If The Blood of Dawnwalker isn’t already on players’ radars, it needs to be. The debut game from new studio Rebel Wolves, The Blood of Dawnwalker, is a choice-driven action RPG set in the Carpathian countryside, and it just so happens to feature plenty of former Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 staff on its development team. Judging from what was recently shown off of the title, The Blood of Dawnwalker is precisely the kind of game that should appeal to both fans of CD Projekt Red’s previous work and anyone with an interest in vampire fiction.
After an initial reveal trailer from which Rebel Wolves was able to collect some fan feedback and refine the development process, the team took The Blood of Dawnwalker to Gamescom 2025 in Cologne, Germany, to show off its current state. As part of that showcase, Game Rant sat down with lead quest designer Rafał Jankowski and writer Piotr Kucharski to discuss what makes The Blood of Dawnwalker unique among vampire games, and how its quest design will feel familiar to anyone who enjoys branching pathways and choices with real consequence. The following transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Game Rant: What does it feel like to get to this point? At Gamescom, you’ll be able to show people the experience of playing Blood of the Dawnwalker. What is it like to reach that milestone?
Jankowski: I’ll speak from my heart. This is the very first time ever for me to be participating in the promotional campaign for a game, and I’m absolutely delighted with what’s happening around here. We’ve been able to share some degree of insight about the game.
I think it’s fair to say that we are extremely happy with how the whole development of the project is proceeding and that we are able to share what’s happening, how the whole thing is shaping up. Personally, I’m super happy. I’m super excited.
Kucharski: I like his answer; nothing to add here [laughs].
Game Rant: One of the things that I think is somewhat unique about the game, specifically, is that you showed off some gameplay, you got some fan feedback, and then we saw a response to that feedback. What has that dialogue been like — talking to players and learning what they are and aren’t interested in about your game — and how has that influenced the decisions made?
Kucharski: We strongly believe that feedback is a very important factor when making games, and we also believe that we are making the game for the players and that they know what they want. So, whenever possible, we try to listen, and if we can, implement the feedback.
Sometimes you can’t really do anything about that feedback because you see the bigger picture, but the players only see a glimpse. But I still think all feedback is viable; all feedback should be listened to. Sometimes you might think that you’re right, but if a lot of people tell you, “You know what, we would prefer something like this,” as long as you don’t have to overhaul the whole thing, then maybe it’s the right way to go.
Jankowski: It was a great opportunity, sharing this piece of gameplay footage in June and then gathering some feedback from the players, scrolling a little bit through YouTube comments and then discussing the feedback, considering our options. It was an amazing opportunity to shape the game a little more in line with players’ expectations. But yeah, I do agree that we see the bigger picture, so of course we reserve ourselves to make the final decisions.
Game Rant: I’m curious about the game’s scope, because we saw in the presentation an ability to experience a mission or experience getting to a conclusion two different ways, day or night. Would you say that, throughout the game, players have opportunities to tackle things in different ways?
Jankowski: The game is all about the player’s agency, choice and consequence, right? Hence, the whole idea of having this narrative sandbox. I like to emphasize how the game’s structured. We give our protagonist a simple goal to rescue his family. They were captured by the prince, our antagonist, and the player has 30 days and 30 nights to rescue them.
And then the whole world, the whole experience opens up from there. We don’t really have a main quest arc leading toward a specific goal. Everything is kind of optional in the game; you can even try to storm the castle right away after the prologue. An extremely difficult task, so we encourage the players to explore the valley, find content that they find interesting, find some allies maybe, level up, find some equipment, and so on.
The whole experience is very open, and another layer of it is that many of our quests have two paths — the day path and the night path. We also have some content that’s time-of-day specific. Some things can only be finished during the night, because they require getting access to some specific place.
Kucharski: There are also the branches within branches. For example, what we saw today is not the only path to take. Earlier, we were looking for a sigil, and we found it near the treasury, but there are other ways to find that same sigil. Some quests will be more like that, and there’ll be very different branches and approaches — day, night, and within day and within night.
Some quests will be more simplistic than that, because sometimes the story doesn’t really need us to come up with multiple different approaches. But to answer your question, it is challenging. We work very closely with the writers and the designers; it’s a very tight-knit operation. We’re like, “OK, so the place can do this, this, and this,” and once the dialogues were written, and we see how this little answer here will impact something else so someone will react in a different way. Honestly, it’s one of the most satisfying feelings in the world.
Jankowski: I am a quest designer first, and I love the challenge coming from this complicated structure. Because, yeah — it’s fun figuring it all out. I absolutely love it.
Kucharski: It’s a puzzle.
Jankowski: Yeah.
Game Rant: Being able to finish the game almost immediately after the prologue, were you inspired by Zelda?
Kucharski: [laughs] I don’t know if we are inspired by Zelda, but what I can say is that we want to see those streams where players decide they’re going to finish the game in 30 minutes. That kind of challenge always sparks a very nice dialogue between players, which is awesome. And also, if we see people do that, we’re like, “Great!”
Jankowski: Our main inspiration when it comes to the game’s structure was Fallout — specifically, Fallout and Fallout 2. In those games, the player gets this kind of simple mission early on in the story, and then it’s up to them to decide how they want to tackle it.
Game Rant: What is the experience like of creating your own brand of vampires? What rules do you create? What do you borrow from? What do you make unique?
Kucharski: Well, first of all, it’s a great experience for me personally because I am an avid fan of the Vampire: The Masquerade RPG system. I’m even a game master. So when I got onto this project, I was like, “Dreams do come true,” really. There is a plethora of things you can draw from. We have games like Vampyr from Dontnod. You have Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, quite a few titles to be inspired by.
