Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, the director behind The Witcher 3, is cooking up a new RPG that, on paper, lets you march straight toward the final boss from the very first minutes if you dare. His next project, The Blood of Dawnwalker, is targeting a 2026 release, and even though it is still some way off, the way Tomaszkiewicz talks about freedom and player agency already makes it sound like one of the boldest experiments in the genre.

There are not many studios that manage to earn players’ trust before shipping a single game, yet Rebel Wolves has done exactly that. The Polish team, founded by former The Witcher 3 director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz together with several CD Projekt veterans, is starting out with a large-scale, open-world RPG called The Blood of Dawnwalker. The project does not have a precise launch date yet, but its intentions are clear enough: instead of a single main quest dragging the player along, it is built as a sandbox-style adventure where every decision pushes the story and the world in a different direction.

The game is set in a fictional Carpathian valley in the 14th century and casts the player as Coen, a hybrid who is half human, half vampire. During the day, Coen clings to his humanity, talking to people, investigating mysteries, and settling disputes with his sword. At night, his vampiric nature takes over, letting him scale walls, slip through guarded spaces, and feed when he has to. This duality defines not only his skill set, it also shapes how he handles missions and what kinds of relationships he forges with the characters around him.

According to Tomaszkiewicz, that sense of freedom is pushed so far that there is effectively no traditional “main quest”. As he puts it, “you build your experience with the missions you find… You decide if you want to do it alone, or if you prefer to build your own team, find powerful objects, develop your character, or complete missions and find allies to help you”. The idea is to let players piece together their own story out of overlapping objectives instead of following a rigid narrative corridor.

In The Blood of Dawnwalker, You Can Go for the Final Boss From the First Minute

One of the studio’s boldest moves is to let players head straight toward the climactic confrontation from the very start of the game. “You can approach everything however you want to achieve your goal”, the director says, calling this level of freedom a kind of calculated gamble where “the reward is worth it”. In his view, taking risks like this is essential if you want to move the genre forward instead of endlessly repeating safe, familiar formulas.

The creative director explains that the team wants the game to mirror the feeling of classic tabletop role-playing games, where you are free to explore, pick your allies, and carve out your own path. There is, however, a crucial constraint attached to that freedom: players have only 30 days and 30 nights to either save Coen’s family or pursue revenge. Every major mission pushes the in-game clock forward, which adds real pressure to each big decision, although Rebel Wolves stresses that the game will clearly warn you whenever an action will cause time to advance.

With all of this in mind, The Blood of Dawnwalker is already shaping up as one of the most ambitious RPGs of 2026. We still do not know its exact release date, but Tomaszkiewicz has suggested that even if it ended up launching late in the year and going head-to-head with GTA 6, not even Rockstar’s giant would convince Rebel Wolves to move away from the release window they believe in.

Source: 3djuegos