Much has been made of the freeform structure of dark fantasy vampire role-playing game The Blood of Dawnwalker, a game that famously has no main quest. There’s an overarching goal to rescue your family from the evil clutches of vampires before 30 days and 30 nights are out, but when you do it, or even if you do it, are decisions entirely left to you.
Does that mean that theoretically, you can attempt a rescue the moment you leave the Prologue area of the game? Absolutely. Does that mean you can drastically reduce a 50-hour game (approximately) to a much, much shorter one? Also yes. But on one condition: you have the skill to do it.
“Yes, very much so,” says lead quest designer Rafał Jankowski when I asked him whether it’s possible to cut a corner by assaulting Brencis (the lead vampire) immediately. “It is possible to miss a lot of content. After the Prologue, there is nothing stopping you from going straight to Brencis’ castle and trying to defeat the big bad vampire and his vampire officers. It is difficult, of course, but it is physically possible – the content is there waiting for the players. The enemies are there waiting for the players. It is absolutely possible to skip everything, like all these quests.
“If you are skilled enough… I don’t know, I didn’t personally try it, I’m not exactly sure how difficult that is. But the idea was to make it difficult enough for this not to be a path that we encourage the players to do on their first try. But we are hoping to see this done soon after the release of the game, because with many players out there, many of them are probably skilled enough or patient enough to try and do it. But it is possible.”
I can’t wait to see the speedruns, I told him, to which Jankowski replied: “Yeah exactly. Me too. Again, we do put some thought into making it difficult, but I’m sure if it can be done, it will be done.”
However, cutting corners like this of course comes with the caveat that you’ll miss many large and interesting parts of the game. It may also be harder to assault Brencis with his other vampire officers – his lieutenants of a sort – still around. Thinning that entourage is actually where the game starts to resemble beloved Xbox 360 game Crackdown, structurally, as you hunt each lieutenant down in their own fiefdom – each themed around them – and set about taking them out.
Doing so will raise your infamy and the ire of Brencis, though, triggering the game’s wanted-like system, which will eventually result in edicts – public decrees – being passed against you. These are intended to slow you down and make life more difficult for you. “He [Brencis] can send out bounty hunters,” creative director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz told me, “or in the extreme version, he can just put the city on the lockdown.” But a flipside of earning infamy is that there will be rebellious people in the valley who will respect you more because of what you’re doing.
It’s these systems and more that are combining to make The Blood of Dawnwalker a very interesting prospect, as I wrote in a big preview recently after seeing 90 more minutes of the game. The Blood of Dawnwalker will be released 3rd September for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X.
