Following the release and positive critical reception of open-world RPG The Blood of Dawnwalker, developer Rebel Wolves still has plenty more planned. In an interview with Eurogamer, director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz confirmed that the studio is working on improvements for the title, which will include, among other things, a new difficulty option.
Tomaszkiewicz has also confirmed that the way combat targeting works will see some changes to make it easier for players who want to escape from some battles by simply running away. However, when it came to a potential New Game+ mode, the director said that the team isn’t quite ready to talk about all of the upcoming additions to the game just yet.
“There is a chance, but I don’t want to speak about it yet,” he said about New Game+. “We will have the proper beats with our publishing team, and if I tell you more, they will kill me.”
As for the new difficulty mode, in a twist, Rebel Wolves is actually working on adding an easier option. As a result, the “Story” difficulty mode will be renamed to something else. The new easier option will take on the “Story” label instead.
“We will introduce an additional difficulty level, but an easier one, because many people are asking for a more easy difficulty. The Story mode which we have right now will be a different difficulty – we will call it Demanding or something like this – and we will add a new Story mode which will be even easier for people who don’t want to experience the combat; they just want to learn the story and go through the game without this gameplay challenge.”
Combat changes will include the game not automatically switching targets when the player stuns an opponent with a difficulty. Tomaszkiewicz admitted that the current behaviour in the game was his fault, and that it was originally meant to work in a different way.
“When I was playing in some of the gameplay reviews, I wanted to stun an opponent and then switch to the other one, but because I was locked on him still, I hit him by mistake and took the stun from him, and that’s why we made it switch for the other character. But people complain about it, and in the newest patch we will lift off and we will see.
The new system will involve players needing to land three hits to “take off this stun”. This is still an experiment, however, and the director isn’t quite sure how the player base will react. “Maybe people will switch between targets fluently, and if they want to just stun, it will be fine, and if they want to stun and hit a few times, it will also be fine. We will see.”
Updates are also going to focus on improving the technical performance of The Blood of Dawnwalker. While it can run at well over 60 FPS on suitable systems, Tomaszkiewicz noted that players wanted to see even higher frame rates up to 120 FPS.
As for parts of The Blood of Dawnwalker that won’t be changing, Tomaszkiewicz confirmed that Rebel Wolves has no plans to tone down enemy health. This, he explained, was to encourage players to think harder about their character builds.
“It depends a lot on how you develop your character and what gear you have. You can create builds where you’re killing them really fast. If you create other builds, they will be more spongy. It’s really hard to balance between these because if we decrease the health too much and you create a really strong build, you will one-shot everyone.”
Further in the interview, he said that the team didn’t want to change the game balance in this regard. “You can do the builds like this. It depends strongly on you. I know there are some people who don’t develop the character and save the perks because they want to do more content, but if you don’t spend those perks, the enemies will be more spongy because you don’t develop your character.”
The Blood of Dawnwalker is available on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. Check out our review for more details.
