Blood of the Dawnwalker interview: “We want you to have full freedom”
By Kirk McKeand
During its live gameplay stream, Rebel Wolves showed the world A Monk and a Saint, a quest from its open world medieval vampire RPG, Blood of the Dawnwalker. To show off the depth of player choice, the video highlighted two of the ways players could complete the quest, with time of day, skills, and the characters you spoke to all impacting how it played out. During Gamescom 2025, the developers showed the mission yet again, with another two possible routes, giving us four distinct variations of the same quest. “That’s pretty wild,” I say that to the developers. “There’s more than four,” creative director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz laughs. It’s the laugh of a man who lived through the creation of The Witcher 3 — a real RPG sicko laugh, right from the depths.
Dawnwalker is a game for us sickos. Set during 1347, somewhere in the Carpathians, you take control of Coen, a half vampire who gains bestial powers and bloodlust during the night and can use a dash of necromancy during the day. When darkness falls, Coen can walk up vertical surfaces and teleport between rooftops. During fights, he wields his claws. During the day, he’s more grounded, unable to do magic parkour and forced to fight with sword and fists, but he can still call on magical energy to speak to the dead. He also doesn’t have to, you know, suck the juice out of dudes when the sun’s up.
This dual gameplay system lends itself to wild variations in quests. Different NPCs are around in the day and during the night, and your abilities allow and prevent access to certain places. Then there are your conversation options influencing how things play out.
“We try to use the same methodology and approach to all the quests,” Tomaszkiewicz says. “But of course, there are simpler quests, and there are more complex quests.”
Rebel Wolves has to not only account for players coming at a quest during the night or during the day, but also factor in what happens when they start the quest in the day and end during the night, or vice versa. At the start of the game, you have 30 days to save your family, and significant quests (clearly marked) tick the clock forward by a chunk of time spread out over daytime and nighttime. But even outside of this game’s quirks, it’s also an open world RPG, allowing players to come at quests out of order (if anything, it’s encouraged here because you can go save your family on day one but it’ll be hard) or from strange angles (walking on walls is a headache for devs). It was a lot of work on the development side to make sure Coen isn’t stranded on some roof because time changed back to day when he was using his vampiric powers — hence why there are clearly marked time trigger points.
“From the design perspective, it was also a lot of work to figure out,” senior quest designer Patryk Fijałkowski explains. “‘Can we progress time here? Won't it break the quest?’ And sometimes it broke the quest, and either we had to take a step back or make another outcome. ‘What happens if you go to the place where the quest should happen before the quest asks you to?’ A lot of games bypass that by basically not turning on the things in there, but we usually try to take a different approach, where you can play objectives of order and the quest reacts to it. And this, of course, is another layer of complexity, because now the dialogs have to react and so on.”
Then there’s Coen’s thirst for human blood. He can’t help it, he’s a thirsty boy. When night falls, you have to keep him topped up with the red stuff, otherwise he enters a state of blood hunger and pounces on the nearest person before draining them dry. When you manually trigger it, you can control it and keep the person alive. When starvation kicks in, though, he bleeds them completely after pouncing on instinct. It doesn’t matter who it is — key NPCs can be killed by your thirst if you’re not careful.
“We put in a lot of work to react to that,” Fijałkowski says. “So if you go with the flow, who knows what may happen?”
While you’ll be able to save freely and revert your saves, the developers hope you’ll lean into these systemic stories as just another thing that makes Dawnwalker’s story unique to you. There’s no way to see everything in a single playthrough anyway, so it just gives you a reason to go back around again and see the story from another perspective.
The team pulled from everywhere in vampire fiction to inspire the game, from True Blood to Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Interview with the Vampire, as well as Name of the Rose, which shares its grounded, medieval setting. “We have some really passionate people about the medieval times who spend a ton of time making these outfits and the architecture believable for the time period,” Tomaszkiewicz says. “Vale Sangora is a fictional place, but we want you to feel it's real.”
Vampires are new to the people of the valley. They were just bedtime stories to scare children until a terrible plague broke out and the blood suckers saw it as their opportunity to rule, headed up by Brencis, the leader of the vampire clique who’s been waiting in the shadows for centuries. It’s a simple exchange: blood for health. It’s one many of the citizens of Svartrau, Vale Sangora’s capital city, happily take. After all, the lords who ruled over them bled them too, just in a different way.
At the start of the game, your little sister is a victim of this bargain. Brencis feeds her vampiric blood and cures her, but takes her away with him, now transformed. That’s when the month begins and you have to build up your power and support before taking the fight to the castle. But even if you don’t do that, the game won’t just end. It’s up to you how important your family is.
“Is family really important to you?” Fijałkowski asks. “The main storyline with saving your family is about that, but lots of different plotlines revolve around that in one way or another.”
“We have some really heavy stuff about specific problems within families,” Tomaszkiewicz adds. How do you solve them? It’s also on very subtle levels… I don't want to go too much. I want the players to experience this. But Coen's family had problems before the vampires.”
All of this feeds into what the developers call the “narrative sandbox”. As soon as the prologue ends, the entire world opens up to you like Breath of the Wild and you’re free to take on whatever whets your appetite (usually blood).
“We want you to feel like you have this sandbox where you have full freedom,” Tomaszkiewicz says. “You can go anywhere you want within the boundaries of the valley. Right after the prologue, you can go straight for the castle and try to rescue your family. You can mix and match different questlines. Certain big questlines are kind of hidden, so we’d love you to explore, to find them, and have this feeling of, ‘Oh, I found this faction, and I want to get them as allies.’”
Rebel Wolves has built the world to support this. Since you have to wait for time to progress as you tick off activities, you can’t skip ahead. If you see something you want to explore but can’t reach until you have your nocturnal abilities, you have to just come back when it’s nighttime. The idea is you make a mental note and come back during the night to see a location in a new way — quite literally from another angle as you walk up walls and shift between rooftops.
While hands-off, Dawnwalker was one of the most promising games of Gamescom. Part Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 and part The Witcher 3, it’s a meaty, grounded, dark RPG I can’t wait to drain dry in 2026.