Talking Player Choice And Using Time As A Resource With The Blood Of Dawnwalker Developer Rebel Wolves

It doesn’t take an industry insider to see that the video game industry is in a dark place at the moment. Beyond the catastrophic human element, we’re seeing fewer and fewer risks taken by major publishers and studios, with long-standing properties and established names being the only constant you can expect to see. That’s what makes The Blood of Dawnwalker such an interesting and refreshing proposition. Not only is the vampire-focused RPG huge in scale, but it also touts various creative systems that buck the usual AAA trends.

I recently attended a preview event for The Blood of Dawnwalker, where I spent four hours going hands-on with the open-world action-adventure RPG, draining blood, swinging swords, and getting into fistfights with local roughnecks. Not only did I come away from my time with the game desperate to play more, but I also had a greater appreciation for the risks developer Rebel Wolves were willing to take in the pursuit of creativity. In addition to playing the game, I also got to spend some time chatting with Rebel Wolves writer Piotr Kucharski. We spoke about Dawnwalker’s unique time mechanic, the game’s various inspirations, and the benefits and pressures of working on and debuting a new IP.

WellPlayed: One of the most intriguing aspects of The Blood of Dawnwalker is the time system, where it’s used as a resource or a commodity that has to be spent to further the narrative. Where did the decision to implement that come from? How early in development did it come about, and what were the reasons behind including it? 

Piotr Kucharski: So basically it’s one of the foundations of the whole idea. Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, our CEO, had this idea for a game. He wanted to make a role-playing game, but one in which you would be fully immersed, where your choices would always have consequences, and you would feel the weight of your choices. 

So then the time system came about to put a bit of pressure on Coen, not on the players, but on Coen. In many games, there’s this idea that the main hero has to do some grand thing, like save the world, so to speak. But there are also all the side activities, so the world will wait. You can go fishing, you can go horse riding, you can go sightseeing, and so on. So we wanted to avoid that. We wanted to keep people immersed. But also, we didn’t want to rush them. We didn’t want to get in the way of exploration, where you can’t freely sightsee, because of a clock ticking. 

So we came up with the time segments and using time as a resource. And I think that in the end, it also adds another layer to the role-playing adventure. And make your choices. 

So basically, there are some quests that, if you want to get an outcome, you will have to pay with your time. But maybe you will find some other solution that won’t require you to do so. So that was the idea. Of course, there has been a lot of balancing, iteration, and so on and so on. But in the end, we’re quite happy with the outcome. 

WP: As a writer yourself, how did you have to adapt your approach to storytelling knowing that players were only going to be able to experience, say, 40% of the game in a single playthrough? 

PK: First of all, you have to come into the whole thing with the mindset that you’re alright with it. You’re alright with the fact that some things will remain hidden. Some people will see some parts of the story, others will see some other parts of the story. That’s the philosophy when making a game in which your choices matter. It’s also about crafting the whole story and deciding what parts of it [the player] will see. 

And I think this is one of the most fun things about role-playing games, right? You have to make the choices, and you will not see everything because some choices are exclusive. From the writing perspective, in Rebel Wolves, in the narrative team, we work in tandem with our quest designers. So basically, the quest designers get an idea of a quest, and we iterate first on paper, then we try to apply it in the engine and see how things work. So before I even start writing dialogue, we try to see how things work, how the players will tackle the things, and come up with as many solutions as possible. And then you write the thing. And then something plays the thing and tells you, “You know what, it doesn’t work. You have to go back to the drawing board”

So you quickly learn about killing your darlings and about the iteration process. The idea is to get it right and find the most satisfying playthrough for every player. So it’s challenging, obviously. It took quite a lot of time, quite a lot of discussions, quite a lot of writing and rewrites and so on.  But in the end, it’s all about choice and giving that to the players, because that is what role-playing games are about. 

WP: I was reading an interview with Rebel Wolves’ founder Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, where he spoke about the philosophy of failing forward. An idea that there aren’t any black and white right or wrong decisions. Can you speak to that principle and how players will feel it when making choices throughout the game? 

