Director of the upcoming RPG The Blood of Dawnwalker, Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, doesn’t want players to feel overpowered during their time with the game. In an interview with Edge Magazine (via GamesRadar), Tomaszkiewicz confirmed that protagonist Coen will be “quite easy to kill” for at least half of the game.
This comes down to the fact that Coen is a human/vampire hybrid, making him more vulnerable during the daytime and stripping him of many of his vampire powers while the sun is still up. When the sun goes down, however, Coen will get a considerable power boost, since “he becomes a vampire and has vampire powers,” said the director.
“He has some powers, but he is quite easy to kill. That was important for us, because we didn’t want to create this overpowered protagonist – that makes it hard to tell stories. We wanted someone who can be hurt, can die, because those stakes are really important.”
Despite Coen being relatively fragile during the daytime, however, Rebel Wolves has been trying hard to ensure that players don’t come across any distinct fail states during their time with the game. Just last month, Tomaszkiewicz had spoken about how the choices made by players will still give them ways to finish the game. Even killing every NPC won’t create a failure state, he said.
“The game – this is a role-playing game. It’s about player role. If you want to play like this or if it happens, you decide if you want to reload the game or go with the flow and see what happens.”
This comes down to the fact that Rebel Wolves is trying to ensure that The Blood of Dawnwalker is a “narrative sandbox”. Comparing it to the classic Fallout RPGs developed by Interplay in the 1990s, Tomaszkiewicz said that the team wants the player “to be able to decide which path they want to take to reach the end of the game.”
This could also end up having interesting knock-on effects on potential sequels, since Tomaszkiewicz and publisher Bandai Namco have confirmed that players will be able to carry over their save files into future games.
“From the beginning, when we talked about The Blood of Dawnwalker, we talked about the whole cycle, because we planned a few games and we wanted to tell the particular story we thought about. When you know what you want to say in the next games and where they lead, it’s easier to plan the story for [the first] game and to put some events and story elements in which will be the hooks for the next things which will happen,” said Tomaszkiewicz.
“If you are not thinking about it, then later you have a problem because you start the next game, you have some ideas for the story, and you start to think, ‘Okay, I will move the saves for the players and what kind of decisions I should predict, and how should it be connected? And how to make it smooth and organic?’ And so on. We prefer to do it this way.”
The Blood of Dawnwalker is being developed for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S, and is slated for release on September 3rd. For more, check out 15 huge details you may have missed.
