A role-playing game, by tradition, doesn’t have to be one where your choices impact the world. And yet, choice and consequence are fundamental elements that have driven the genre for so long. Not the choices in tactics, party members, equipment or abilities, but what defines the journey in your own mind.
The choice to nuke Megaton in Fallout 3. The choice to bring Anabelle’s bones to Graham in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Even the choice of where to send Jacky after the pivotal heist in Cyberpunk 2077. These can have pivotal, long-term effects on the story, sometimes in ways that won’t be obvious within the confines of the game. They don’t just stay with you because they’re significant, but because you made them and had to live with the consequences forever (or at least until you reload and try something else).
For better or worse, there’s been a dearth of open-world action RPGs with choices of similar narrative impact, much less those that thread the entire experience. So many games took inspiration from The Witcher 3’s gameplay model while infusing their own unique spins and twists – from Horizon Zero Dawn and Forbidden West to Assassin’s Creed Shadows – without really expanding how it handled choices. Which isn’t to say that they featured none whatsoever, but there’s been almost nothing in the genre that’s on the scale of, say, Baldur’s Gate 3 (barring, perhaps, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2). Let’s not even delve into the non-open world action RPGs like Dragon Age: The Veilguard and how poorly they handled the weight of choice.
Which makes The Blood of Dawnwalker, out on September 3rd, so interesting. It’s ironic because Rebel Wolves features veterans from CD Projekt RED, including The Witcher 3’s game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz and its composer, Mikolai Stroinski. Right off the bat, it admits that the open world is on the smaller side and that a typical playthrough could take about 50 hours (depending on the difficulty and whatnot). It also welcomes comparisons to the game that made everyone famous, but there isn’t a lingering sense of recreating it, even though several elements look familiar.
Instead, The Blood of Dawnwalker is looking to bring back choice and consequence to the open-world action RPG setting in its own way, turning what seem like restrictions into moments that carry real significance.
For those unaware, the premise centers on Coen, who resides in a small village called Laslea within the Vale Sangora region. The latter has twisted under the influence of Brencis and his court of vrakhiri, or vampires. Their goal isn’t simply feasting on all the humans and leaving it at that, however. Instead, Brencis wants to subjugate the people, creating a society built on fear and tribute. If he receives their usual offerings of blood, everyone can live as they like, caveats and all. Step out of line, however, and, well, you can probably guess the rest.
Coen’s situation is unique because after being turned into a vampire, he discovers the ability to continue walking around during the day like a human. This mythical “Dawnwalker” seems like the best of both worlds, but that’s the least of our main man’s concerns. After a series of events in the beginning at the hands of Brencis, Coen has 30 days to save his family.
And that’s where The Blood of Dawnwalker weaves in its first mechanic to make you care: Time. When you’re exploring the vast open world, it doesn’t advance, but when it comes to making choices, it begins slipping away, at least in the opening hours. Besides establishing how futile some actions can be, this serves to highlight that some narrative events are set in stone. At least, as long as Coen remains who he is.
The Dawnwalker is a wild card, though. What can’t be achieved during the day when limited to his human capabilities, whether it’s through swordplay or magic, might be accomplished in the nighttime when his vampiric powers become available. Infiltrating a crypt to retrieve something important suddenly becomes a whole lot easier when you can just sneak inside. But that also requires waiting until nighttime. If you can successfully gain access during the day, why not leave the night for something else? The inverse is also true, of course, and that’s only one layer of the choices involved.
Because if you really want, Coen could just abandon his family and do whatever he likes. You could accidentally feed on an NPC and kill them if his hunger is left alone for too long, but why not go out of your way to slaughter everyone? The fact that evil playthroughs are possible and that Rebel Wolves doesn’t have a fail state in place, instead encouraging you to live with your choices, is something that’s not often seen in the open world action RPG genre nowadays.
Then again, you don’t have to be plainly good or evil to outright miss the content available. Coen’s journey could become a hell of a lot shorter because you can challenge Brencis at any singular point throughout, even after becoming a vampire. It’s difficult, but if you’ve seen anyone bum rush Hyrule Castle in Breath of the Wild with just three hearts and a dream, having that option is great.
And yet, you’ll miss out on learning about the resistance against the vampires, or learning more about each member of Brencis’s court and attempting to potentially turn them against each other. There’s an entire infamy system that also rewards your rabble-rousing across the countryside. It may result in a world state with blockades and soldiers out to get you at almost every turn, but you can also deal some heavy blows to Brencis, making that final battle – if it is indeed the finale – that much easier. Coen gaining a reputation which can endear him to the rebels and intimidate foes also doesn’t hurt.
Perhaps more interesting is that the story doesn’t end after 30 days – instead, the “circumstances” change. What does that mean? If you sit around doing nothing or simply making Coen into an unofficial vampire overlord, what happens? More importantly, what happens after that?
Again, this is just what we know from what Rebel Wolves has shown us. The degree of divergence in the endings has yet to be detailed, much less how choices made in the early going could affect your experience 10 or 20 hours later.
The sheer range of choices and the studio outright stating that all quests are quests, some unlocking “new possibilities” and others granting new info while others don’t when asked how the “main” and “side” quests work. Tomaskiewicz even likened the experience to more of a pen-and-paper RPG, or similar to Fallout 1 and 2 “where you have a clear goal and everything is optional – you decide. You travel the world, you decide what you want to do. There is no main quest.”
It sounds ambitious for a studio that doesn’t quite have the same resources as a CD Projekt RED or even a Bethesda. However, it’s also aiming for something more compact by those standards, and more easily facilitates replayability.
There are still plenty of ways that The Blood of Dawnwalker could stumble, whether it’s in the combat, the level of polish, the performance or even in the overall writing. But seeing a developer take these kinds of swings, appealing to an audience that so many have tried to get away from in the pursuit of mass appeal, is refreshing. And who knows? With over two million wishlists and counting ahead of launch, it may become a massive hit, laying the foundation for more such experiences in the future.
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