Rebel Wolves, the studio behind upcoming RPG The Blood of Dawnwalker, has revealed more details about the game. In an interview with PCGamer, creative director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz spoke about the studio’s approach to making the game, and how when it’s out, players will get to experience what Tomaszkiewicz describes as a “narrative sandbox”.
Tomaszkiewicz explained that “narrative sandbox” means that the game allows the player to affect the story around them by interacting with the world. This means that players will have plenty of choices to make in not only the story itself, but through gameplay to effect the title’s narrative. While The Blood of Dawnwalker won’t be a pure sandbox game, players will still get to make plenty of decisions to effect outcomes of various stories.
“So narrative sandbox refers to the way we craft our content,” said Tomaszkiewicz in the interview. “It’s how we allow you, the player, to interact with it. So the core of it is maximising players’ agency and freedom of choice, while, at the same time delivering the high-quality narratives that we are known for crafting in the past. Dawnwalker is not going to be a game where it’s a pure sandbox, where you’re just focusing on the gameplay. We do want you to experience these moments with the world of the characters, and the emotions that these situations can evoke, and so on, and so forth. But, at the same time you are looking for ways of maximising freedom as you do.”
He also went on to say that just about all of the quests in The Blood of Dawnwalker are being designed with this idea in mind, and not just the main quests. Even small, seemingly inconsequential encounters might end up having much larger consequences in the long run, and sometimes even tying into the game’s main story.
“Narrative sandbox informs not only the main quest—it also informs all the other types of content that we have,” Tomaszkiewicz continued. “We are trying to make tie-ins from these. You know, you might encounter seemingly inconsequential, smaller activities of the world, but we are trying to make them tie into this main narrative. It kind of feels like a synergetic approach where all this content helps each other to be this cohesive whole. It’s not like there is the main story, and there are just sidequests that are unrelated to it. All of it kind of overlaps a little bit, if that makes sense.”
Design director Daniel Sadowski also helped further explain the concept of the “narrative sandbox”, by saying that the studio is “trying our best to balance everything out, and there is a lot of cool content that you can interact with.”
“We are trying to tie-in all of that content so that things affect each other in cool ways, and give you a lot of freedom as to what to do next,” explained Sadowski. “Sometimes it feels like playing a paper RPG where you can really just go into the world, and pick your adventures. That’s sort of what we are aiming for here with the narrative sandbox as well.”
Quite a few details about The Blood of Dawnwalker have been revealed through these interviews, including game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz revealing that, not only will the protagonist not be overpowered, but also that the decision was made because it allows the studio to make a more interesting story. He also revealed that the upcoming title will not have flashy magic, and any magic players see in the game will revolve more around subtle manipulation rather than epic fireballs.
The Blood of Dawnwalker is the first major title by Rebel Wolves – a studio made up of industry veterans that have worked on titles like The Witcher 3. While the game doesn’t yet have a release date, we do know that it is coming to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.
