Despite being an open-world RPG, The Blood of Dawnwalker has seen plenty of praise thanks to its own twists on the genre. In an interview with Korean publication Inven, a spokesperson for developer Rebel Wolves spoke about how the team wanted to make the games it wanted to play rather than succumbing to market pressure.
“We wanted to create an environment where we could focus entirely on the project itself without being driven by stock market pressure or tight deadlines,” explained the spokesperson. While acknowledging the fact that the studio has gotten plenty of help from companies like NetEase and publisher Bandai Namco, ultimately, Rebel Wolves notes that “We are rebels. We don’t want to follow trends. We want to make games that we ourselves want to play and enjoy.”
The Blood of Dawnwalker was released in September, and since then, the studio has gone on to offer quite a bit of post-launch support with frequent updates. The most recent one, released just last month, brought in more than a thousand improvements, and even added a new “Forgiving” difficulty option, as well as the ability to respec.
One of the RPG’s more unique mechanics is its constantly ticking time limit. With protagonist Coen having a hard limit of 30 in-game days to complete his main quest, Rebel Wolves turned it into a gameplay mechanic to ensure that players are always making important choices whenever they decide what they will do with the time they have left. Interestingly, game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz has said that it used to be a lot more restricted in earlier builds.
“We had at first a more restricted time where it was harder to beat the game, but after all of those voices, before release even, we knew that it can be a problem and we rebalanced it this way to give the buffer for the people to not fear this.”
He went on to note that while the prologue served as a way for the studio to test how its time limit system worked, that part of the game ultimately didn’t get any changes “because we wanted to give this experience for players and show them what they can expect.” In fact, he confirmed that the studio “changed the main game, besides the prologue, because we were afraid that people will complain too much that it’s too restricted.”
On the subject of how strict earlier builds of The Blood of Dawnwalker were, Tomaskiewicz said “Quite [a lot]”, and went on to reveal that “we wanted to give the player the proper feeling and proper emotions of the main story.” Rather than wanting the main campaign to be a challenge in and of itself, the emotions and feelings are “the purpose of the main story, not to create a challenge for it.”
The Blood of Dawnwalker is available on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. For more details, take a look at our review, where we gave it a score of 9 out of 10 thanks to its influential time-limit system, compelling choices, and memorable dramatic consequences for these choices, among other things.
