Developer Rebel Wolves has made no secret of the fact that its upcoming RPG – The Blood of Dawnwalker – will have player agency as one of its core gameplay aspects. In an interview with Eurogamer, game director Konrad Tomaskiewicz has spoken about the RPG and compared it to some of the giants of the genre, both modern and classics.
When it comes to the central structure of The Blood of Dawnwalker, Tomaskiewicz said that players won’t really find a singular main quest to follow. Rather, they will encounter different kinds of quests, and figure out things like where their main target might be. This also means that the player can then decide to immediately take out the target, or even hang back and do some other quests that might help weaken the target’s position. He noted that the number of options presented to players is the studio’s attempts at bringing the freedom of gameplay decisions that can often only be seen in table-top RPGs.
“No, there’s no main quest. You build your experience from the quests you encounter,” he explained. “You know where your enemy is. You can attack this place anytime you want to. It’s up to you if you want to do it by yourself, or if you want to build yourself, find the powerful items, develop your character, or do some quests and find allies to help you do it. We want to bring video games closer to pen-and-paper RPGs and give you the freedom to experience what you want to experience.”
As for just how much freedom the player might have, with Eurogamer asking whether it will be similar to Warhorse Studios’ Kingdom Come: Deliverance series, Tomaskiewicz noted that it wasn’t a bad example. However, more apt examples, according to him, would be the classic Fallout and Fallout 2 developed by Interplay in the 1990s. In both titles, players were given their primary objective right from the beginning, but then also had freedom to explore the world and build up their strength in different ways at their own pace.
“Kingdom Come: Deliverance is not a bad example, but still they have the main story that develops; you have the open world and the main quest which is leading you,” said Tomaskiewicz. “In our game it’s different. Our game is more similar in this area to the old Fallout, the first and second games, where you have a clear goal and everything is optional – you decide. You travel the world, you decide what you want to do. There is no main quest.”
Earlier this month, Tomaskiewicz had also spoken about how The Blood of Dawnwalker will tackle the subject of vampires, noting that rather than being a story about vampires, the upcoming RPG will be a story that happens to feature vampires. “We have different creatures of the night,” he said. “We want to tell [a] story with the vampires, not the story about [only] the vampires.”
The Blood of Dawnwalker is in development for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, and is slated for release in 2026.
