The Blood of Dawnwalker, an upcoming vampiric romp from former CD Projekt Red developers, just showed off a hefty chunk of “actual gameplay” from one mid-game quest. Well, the walkthrough actually showed the same quest being played during the day and during the night, but the outcomes were so drastically different, they may as well have been two entirely different missions.
First things first, Blood of Dawnwalker doesn’t look too different from The Witcher 3, which creative director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz also worked on. There’s violent third-person combat, a dark fantasy world to explore, and branching RPG systems. The main difference here, though, is that our protagonist turns into a bloodsucker come night.
“Each quest is a complex structure with multiple possible paths leading to the end goal,” designer director Daniel Sadowski said in the gameplay video below. “We maximize player’s freedom and agency, offering you a Narrative Sandbox to play in.”
Developer Rebel Wolves decided to show that off via a quest that takes us to a cathedral in the heart of the city. During the day, we encounter a weird, blood-soaked baptism and speak to a priest about repentance. At night? Things get even more freaky. The cathedral’s actually closed, so we instead need to use our vampiric abilities to scale buildings and feast on innocents, before getting into a brawl with an evil vampire boss waiting at the end. Again, these two routes could have been two entirely different quests and I wouldn’t blink twice.
“The core feature of The Blood of Dawnwalker is the dual gameplay loop. Remember, Coen may be a human during the day, but he turns into a vampire at night, and has a different set of skills at his disposal. And this is just one variable that affects our quests. Depending on when you tackle a particular quest, what choices you’ve made earlier, whom you befriended or whom you’ve angered, your gameplay and story experience will be very, very different.” While the video above ends in defeat, Sadowski promises we could instead sneak around and avoid combat altogether.
