The Blood of Dawnwalker

[one-armed dwarf]

 

https://www.gematsu.com/2025/01/the-blood-of-dawnwalker-cinematic-reveal-trailer-and-gameplay-teaser

 

Quote

The Blood of Dawnwalker is the first chapter of Rebel Wolves’ brand new role-playing saga—a single-player open-world dark fantasy action RPG with a strong focus on story and narrative. Developed on Unreal Engine 5 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.

14th century Europe. Bloody conflicts sweep the lands, and the Black Death comes for the survivors. In the wake of the disasters claiming thousands of lives, the decimated human population struggles for survival. It’s a moment of weakness. In Vale Sangora, somewhere in a forgotten corner of the Carpathian Mountains, vampires seize their opportunity to walk out of the shadows, overthrow the feudal lords and claim what they’ve been denied for centuries: freedom, and ultimate power that comes with it. Legends turn into reality, and history as we know it will never be the same.

 

You play as Coen, a young man turned into a Dawnwalker, forever treading the line between the world of day and the realm of night. Not fully human, not entirely a vampire, you have 30 days and nights to save your family or swear revenge on your sire and destroy everyone standing in your way.

 

The freedom in gameplay is reflected in Coen’s very nature as a Dawnwalker. Depending on the time of day, players will have different skills, abilities and storyline outcomes. Players must choose: do they fight for humanity or embrace the cursed powers?

 

This is by some people who used to work at CDPR on Witcher. It's been described as an open world RPG but with an interesting twist, a timer. Not a real timer but one where quests will progress the timer a certain degree. I'm guessing it's like, do a quest at midday and now it's the evening when it's done, and certain other quests are locked off. Something kinda like Persona but instead of cookie cutter social links it's a branching narrative

 

They describe it as a 'narrative sandbox' where you can have multiple different playthroughs. Personally it's one of the most interesting games I've heard about in a while, speaking as a Pathologic 2 sicko, and it's not like the timer here will be as punishing as in that.

[shinymcshine]

I'd like to see an RPG with some timed consequences - where if you don't do a quest within a certain time there's an in world impact - such as another NPC finds the treasure and taunts you about it, or a kidnapped ransom victim is executed and their family vilify you etc - if it's just cut off so you don't get access to reward xyz it might be a bit of a so what.

 

What would be rubbish is if you 'complete' a quest activities but then can't / don't get back to the quest giver within x days (perhaps because you're on the other side of the map, and you've lost your horse) and then it just gives you a hard 'fail'.

[radiofloyd]

 

https://www.gematsu.com/2025/06/the-blood-of-dawnwalker-launches-in-2026
 

The Witcher, but you’re a (half) vampire.

[Maryokutai]

Ah, this is that game. Alright, then I guess we can accept that it does like a carbon copy of Witcher in some aspects. Completely forgot this got announced already.

 

Didn't really blow me away unfortunately, looks very last-gen and janky, though maybe that's a good thing because it means their focus might have been elsewhere. Some of the dialogue is a bit, well – but I guess it's all out of context, so I'll try to keep an open mind about this.

[Nag]

I'd have to say that I'd agree with that... I'm not sure how this even managed to grab the air time on the show, it looked very disappointing. 

[one-armed dwarf]

Yeah I don't really mind if a game is janky if it has cool ideas, would prefer that to a polished but overly familiar RPG.

 

Not that I'm necessarily saying this will end up the former, just basing off the description of what it was doing in the first post.  Especially as the description of the timer narrative reminded me of Pathologic

[Maryokutai]

 

Bad interviewer but I quite like what they show of the game here. It's not as perma-depressing as it initially seemed, with some brighter moments during daytime, and overall looks quite good for what is ultimately a double-A RPG. I just hope the bloodthirst mechanic doesn't become overbearing, I'm not too big a fan of survival elements on a timer.

[DANGERMAN]

it still has B game vibes to me, but I hope its good. I really wanted to like Vampyre more than I did, and this reminds me of that

[one-armed dwarf]

The Assassin's Creediness in it is pretty offputting to me, so I hope there's more beyond the surface. Which hopefully should be the case with the narrative structure.

[Maryokutai]

The latest EDGE has a big piece on this. It doesn't unearth a lot of new info but maybe gives more detail about what we know already. IIRC they mention day and night are both split into 8 chunks of time and doing specific things will eat up one or more of these chunks, and as a result likely prevent you from doing something else. So that's very Persona like assumed, but there seems to be a lot more missable stuff and the developers themselves say that a perfectly planned playthrough might allow you to at best see 80% of it (which honestly is more than I was expecting).

Crucially it doesn't have fail states, so if a quest requires you to meet up with person A at place B and you don't get there in time, it will simply conclude as 'has not met person A'. I've also found it interesting that it doesn't have a classic main quest except for the initial premise of having to save your abducted family (which you can see in the video above but, interestingly, also doesn't 'fail' if you don't get there in time). Which make sense in the context of a non-hierachical quest structure but is still quite unusual.

 

I'm still unsure whether this will be for me, because I usually like the quest hunt in RPGs and it doesn't bother me that's it's a rather unimmersive aspect of those games. But it sounds very interesting and I will likely check it out at some point. The whole structure sounds like a nightmare to code though, so I'll definitely wait for some feedback regarding potential progress blockers.