How Blood of Dawnwalker Places a Premium on Player Agency in its Quest Design

Rebel Wolves is a new studio founded by CD Projekt Red veterans, and its debut project, The Blood of Dawnwalker, is an exciting vampire-themed action-RPG that looks to capitalize on its developers’ experience on games like The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077. As such, Rebel Wolves has communicated an emphasis on branching pathways and impactful choice in how it designs The Blood of Dawnwalker‘s quests, complete with a day and night cycle that affects the outcome depending on whether the protagonist is in their human or vampire form.

In a recent conversation with Game Rant about The Blood of Dawnwalker‘s development, Rebel Wolves writer Piotr Kucharski and The Blood of Dawnwalker‘s lead quest designer Rafał Jankowski spoke at length about how player agency is at the forefront of the game’s quest design. But more than just branching pathways that impact a quest’s outcome and enhance replayability, The Blood of Dawnwalker‘s quest structure aims to create a narrative sandbox that makes each playthrough unique while allowing players to shape the game’s protagonist into a hero — or villain — of their liking.

The Blood of Dawnwalker’s Quests Avoid Holding the Player’s Hand While Still Having Purpose

Quests with branching pathways and different choice-based outcomes are familiar territory for fans of games like The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, and the team at Rebel Wolves has leveraged its experience working on those titles to deliver something similar with The Blood of Dawnwalker. But because of the protagonist’s place as a newly cursed vampire, choosing how to handle situations, whether with violence or humanity, factors heavily into how each of the game’s major quests plays out. Speaking on this gameplay dynamic, Jankowski notes:

“I like to emphasize how the game’s structured. We give our protagonist a simple goal to rescue his family. They were captured by the prince, our antagonist, and the player has 30 days and 30 nights to rescue them.”

How players choose to go about achieving that ultimate goal of rescuing the family of The Blood of Dawnwalker‘s protagonist is entirely up to them. They can choose to utilize their human nature to gain the trust of NPCs and achieve their goals through a nonconfrontational approach, for example, or wait until the sun goes down and surrender to their newfound vampiric powers to achieve their objectives through force. According to Jankowski:

“The whole experience is very open, and another layer of it is that many of our quests have two paths — the day path and the night path. We also have some content that’s time-of-day specific.”

This suggests it’s not always as cut and dry as simply sticking to one side or another, with players potentially having to dabble in both types of approaches. Up to this point, Rebel Wolves has been selective about the amount of The Blood of Dawnwalker‘s combat that it’s shown off, but Jankowski assures players that combat plays a major part in the experience.

As Jankowski puts it, “we want the players to have fun with our combat system,” clarifying that The Blood of Dawnwalker won’t have an option for a purely pacifist playthrough. But Kucharski does note that players “will have the opportunity in some quests to circumvent the combat and just find a peaceful way to handle things,” further emphasizing the agency that the player has over not just a quest’s outcome, but how it plays out during the moment-to-moment gameplay.