And of course, there’s the vampire media of television and of movies. You have True Blood, for example, a nice showcase of vampires living amongst humans, and everyone is aware of it. Nosferatu comes to mind. Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, especially, with the game set in Carpathia. There’s the whole Romanian aspect. So a lot of things to draw from, and it’s very exciting. But it’s also exciting, as you mentioned, to add our own twist to some of the established vampire lore.
Jankowski: Early on during the development, we were considering what vulnerabilities — those typical vampire vulnerabilities — we were going to get in the game. We did consider not allowing Coen to enter a house without being invited, but it didn’t work out in the end [laughs].
This is a question that we faced early on in development. Because there are many, many vampire media already out there, we had to ask, “OK, how do we make it our own?” Coming up with this pretty unique protagonist — the human during the day, vampire during the night — was our answer to that.
Game Rant: In terms of the different ways to tackle a quest, we didn’t see a ton of combat. How much of that blending can players expect? Could someone play through most of the game with minimal or no combat?
Jankowski: A “no combat” run is out of the question. The first thing that comes to my mind is that, when you storm the castle, there will be opposition waiting for you, right? So combat is an important part of the experience. We don’t offer a total pacifist path, and we want the players to have fun with our combat system.
We are putting a lot of effort into making it approachable at first when you start messing around with it, and then it will pose some degree of challenge to master it.
Kucharski: But you will have the opportunity in some quests to circumvent the combat and just find a peaceful way to handle things.
Game Rant: What are the challenges involved with creating an undead character who’s immortal, but also making it interesting and engaging for players? How do you decide how much damage he takes, how much damage he deals, things like that?
Kucharski: So Coen is a baby vampire, OK? [laughs]. He’s a very fresh Dawnwalker, so he’s not overpowered; he’s not the most powerful being in the valley. That helps us to adjust the challenge. Our gameplay designers would probably have a more personal answer than we do, but we wanted Coen’s power to tie into our narration.
We want Coen to be someone vulnerable, and it means many different things, including in combat, of course. Both human and vampire Coen — he has his weaknesses, his strengths. Designing that is a challenge, but I think that we’re really getting there.
Jankowski: Yeah, definitely. We do want the nighttime in the game to feel dangerous. The world that we are creating is full of many different creatures of the night. Some of them do pose a challenge to vampires. They might not be an apex predator, but they are powerful, even if they’re not the end-all be-all.
Kucharski: There’s always a bigger fish, right? [laughs].
Jankowski: Definitely. We also have Blood Hunger. Coen’s powers come at a cost; he needs to feed on other beings, and if this is ignored by the player, it may cause some unforeseen consequences.
Game Rant: Can you give a sense of how big the script for Blood of Dawnwalker is?
Kucharski: I’m not aware of the number right now off the top of my head, but there is a number, and it’s quite massive [laughs]. Because of all the branching stories and choices, we spent quite a lot of time writing, rewriting, iterating, and so on. I think it’s right up there with some bigger titles, and you’ll have a lot of dialogue to go through.
Jankowski: However, when it comes to the length of one playthrough, we assess it to be around 40 hours long. Again, this is just an assessment right now during development; we’ll be able to be more sure about it later on when we’re closer to the release date. We want this to be a satisfying, compact experience, and the game is designed for multiple playthroughs.
Game Rant: We saw that players had a lot of agency in terms of how they want to tackle a quest, but how much agency does the player have in the personality or perception of Coen as a vampire character? Are there choices that influence his relationships with other characters?
Kucharski: He’s a pre-made character, of course, so there are some boundaries that, as writers, we have to move around. What we aimed at was that Coen is a very humane character with his own background that is already established, but also, we wanted our players to have the choice in how they want to react to becoming a vampire.
Or how you think about Coen’s family, because maybe this is a family that has some problems. Maybe Coen is not so very fond of his family. We want you to craft your own Coen, in a way.
Players will make choices, and there will be reactions from NPCs. There will be quite a few characters with whom you will be able to establish some kind of a bond. And it can be everything from being close friends to being rivals who don’t really like each other but work with each other because they have to.
Game Rant: You mentioned that there isn’t one overarching quest, but there is what feels like an overarching villain. How do you tie the villain into the choices the player makes?
Jankowski: We wanted Brencis to be more of a present, proactive villain, so we devised this notoriety system for the game. Some actions will make Coen’s notoriety grow. He’ll become more and more recognizable in the valley, especially by Brencis’ forces, which will make his life a bit more difficult.
Then there is another layer for it. Brencis will be reacting to players’ actions by issuing edicts, new laws that change the situation in the valley and how the soldiers behave. One example is introducing curfews. We didn’t want him to just sit on his throne waiting for Coen.
Game Rant: In terms of designing quests, you don’t want to hold players’ hands too much, but you also want to make sure that they have a clear end goal. What is the process like of having to accomplish this for multiple branching paths and figuring out where all the moving pieces go?
Jankowski: Well, there’s lots of brainstorming, a lot of iteration. We start with a paper design for a given quest, and we go back and forth discussing the idea, the proposed paths, between ourselves and our colleagues. Then the paper design goes to the director of the given area, and we quickly transition to implementing it so we can see how it plays out on the screen as soon as possible. We want to be able to find the weak spots so that we can iron out the design.
The process is challenging, but also very fun, because it involves a lot of brainstorming and cooperation between quest designers and writers. In the end, I feel like we will offer our players a lot of freedom.
[END]
Rebel Wolves
Unreal Engine 5
Single-player
Unknown