PK: The idea is that whatever choice you make, you are supposed to get an interesting story beat. So even if a choice seems to be the ‘wrong one’, you will still get something out of it. You will either learn something about other characters, you will learn some lore, maybe you will even find an item, things like that. It’s all about making every choice viable. That way, the players will not feel like, “ah, damn it, let’s reload the game because this is not the choice I want.” 

Obviously, it’s also a matter of preference. Some people will still be like, “Okay, I am going to press F9 and retry the whole thing.” Especially with Coen having this hunger inside of him, he may lose control of himself, right? And he may kill quite a lot of people. I really encourage players to be okay with that. If Coen loses control and kills someone, play with that, face the consequences, and the game will not be broken.

So you can basically kill everyone, and the game will not be broken. And it also adds up to the whole narrative sandbox idea, that whatever you do, it’s a valid choice. After the prologue, you can go wherever you want. You know what the goal is: it’s to defeat Bencis, but how you get there is up to you

WP: With Dawnwalker having this nonlinear approach to progression, how did the team tackle morality? 

PK: You have to make it believable, first of all. You have to make it a choice that the character would actually make. There has to be a motivation behind it, and it’s not only about saying, “You know what, I’m going to kill you”. 

You need to have a buildup. You need to have things happen that will leave Cohen with those decisions. So, if Cohen says, “Just get away from here, I don’t care about you,” it should be a valid option. It should feel like Cohen is still being Cohen. 

Basically, when we created him, we wanted him to be a character that’s believable, that’s fleshed out, and from the beginning you know who he is. So he is this young man, raising a family with their own troubles. Everything that’s happening to him is quite terrible. With the Black Death before, now the Vampires are ruling the place, it’s not an easy life. 

We talked about what kind of character we want him to be, and we wanted him to be as human as possible and also someone very open to other people. Someone who can read their emotions, who can be empathetic. Of course, this is the origin of Coen, the setup of Cohen. His changing into the Dawnwalker is a bit like a new beginning to him. 

We know who Coen was, but now the players can decide whether he will strive to remain as human as possible, to remain a good boy. Or they can be like, “You know what, screw it, finally I’m free, I can do whatever I want” It also ties into the motivations behind fighting Brencis. Because you can feel like you’re doing it to save your family. Or you also can be like, “This guy ruined my life and I just want to get my sweet revenge.” And all of these are valid and true to the character. 

WP: Something that is important in many RPGs is reactivity. You do something here, and it will affect a conversation you have with a character there. How did the team approach this aspect of role-playing within the limits of your time mechanic? 

PK: There’s a two-prong system to it. So first of all, you have the choices that have an immediate impact. You steal something from someone; they see it, and they will react. You attack someone, they will defend themselves and so on and so on. 

From the other point of view, we have some choices that will have a payoff later on in the game. So, for example, if you kill someone in one quest line, and then you’re in some very different story line later in the game, you’ll meet another character who tells you, “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die!” This is the idea. 

So to not only show the players that the world is reactive to their choices, but also that it will surprise them in the long run. 

WP: Taking a step back to the conceptual phase, what was so alluring, from a narrative perspective, about vampires, the 14th century, and the Carpathians as a setting? 

PK: We wanted to have our own IP. From the very beginning, we said that it would be a dark fantasy game set in medieval times. And this offered us a lot of opportunities to have fun with adding some things, adding some twists and turns. Of course, there was a question of historical accuracy. If we wanted to stick to things being as accurate as possible or not. The answer was no. 

We wanted to have a setting for all those history buffs around. They will recognise some things and be able to say, “Oh yeah, people used to live like that.” There are mentions of characters, real historical characters, events and so on. But in the end, we didn’t want to stand in the way of us having fun and creating fun stories

So whenever we were challenged with the question, “Would this happen because of X, Y, or Z?”, we had to figure out what was more important. And to us, in most cases, the more important thing was to have a cool story and something that the players would find believable, but not necessarily true to the real world and what really happened, right? 

