While developer Rebel Wolves has made no secret of the fact that its upcoming RPG, The Blood of Dawnwalker, will focus quite a bit on giving players plenty of agency, creative director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz has now also revealed that it will feature a small-but-dense world for players to explore. In an interview with GamesRadar, Tomaszkiewicz spoke about combining the freedom of Baldur’s Gate 3 with a world the size of classic RPG Gothic.
Noting that he is excited about the modern gaming trend of “maximizing player agency”, Tomaszkiewicz brought up Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3 in particular.
“I love the games that did this in the past, and I loved what they did with Baldur’s Gate 3, for example, with this – kind of mixing this narrative experience and maximizing your freedom of choice: what do you want to do, which plot lines do you want to do or not do, and how does the game world react to this? I think this is very exciting,” he said.
With this emphasis on player agency, Tomaszkiewicz brought up the fact that while other games “can have a super well-crafted, very emotional, cinematic experience,” not giving players enough freedom ultimately means that “you’re basically like an observer with extra steps.” He went on to say, “to me, it’s not as exciting as really participating and leaving my mark on the game world.”
As for the scope of The Blood of Dawnwalker, Tomaszkiewicz said that he has been finding large open-world games tiring, especially since he doesn’t have much free time these days and instead prefers “more condensed experiences.”
“I feel tired with games that are way too big,” he said. “I don’t have that much time, and I prefer more condensed experiences, but I still enjoy open worlds. One of my favorites from the past were the Gothic games, for example, and they were much smaller worlds, but they were so dense with detail, quests, and characters, and it felt like you really inhabited that space. This is something I really enjoy also.”
“Obviously we are kind of also doing it because we wanted to keep the scope contained to the specific size of the team, and we wanted to produce this in a reasonable way and so on,” Tomaszkiewicz continued. “But I think it has this effect of having this smaller world that is dense with content, and you get a lot of the good stuff – you don’t feel like you’re just traversing empty spaces that much.”
Tomaszkiewicz recently also confirmed that The Blood of Dawnwalker will have full support for players who want to run through the game as an evil character, thanks in large part to the level of freedom offered by the RPG.
“Evil run. Generally speaking, you can kill off the majority of NPCs,” he said during a Q&A. “Maybe not every single one; there are specific cases where, for narrative cohesion, we had to limit that. But we tried to make sure you can kill off most NPCs if you want to, and the main story handles it: you get different outcomes, different endings for different plot lines. It was actually a big point of discussion in the studio: ‘Is this true to Coen? Would he do these things?’”
The Blood of Dawnwalker is being developed for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S, and is slated for release on September 3rd.
