Rebel Wolves, the studio behind upcoming RPGThe Blood of Dawnwalker, is headed by CD Projekt Red alums, including the game director onThe Witcher 3, so it probably shouldn’t surprise anybody that the former sounds a lot like the latter, except with vampires. I thought – nay, hoped – that since a smaller studio was behind it, it wouldn’t be as big a game.
Like many people, I’ve grown quite tired of the open-world formula and games that take forever to finish. I liked The Witcher 3, though Ifound its filler content tiring, and was intrigued by the idea that The Blood of Dawnwalker would be a“narrative sandbox”of sorts that would let you decide what kind of story you created with each playthrough, instead of a checklist game where you have to spend hours ticking off all sorts of annoying side content to fully complete it.
The Blood Of Dawnwalker Will Have Bandit Camps And Treasure
Unfortunately for me, but fortunately for people who loveUbisoftgames, Rebel Wolves has shared more information about the game, and it sounds like The Blood of Dawnwalker is going to be a bigger open-world game than we expected.A post on the game’s official Twitter accountsays that Dawnwalker has “a variety of biomes, such as mountains, meadow, peatbog, swamp, forest, caves, etc., as well as a variety of NPCs and points of interest: shrines, ruins, bandit camps, monster nests, treasures, and much more.”
I just fell to my knees in my office and shook my hands at the sky. Again, this is probably good news for a lot of people, especially RPG fans who want to pour hundreds of hours into a game. And again, that is not me.
When I think about “points of interest”, I see checklists materialise before my eyes. I see myself sneaking up to bandit camps over and over, fighting the same enemies every time, never gaining anything from the experience but some gold and a little more despair. I think about treasure hunts, all structured the exact same way – find mysterious note or map, go to location, uncover loot.
Filler Content Makes Games Lose Urgency
To be fair, creative director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz hastold GamesRadar+ thatwhile the studio is aiming for “the quality level of The Witcher 3”, The Blood of Dawnwalker will be closer to 30 to 40 hours. It’s unclear if this length will include the kind of side content alluded to in the Twitter post, so it’s hard to say if my concerns are well-founded, but I do worry that having this kind and amount of side content in the game will throw off the pacing of the game.
I mention pacing specifically because The Blood of Dawnwalker plays a lot with time. Coen, the protagonist, has different (read: vampire) skills at night, but it also requires time to pass – you have 30 days to save your family from execution, and time only moves forward when you do certain actions. Exploration doesn’t take time, but certain quests do. It’s sort of like Baldur’s Gate 3, but hopefully with better signposting.
But considering this is a game that’s supposed to emulate urgency, having a bunch of side content to mop up in between all the important stuff seems like it will detract from that. Sure, this is an issue most open-world games suffer from, but I was hoping that as a “narrative sandbox”, The Blood of Dawnwalker would feel smaller and more consequential, like youdon’thave time to waste biting bandits in the neck. We’ll have to wait and see the game before we know how it all shakes out.