And of course, when it comes to vampires, you know, we drew from quite a lot of sources, namely from different folklore around the world. We have vampires in almost every kind of belief system: Chinese, African, European; they are everywhere, really. 

Here, it’s mostly drawn from Germanic, Slavic, Balkan, and Romanian folklore, but we’ve also added our own twist. Not only with the vampires, but we have the Uriași you’ll meet, who are goat people. So they are from real Romanian folklore. They were giants living in the hills and in the mountains. So we decided to keep them quite big and keep them hidden away, living in their own villages up in the mountains. But now, with the vampires out in the open, they’re like, “You know what, it might be a good idea to join those guys and find our own place in the world of humans.” 

So we had quite a lot of fun with that, and hopefully people will enjoy all the twists that we added. And I think learning the deeper facets of lore should be fun for them too. 

WP: As you mentioned, this is a new IP, which is something we don’t see a lot of at this scale. As a writer in an industry wanting to play everything safe, what was it like working on a completely new IP? I imagine there’s safety working on an established brand, but there would be benefits to working on something new as well. 

PK: Working with an IP that is well established, some things are easy because you already know the answer to certain questions. But also, there are limitations. “We can’t do this because it will ruin the established lore” 

With a new IP, you don’t have those constraints, but you have to come up with everything on your own. From the very beginning, we said it’s going to be a saga. Showing the CGI [trailer] on Summer Game Fest, showing Coen in modern times, we wanted to remind people that this is going to be a saga and also to promise them that, if you get involved from the very beginning, there will be a payoff. 

But also, it’s important to say that the story of Coen and Brencis in this first game is a self-contained story. So you will get most of the answers regarding this particular plotline. But of course, there will be some further questions left open. 

But to answer your question, creating your own thing is very satisfying. I, as a writer, when I came to the company, many things were already there, many ideas, the world. Jakub Szamalek, who is the Narrative Director, with Konrad and other guys, came up with the core ideas. So when I signed the NDA, they showed me the game, and I was like, “Oh my God, this is so cool.”

But honestly, the agency, my agency, was really there. Working on both the quests and the ideas for the lore. We had a lot of brainstorming sessions, things like people saying, “Okay, guys, I have this problem, what do we do about it? What was really awesome was Jakub saying to us, “Come up with an idea, and then we can discuss it. I’m not going to answer it for you. We have to make sure it is a team effort.” And in the end, everyone put their heart and souls into it. And I hope that people will feel it. This is an original idea, an original IP. There are a lot of things to find out and discover, but also hopefully we’ll be engaging enough for people. Because obviously, there is this stress and this nervousness about showing your brand new baby to the world. 

But honestly, I’m quite confident about it. We’ve played the game; we’ve see some reactions already. And, you know, you have to believe in your child before you push it out in the open. We’re quite confident; we have a great team, and hopefully we’ll see that pay off. And hopefully, in the future, there will be more adventures with Cohen, because this is all about him. His journey from point A to point B. Time will tell. 

WP: That pivots nicely into my last question. In talking about the trailer shown at SGF, I don’t think everyone would be so confident as to show what you guys did. I think that was pretty bold. But it shows a lot of confidence in the product. What was the thought process behind promising players a scope beyond the first game, before that first game has even been released?

PK: There were quite a few reasons behind it. So first of all, we wanted this event to remind everyone that it’s going to be a saga. From the very beginning, we said so, and this is a reminder that we have the whole thing planned out; we have ideas. And if people engage with the product and they like it, we are ready to deliver more. 

Also, as you said, it is a promise. It’s a promise that we will be sticking with Cohen; we’ll tell his story. If we have the opportunity to do so, we will do so. We’ll focus on him. And if you are in for the ride, we will do everything in our power to give you a really enjoyable experience. 

WP: Piotr, thank you so much for your time. I’ve absolutely loved my time with Dawnwalker so far. Best of luck with the launch. 

PK: Thank you so much. I hope you enjoy yourself once you get to play the full thing. 

The Blood of Dawnwalker releases on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC on September 3.