It may not surprise you to learn that The Blood of Dawnwalker’s most contentious mechanic can already be removed. If you’re unfamiliar, the open-world role-playing game has a time mechanic where every quest you complete pushes time forwards and uses up a little more of your 30 day, 30 night time limit (of sorts).
Time management is a core part of The Blood of Dawnwalker, so you’re forced to make difficult choices across its world, knowing that doing one thing may prevent you from doing another further down the line. A lot of people clearly don’t like timers, especially in open-world games where they like to do everything, which is probably why the game’s most popular mod on Nexus Mods at the moment is one that eliminates it.
The Better Story Timer mod has been downloaded over 115,000 times since it went live shortly after the game’s launch last week. As the mod’s description notes, it “allows you to have as many days as you want for the story”, and removes time costs associated with spending skill points.
By default, the mod increases the number of days for the game’s main quest to 90 in-game days, triple that of the standard 30. This can be adjusted further by tweaking an ini file. The mod also increases the number of segments – chunks of the day – on the in-game clock, meaning you can do more each day. This is especially useful when acquiring skills, as some upgrades require a segment to learn, and some more powerful ones, one or two segments, which further eats into your time.
If you feel even that is not enough, the mod also lets you remove the time costs associated with learning active and passive skills without affecting other time-advancing events such as quests.
The mod has been updated to keep pace with Dawnwalker’s own patches, so it should be compatible with the latest version of the game. The mod’s creator notes that some people have already finished the game with it installed. It works in the much more time-limited prologue, too, but the author suggests removing it before playing the game’s epilogue.
The Blood of Dawnwalker developer Rebel Wolves – made up of many Witcher and CD Projekt Red alumni – recently announced the game has sold over one million copies in just three days, and its Steam player numbers alone are healthy.
In the Eurogamer review of The Blood of Dawnwalker, Bertie praised the game’s bravery for tackling an open-world RPG with new ideas, such as the time mechanic, and was enormously encouraged by the game, even if it didn’t quite hang together in parts.
