The comparison is no accident, because the game’s director also has deep ties to CD Projekt RED’s 2015 classic…
In The Blood of Dawnwalker, 14th-century Europe, still suffering from the aftermath of war and plague, looks exactly like the kind of muddy hell Geralt would cut his way through in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Its protagonist, the half-vampire Coen, projects a similarly almost-human-but-clearly-something-more energy – a gruff yet acceptable monster we need in order to crush the real villains. When asked whether he is comfortable with The Blood of Dawnwalker being compared to The Witcher 3, the game’s director, Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, said he absolutely is, and that he feels very confident about what his team is building.
Tomaszkiewicz was not only the director of The Witcher 3, but also the story designer and screenwriter of the first The Witcher, the lead quest designer of The Witcher 3, and the second director and development lead on Cyberpunk 2077. In 2022, he founded his own studio, Rebel Wolves, to make more of the sort of open-world games he describes as story-driven, but with a twist. Those twists matter. In The Blood of Dawnwalker, one of them is a more consequential day-night cycle, with Coen only gaining access to his full vampire abilities at night. There is also more time pressure involved: while Cyberpunk 2077 stuck a chip in your head, told you it would kill you if you did not deal with it, and then let you roam however you pleased, The Blood of Dawnwalker expects players to choose their side content more carefully.
You will not have time to do everything in a single playthrough. And while Tomaszkiewicz is happy that the new game is being compared to something as beloved as The Witcher 3, the music even nods in that direction, he does not want Rebel Wolves to become the next CD Projekt. Rebel Wolves currently employs 160 people, and his dream for The Blood of Dawnwalker is for it to be successful enough to finance two more games of a similar size.
“Starting a new company just to do exactly the same thing we did before is a problem, because then we do not feel like we are evolving or growing further. That was very important to us as artists. We want to push the boundaries of AAA RPGs by building in risky elements that create a bigger experience, more emotion, and a different kind of mood throughout the game. Our team’s goal is to keep the size we have right now. Maybe we will need help in certain areas after the game launches, so we will probably grow a little. But I am afraid that if we keep expanding, we will lose the communication and processes we have now. I would like Rebel Wolves to be exactly this size even 10 years from now”, Tomaszkiewicz said.
The Blood of Dawnwalker is expected to launch this year for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC.
Source: PCGamer, The Game Business
