We recently announced our latest cover story as The Blood of Dawnwalker, the debut title from Rebel Wolves, a studio co-founded by Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, who directed The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Cyberpunk 2077. We spent a full day in the Rebel Wolves’ studio in Warsaw, Poland, seeing an extended hands-off demo and speaking with key members of the development team. After watching a long demo consisting of the prologue (read our impressions of that here), we went into a small room with Tomaszkiewicz to get an exclusive look at an extra sequence that hints at how relationships will play out as you play through this extremely promising action/RPG built on player choice.
In the extra quest I see, protagonist Coen, a Dawnwalker who is a human by day and vampire by night, visits the town herbalist, Anca, to procure an elixir to strengthen the body and mind of his mother, Esme. Coen does this so that the primary antagonist, Brencis, and his clique of vampires don’t know Esme’s been starving herself. When Coen arrives at Anca’s house, he asks her about a concoction that can calm his mother’s mind and fortify her body. However, a surprise storm rolls in, trapping Coen and Anca in the house. Anca asks Coen if he’d like to use this opportunity to practice his Latin; it turns out she’s more than just an herbalist. Choosing to stay consumes a time segment, a finite resource that dictates the passage of time within the daily calendar.
They begin working through a poem that Anca originally indicates might be a bit much for Coen, but they dive into it anyway. The ode to the poet’s lover certainly sets the mood, and small facial expressions indicate there might be a bit more to this teacher/student relationship. The fact that I can read their facial expressions stands in stark contrast to how romance options used to feel even just a few years ago, where it felt like two mannequins talking, flirting, and getting physical, highlighting how far the technology has progressed in recent years.
“Now, you can believe that they are really characters or people,” game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz says. “Our goal is to allow you to believe that and to feel that, because then immersion is totally different, you know, and emotions are different because you believe that you are speaking almost with a real person.”
However, that mood is interrupted as the storm knocks over a tree, smashing through the roof of Anca’s herb shack. Since those herbs are her livelihood, it’s a “drop everything” kind of situation. Coen and Anca run outside, but in the pouring rain, Anca slips and cuts herself. Coen saves the herbs, but now he must address Anca’s injuries.
Though she’s resistant to the idea, Coen insists he helps patch her up. She agrees and removes her shirt so he can see the wound on her back. Now, the chemistry between the two feels even more intense. Through an interactive scene, Coen dresses the wound while the two make small talk. Nothing too risqué occurs in this sequence (aside from the shirt being removed), but Coen certainly gets in a few flirtatious lines on the way out.
Player choice is at the center of The Blood of Dawnwalker, and that includes not only what quests you take on and how you complete them, but how you interact with people in the world. “We have a number of systems around this; some of them are kind of exposed to you as a player,” creative director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz says. “The system we have in place for that, we call ‘infamy.’ And this system tracks your actions throughout the game and how known you become to the vampiric court and to the people of Vale Sangora in this negative way. This can be done in multiple ways: If you go on rampages, if you just kill people, if you steal things and people catch you, you, of course, get this bad rep. But also, like, quest choices and just choosing to go after Brencis, his retinue, and their organization will definitely bump you up on their ‘bad people’ list. There are consequences to this, negative and positive. On the negative side, Brencis will take notice, and he will enact these edicts that basically are meant to make your life harder. So, for example, he might send bounty hunters after you, or he might put the city on lockdown, in an extreme case, where it’s very difficult to get in and get out and get to those shopkeepers, or you have to find your way around it. [He might] put more military patrols on the street, and so on.”
But it’s not all negative, as infamy can aid Coen in his quest to take down Brencis and save his family. “On the positive side, there are people that hate Brencis and work against him, and raising your infamy will provide them with proof that you’re on their side, that you’re not just another vampire that is working against them,” Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz says. “It also might make it easier for you to intimidate people because now, suddenly, you have this reputation of this infamous guy that goes around and wrecks the [vampire] organization.”
But it goes beyond widespread infamy and Coen’s reputation, as Rebel Wolves also tracks your interactions with people on a micro level, building a database of Coen’s relationships, which can eventually lead to romance. “We track your choices individually on a more detailed level,” Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz says. “Because of that, we have a lot of reactivity to your choices in the quests. NPCs might remember certain things you do and react to it in other places.”
“You can build relations in our game, not only through normal dialogue, but also action,” Konrad Tomaszkiewicz says. “We have a lot of different activities and quests in the game. Some of them are flashy and you have combat or magic, and some are subtle or more calm, but you have people with whom you can speak or do some other thing to help them and build your relation. Sometimes, maybe romantic relations will come out of it.”
This demo, when combined with these systems, plants the seed for how romance can play out in Rebel Wolves’ debut game, but the studio isn’t quite ready to share much beyond what I saw. “We have a rule that we are not speaking about romances,” Konrad Tomaszkiewicz says. “You will see it after we release the game, but there will be some romance options that you can do. [Regarding this demo], we are taking a lot of care about the details to create those people to be really rich and interesting, and you’ll need to build your relations to achieve that.”
If you’re a subscriber, you can read more about this sequence, as well as get the most comprehensive look at The Blood of Dawnwalker yet in our cover story. It’s available online for both print and digital subscribers right now, with the print issues arriving in mid-June. The Blood of Dawnwalker launches for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on September 3.