Rebel Wolves is a studio comprised of several instrumental members of the team that brought us The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, a game considered by many to be one of the greatest video games of all time. Perhaps most notably is Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, director of The Witcher 3 and its critically acclaimed expansions, as well as a second director and head of production of Cyberpunk 2077. But Tomaszkiewicz isn’t the only member of the team that came from RPG royalty, as several other important members of the Witcher 3 development team, as well as former employees from studios like Techland, Rockstar Games, Riot Games, People Can Fly, and Capcom, joined the studio early on. Now, with its debut game, The Blood of Dawnwalker, on the horizon, I flew to Warsaw, Poland, to get a good look at what this immensely experienced team has been up to since its founding in 2022.
The hands-off demo I witnessed began with a cutscene showing a man and a young girl on the run through the Vale Sangora region, a Carpathian mountain valley, in 1347. We learn that this is Coen, the game’s protagonist, and his younger sister, Lunka. This era of 14th-century Europe is riddled with crises, including a plague outbreak that decimated the continent. It turns out that Lunka has the plague, and soldiers have orders to stop the spread by any means necessary. Though Coen pleads for her life, the soldiers strike her down. However, a group of vampires shows up, decimating the soldiers and feeding Lunka their blood, healing her. They save her life, but the sequence of events weighs heavily on Coen. From there, the extended gameplay demo begins.
The Blood of Dawnwalker is a dark, choice-driven action RPG that plays into the pedigree of the developers behind it. However, when I say it’s choice-driven, it may lean even more into that than even The Witcher 3, which is acclaimed for enabling players to progress through the story in their own way. During the prologue, I see that play out, as players are asked to retrieve herbs to save their mother’s life. It feels like a main quest, but you can actually completely ignore it. Similarly, Coen runs right past a woman pleading for help, instead opting to help a man whose brother didn’t come back from his trip into the woods, as well as a pig-owner whose prized hog escaped.
Along the way, I encounter various combat situations. Using directional combat, where you react to the direction from which the attack is coming as well as the timing, the team at Rebel Wolves aims to deliver engaging combat that keeps players immersed, rather than feeling like passive participants in the combat. There are omnidirectional parries as well, but they consume more stamina.
Performing certain actions, selecting certain dialogue options, and pursuing quests consumes time segments; there are eight during the day and eight during the night, and the game takes place over 30 24-hour periods. This means you must be judicious about which quests you take on, and you may not be able to do everything in a given time.
If 30 days sounds like a short time in which to tell an in-depth RPG story, Tomaszkiewicz claims it will still offer plenty of gameplay as you navigate that month. “Right now, the average [playthrough] is 50 hours, but it depends on which difficulty you play, it depends on how picky you are, how much you explore, and how much you upgrade your gear and so on,” he says. “A few people from our team have finished the game […] and there are big differences. It’s like from 50 hours to around 70.”
Not only that, but some quests require swift action; if you opt to find the missing brother early in the day, he’s still alive in the cave in which he fell. However, if you put it off until later, you won’t have made it in time and will have succumbed to his injuries. Similarly, since we ignored the woman pleading for help, her quest went unfulfilled and she is eulogized in a later cutscene.
In The Blood of Dawnwalker, Coen is the eponymous Dawnwalker, thanks to a high content of silver dust in his blood from his childhood spent mining the precious metal, preventing him from becoming a full-on vampire. This means that he’s a human by day and a vampire by night. That brings with it different abilities and ways to approach quests. Sometimes, different quests will be available depending on when you’re playing, plus you can approach others in substantially distinct ways, given that you have various supernatural powers as a vampire, plus additional combat abilities.
Thanks to his claws and fangs, Coen can handle himself without a sword in his vampiric form, including feeding on enemies to regain health. Not only that, but he can also traverse huge gaps, scale walls, and slide down steep cliffs using his claws. However, he must also quench his thirst for blood; if his blood cravings become too great, he can lose control and be forced to kill the first NPC he comes into contact with. If you’re lucky, it could be a completely inconsequential character, but you have the potential to kill either a favorite NPC or someone who has a questline. And since the story is designed to adapt to your choices, you could inadvertently cut off entire parts of the game.
“Because this is a new company, we have the chance to do something innovative and maybe more crazy to try, to do something new, and we decided that, adding this open structure will give us the feel of total freedom, and it will boost immersion,” Tomaszkiewicz says.
The demo concludes with Brencis, the main antagonist, attempting to feed on Coen, but the silver burns his mouth. Instead, the vampiric leader pins Coen to a wall with an axe and takes what remains of his family, setting a clear goal of what you must accomplish in the 30 days of gameplay that will follow.
I came out of my demo wowed by the sheer ambition of what Rebel Wolves is trying to accomplish with The Blood of Dawnwalker. The level of freedom feels head and shoulders above what others in the RPG space are attempting, and if the prologue I witnessed is any indication, the studio’s stockpile of seasoned game-development talent might just have pulled it off. I’m excited to learn more as we get closer to the launch date of September 3.