The Blood of Dawnwalker, developed by former CD Projekt Red staff, gets reveal
Set to release in 2026, the dark fantasy RPG is what The Witcher 3 director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz describes as a "narrative sandbox".
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The game takes place in medieval Europe, with a vampiric twist. (Image source: Rebel Wolves)
Rebel Wolves is a new studio founded in 2022, but rest assured, it's no team of amateurs. Founded by Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, the former director of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, many of those on the core team have worked on The Witcher series as well as Cyberpunk 2077.
And just this week, the Polish-based studio has announced its first title: The Blood of Dawnwalker, set to be the first entry in Rebel Wolves' "brand new role-playing saga" in the dark fantasy genre.
The single-player open-world action RPG is set in alternative 14th century Europe. True to the genre, the world you enter is bleak and dreary; taking place in the fictional setting of Vale Sangora, the Black Death hits an already ravaged land plagued by conflict, and in the midst of all this, vampires emerge from the Carpathian Mountains, offering protection for the humans, but seemingly for an ulterior motive.
The game features a world inspired by central and eastern Europe, with influences ranging from Poland and the Balkans to Ukraine and Romania. (Image source: Rebel Wolves)
A street-level view during daytime. (Image source: Rebel Wolves)
Players take the role of Coen, the young protagonist who is turned into the titular Dawnwalker, a being somewhere between a man and a vampire. Not being fully either, this conflict brings about one of the game's core mechanics, that being different abilities and story outcomes based on the time of day. An example given by Tomaszkiewicz in Rebel Wolves' game reveal stream is Coen's relative weakness as a human in the daytime, while at night, he has access to vampiric abilities, but faces much more difficult enemies.
As Coen, under the backdrop of vampire lord Brencis's regime, you have a choice to use your powers to save your family from his grasp or get revenge, and players only have 30 days and nights to do so.
Check out the CGI trailer here (with a gameplay teaser at the end), taking place two years before the main game:
At the heart of Rebel Wolves' pitch is the flexibility in shaping your own story via the game's quests, with Tomaszkiewicz calling this approach to the open-world RPG a "narrative sandbox". As he puts it:
Citing classic RPGs as the inspiration, Tomaszkiewicz and narrative director Jakub Szamałek noted Fallout 2 as one reference for what they are trying to accomplish, where the game allows the player to shape their own narrative right out of the gate. Akin to older RPGs, they also wanted to incorporate a sense of urgency, hence the day-night system.
The trailer also teased a gameplay reveal this summer, with a release date sometime in 2026. The release platforms for The Blood of Dawnwalker are PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC via Steam, and its set to be published by Bandai Namco.
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