The Blood of Dawnwalker Gives You Enough Freedom to Kill a Lot of “Important NPCs,” Devs Aiming for Campaign to Last 30-40 Hours
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While we haven’t seen much gameplay in Rebel Wolves’ The Blood of Dawnwalker, the studio, comprised of ex-CD Projekt RED staff, has been willing to share information about the game. The game’s director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz. who worked as Lead Quest Designer in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, has confirmed that players will be able to kill NPCs (non-player characters) — even important ones.
Contrary to most open-world action games where you can’t kill NPCs unless you’re specifically tasked to, in Blood of Dawnwalker, that won’t be the case.
Expect NPC Blood to Spill in Blood of Dawnwalker
Speaking to Games Radar, Tomaszkiewicz mentioned that while the “narrative sandbox” the developers are aiming for doesn’t offer endless possibilities, given that you are playing the protagonist and the studio has a story to tell, players will be able to shape their own version of Coen.
The game’s quests can branch and twist in different directions, as Tomaszkiewicz explains, “For example, we allow you to kill off a lot of NPCs, and a lot of them can be really important NPCs.”
However, there is a drawback to just sucking the blood out of everyone. “Sometimes this can lead to alternate outcomes or even cut off certain quest lines. And this, of course, ties into our other systems […] you being a Dawnwalker means that you have this blood hunger during the night time, so this can actually lead to these NPCs dying if you’re not careful,” Tomaszkiewicz notes.
It’s unknown whether players can kill important NPCs while traipsing through the game’s open world or whether this needs to be tied somewhat to the game’s story and quests.
Blood of Dawnwalker Is Planned to Be 30-40 Hours Long
In the same chat, Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz mentioned how he doesn’t care whether people call the upcoming RPG as AA, AAA or even AAAA, as he just wants it to be the same level of quality of The Witcher 3, though admits given they are a smaller studio, this will be smaller than CD Projekt RED’s hit RPG.
Tomaszkiewicz states, “In terms of quality, we definitely look at AAA, because this is where we are coming from, the quality level of The Witcher 3. Definitely, our games are not as huge in terms of amount of content and gameplay hours – we are a smaller studio, this is our first project, so we definitely are building something smaller. But we want to build something as robust in terms of quality, maybe a bit shorter.”
While development is not finished, Rebel Wolves aims for the game to be around 30-40 hours long, which isn’t short, but definitely a lot shorter than games like The Witcher 3. Tomaszkiewicz isn’t too concerned about that and mentions how a game’s size shouldn’t be the basis for whether a game is AAA or not. One example he gives is Call of Duty, as the series’ campaign has never reached the 100-hour mark (or even close to it), and it’s classified as a AAA game.
“Comparing something to a behemoth like The Witcher, which we aimed for 100+ hours, but I think a lot of people played 200, 300 hours, is insane. If size is your measure, then yes it’s not the size of a AAA like The Witcher. But I don’t know if size is the measure, to be honest, because there are AAA games like Call of Duty that aren’t 100+ hours gameplay campaigns. And I don’t know if anyone would call them AA, or indie,” Tomaszkiewicz explains.
If The Blood of Dawnwalker can get anywhere near The Witcher 3’s quality, then action-RPG fans are in for a treat. We’ll have to wait until this summer to catch our first real look at gameplay, but so far, Rebel Wolves is hitting all the right notes in terms of design.
The Blood of Dawnwalker is in development for the PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC, but has no release window yet.
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