During last week’sXbox Games Showcase,The Blood of Dawnwalkerstepped out of the shadows and into the light. After all, Dawnwalkers can do that. It’s kinda their whole thing.
The open-world action-RPG is the first game from Rebel Wolves, an up-and-coming studio founded by Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, one ofThe Witcher 3’s trio of directors. Set during the Black Death but with a fantastical twist — a loose set-up it interestingly shares withA Plague Tale— The Blood of Dawnwalker casts players as the titular sort of vampire, the kind that can go out during the day.
Like Fangs Need A Neck, Vampires Need RPGs
Vampires and RPGs are a match made in heaven because the elements that make RPGs compelling are the same elements that have kept audiences coming back to vampire stories for centuries.
In thevideo description on Bandai Namco’s YouTube, The Blood of Dawnwalker sets up the familiar dilemma: “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. Fight for your humanity or embrace the cursed powers to save your family. Whatever your choice, the question stands: is your soul worth the lives of those you love?”
Those are familiar vampire questions, and they’re also the questions that make great RPGs great (and, if we go even further, the questions that drive most stories, and if we want to go further still, human morality). Do you want to choose the easy path to success, but hurt other people? Or do you want to take the more difficult path, but avoid destroying innocent human beings?
The Cult Classics Paved The Way
This ethical conflict has powered multiple vampire games over the years. In my personal favorite,Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, you have to drink blood to progress, but how you get the blood is up to you. You can get small amounts by killing rats and raiding blood banks, but getting enough to thrive requires cornering humans in back alleys.
Drinking a human’s blood is framed as a necessity, but it’s up to you whether you drink just enough, or drain them dry. If you go raisin mode, expect to lose humanity points. And if you do it in public, you’ll violate the ‘Masquerade,’ the laws that require keeping vampiric behavior to the shadows.
Vampyr, Don’t Nod’s 2019 follow-up to Life is Strange, plumbed the depths of depravity and the inherent dangers of vampirism, following Jonathan Reid, a recently turned vampire in 1918 London. In that game, you could make it to the finish without drinking human blood, but it would mean missing out on leveling up — a pretty tough handicap in an RPG. What’s more, the game built on its foundation as a relationship-driven RPG, with NPCs' blood gaining potency the closer your relationship became.
Vampire games aren’t always big hits, andthey certainly don’t always deserve to be. Both of the games I’ve mentioned have achieved cult status over the years — especially VTMB, which is the Velvet Underground of video games — but neither was a huge hit when it launched. VTMB’s release was eclipsed by Half-Life 2, which launched the same day. Paired with how janky the game was at launch, that was the kiss of death. Vampyr, meanwhile, only sold all right and received mixed reviews. Those who loved it, really loved it, but most ignored it.
The Blood of Dawnwalker has potential to break out in a big way. It’s a medieval RPG launching the year afterKingdom Come: Deliverance 2. It has The Witcher 3 pedigree. It’s a big choice-driven RPG at a time when audiences can’t get enough of them. Sure, it looks a little janky, but players increasingly understand that interesting, deep gameplay is worth trading a little fidelity for. The Blood of Dawnwalker could do the impossible and bring vampire games out into the bright sunshine of the mainstream.
