although it isn’t known how exactly this will work.
After the trailer’s release, theDawnwalkerX account has been putting out character introductions for those seen in the trailer, such as for Coen, the protagonist, and Brencis, the main vampire in the teaser.
A good reference for this might be something like thePersonaseries,where the games are split into days that allow the player to complete different tasks. As the days pass, different events are allowed to happen, progressing the story, although thePersonaseries only allows for a finite amount of time to do these tasks. It isn’t clear whether rushing means that there is indefinite time per day and the player gets to dictate when the next day happens by resting or using some other mechanic to let time pass.
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It could be more like howBaldur’s Gate 3treats its days. Rather than a natural day-night cycle, like inSkyrim,BG3allows players to spend as much or as little time in a single day as they want, and the day only ends by returning to camp to do so.The Blood of Dawnwalkercould do something similar, allowing players to do as much as they want before choosing to turn the day to night and letting events in the story happen as a result. There could even be events depending on those days, just like inBG3.
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Rebel Wolves has made it clear thatThe Blood of Dawnwalkeris just the start of something that could end up being special. There’s a reason why the developers have called this the first chapter, and it implies that more is planned with the IP outside this one game. With all the other open-world fantasy RPGs coming from established IPs, whether that beAvowedcoming from thePillars of Eternityfranchise,The Witcher 4, or the never-ending wait forElder Scrolls 6, a new IP in the genre could be a big advantage for Rebel Wolves.
The 30-day time limit could also be a feature unique to the series and help it differentiate itself fromThe Witcherseries, especially sinceThe Witcher 4is on the horizon. Being a dark fantasy title with a character with special powers and the team’s previous work on the series,there will probably always be comparisons withThe Witcherseries. Riding the coattails ofWild Huntwill help generate hype, but getting out of that game’s shadow will be a task in and of itself, considering how beloved it still is ten years on.
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Although relying on gimmicks will never make a game great, the best RPGs tend to have something unique to them, andThe Blood of Dawnwalker’s 30-day timeframe could be the thing people remember from it if it is handled well. Players need to feel the squeeze of the time limit narratively but can’t be rushed into missing side quests as a result. If the time limit feels arbitrary, it will probably be treated as an annoyance and something that shouldn’t be kept in future installments ifThe Blood of Dawnwalkerperforms well.
Source:PlayStation/YouTube&X: @DawnwalkerGame
