Dark fantasy vampire role-playing game The Blood of Dawnwalker releases on 3rd September 2026, publisher Bandai Namco and developer Rebel Wolves have announced. The game previously had a vague “2026” window but now it’s got an exact date.
The announcement ends a bit of speculation about whether The Blood of Dawnwalker would try and avoid a showdown with big Xbox RPG Fable, which has an unspecific “autumn” release date, and whether it would steer well clear of Grand Theft Auto 6 in November.
However, Rebel Wolves co-founder and The Blood of Dawnwalker director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz didn’t seem outwardly concerned about competition when I asked him about it at Rebel Wolves’ studio in Poland recently. “If we are worried?” he said. “We spoke about it with the guys and the first idea is that you shouldn’t be worried about the stuff you don’t have control of. And you never know, because the games are moving, and there are a lot of interesting games appearing this year.
“But I’m really confident, and the game we have is really great, and I think that RPG players are waiting for bigger games like ours, which are telling good stories and giving freedom and following them to play the role in these words. And I keep my fingers crossed and I think we’ll be good.”
The Blood of Dawnwalker follows the adventure of Coen, a half-human, half-vampire hybrid, who has to rescue his family from the clutches of vampires before 30 days and nights run out. Matching his hybrid nature is a hybrid approach to gameplay, whereby Coen has different powers as a human through the day and as a vampire at night, offering him different opportunities. As a vampire he can blink through the air and walk up walls, for example.
The game also differs by having a looser, pen-and-paper-like RPG structure, whereby we’re presented with a world and asked to carve our own paths through it, rather than follow a main quest. We have an overarching goal, but how we go about achieving it is up to us. This should result in people having quite distinct experiences from each other, a bit like in Baldur’s Gate 3.
I watched 90 minutes of previously unseen The Blood of Dawnwalker footage at Rebel Wolves, and I came away very encouraged by what I saw. There are strong similarities to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – unsurprising given Konrad Tomaszkiewicz directed it, and many of the studio worked on it – but there are strong differences here as well. I wrote about these in more detail in my The Blood of Dawnwalker preview published today.
