The Blood of Dawnwalker is an upcoming RPG from a host of former The Witcher 3 developers, with a medieval Eastern European setting mixed with heavy dark fantasy elements.
The game is a narrative-driven experience utilizing a deep day-and-night cycle where gameplay dynamics change based on the time of day. It is gritty, gothic to the core, and filled to the brim with blood, guts, and vampires, as well as some mighty familiar Witcher antics in its soundtrack and art direction.
During Gamescom 2025, we got the wonderful opportunity to sit down with Patryk Fijałkowski, Rebel Wolves' Senior Quest designer, who shared a ton of insight regarding The Blood of Dawnwalker's unique day-and-night mechanics, player agency, multiple outcomes to the same quest, and a whole lot more.
Here's the conversation in full.
Note: We have edited parts of this interview to make the text clearer and avoid common speech repetitions.
The Blood of Dawnwalker has quests that can be tackled from two different times of day, two different perspectives, and they all go in different directions. For example, at night you can use your vampiric powers to find things, but you cannot do so during the day. How difficult is it as a designer to design a quest that has all these factors?
Patryk Fijałkowski (senior quest designer, Rebel Wolves): Well, it is definitely difficult. A lot of headaches, a lot of thought process and iterations. But at the end of the day, it's rewarding, I think. And it made us think about the game in its entirety at an early stage. We have to have the whole game at an early stage, start testing it, find the edge cases, things that don't work, things we have to think through. And there were many.
Like the presentation you saw, for example. We are in the cathedral during the day, and there's this objective that pushes the time forward. And what if the time changes to the night in that situation? There was a lot of stuff like that.
Here we were thinking, okay, so do we just not do an objective that pushes time inside the cathedral, or do we have some other ideas? And in that case, for example, we thought, well, we have the deacon. When the night comes, the deacon can approach us and say, "hey, the cathedral is off limits at night, you have to leave." He shows us the door.
It was really like a puzzle. At the end of the day, we were just thinking about how to overcome it, whether it be taking a step back or thinking maybe we can do this in the production budget that we have, and we just pick our battles.
During the presentation, we saw the boss die during the day. But if we were to beat him at night, would he still die then because of being a Dawnwalker? Or is it a situation where you can get different endings depending on whether you tackle the quest ending in the day or ending in the night?
Fijałkowski: It depends on the quest. I won't spoil what happens at night in this situation. What I can definitely say is that because Mihai is a Dawnwalker, he has a different moveset and there's an entirely different boss fight. But, you know, I guess I will spoil it a little bit.
Like, death is death, Coen can die too, so you can kill him also at night. But there are instances where tackling the quest at night may lead you to different outcomes. Another thing is that because of the dual gameplay, [with] the human Coen, the night Coen, it's not that you'll just tackle the quest at night.
You, for example, may do half of it during the day, half of it at night. [An] example again from the presentation, you can reach the library at night, get the key, but you don't have to do the whole quest. You can just leave the library, for example, to do something else that you have to do at night, at [the] city or something, [and then] go back at day, you have the key, you skip the deacon, you may find clues you need at other places. We showed a lot of this quest, but it's still not the entire quest. There are still different ways to go there.
Being a quest designer, how does it feel to know that some players might miss out on some things the team has worked on entirely? Because if they do a quest during the day, they're not going to see what happens at night and vice versa. How does the team feel knowing that some of their best work might be missed out because players tackle it at different times?
Fijałkowski: Honestly, I'm speaking for myself, but I think some of my teammates would agree. We are excited. Of course, we've put a lot of heart into that. That's part of the fun. We are excited to see players talking with [each other], like "You did the quest at the cathedral? Yeah, I tried to kill Zanti, but she was too hard." And the other one might be like, "What, Zanti? There's Zanti? I met her at a different place."
So I think it's exciting. And, you know, we are trying to do this dual gameplay and give you as much freedom as we can. We call it a narrative sandbox for a reason.
After the prologue, you can just do whatever. We don't want to say that this is a main quest and that is a side quest. We try to enrich the main goal, so Coen doesn't do random stuff that doesn't make sense given that he's on a mission to save his family.
And if you try hard, you can still see 80 percent of the game or so in a single playthrough. Because even though the replayability is obviously a big part of the game, you want players to try different routes, ally with different factions, stuff like that. We still know that there are completionists and there are speedrunners who just want to go forward. For example, [they would] play it once and have a feeling that they have a full experience. And I think seeing 80 percent of the game on a single playthrough is achievable.
We also have to remember that even though there's a deadline, 30 days and 30 nights, it doesn't mean a game over. We try to be as reactive as possible, and we don't want to make these invisible walls, be it in the level design or general game design.
How did the team come up with this idea of a time limit, but made it so that it feels fair? How has taking a quest that's going to push the time forward been made not to feel like a big risk to the player?
Fijałkowski: When we came up with the idea, it was really a natural thing, because we had the vampires, we knew we wanted to make a dual gameplay loop, so we knew the day and night would be important. So then the time should be important too.
And we wanted the players to feel the urgency of the main goal, but we didn't want to stress them out, because, as a player myself, I don't like timers in games. Sometimes the time ticking is stressful in an unfun way, so we didn't want to do that.
We have an open world, after all, and we want players to explore it freely, so you can go loot stuff and be sure that the time won't progress. We always clearly communicate that, hey, if you do this, then the time will move forward. And I think most of the quests will push the time forward in one way or another, and we are hoping that the stories are interesting enough, and the rewards are valuable enough that players will be engaged, and just treat time as a resource.
When you have money in a game, you spend it, right? You see a cool armor, you see a recipe or something like that, you know you have money, and you want to spend it to become stronger, to see new things. It works similarly here: you have this time as a resource, you know how much you have, and you see an interesting story, and you think, well, it's half a day, still 20 days to go, why not?
I think it requires a different mindset, but I think once players have experienced it, they will see that it's an interesting one. Even though they are not stressed, they still have to remember what game they are playing, the world they are in. We try to make everything connected. Quests, the lore, stuff like that, it all comes together into one cohesive experience.
So regarding that connection you just pointed out, let's say that I take on the cathedral quest that we saw in the presentation, I do the night quest, I go to the top of the cathedral, I see the sigil, I get the book, I go to the catacombs. That means I've obviously missed the part where, in the day, I'd have to move the bookshelf and face that enemy beneath.
Are there any quests where an enemy or something that's happened will get skipped, but might come back and be a problem in some other way in the future? Or is it a case of if you didn't do that day quest and went to find that enemy, it just never appears again?
Fijałkowski: It depends on the quest, but we do have situations where you may tackle an enemy in a certain quest, and if you don't, he will appear in a different place and be more difficult. I think some of them are a huge part of the design.
Regarding inspiration for your questlines, because you have this sandbox world, it's very non-linear. When creating these quests, where does the team go to get the ideas, and how do you then take those ideas and bring them into reality using the engine and the world?
Fijałkowski: I think two of the most inspiring games would be Fallout 2 and obviously The Witcher 3. [Fallout 2] has a structure where you have a goal, it's clear, and there are many possibilities to do that. It was really an inspiring structure for us to go and figure out how we can do that with our systems and stuff like that.
I myself didn't work on The Witcher 3, though we have veterans there. We do love the game, the ones that didn't create it. I think the ones who created it are proud of it. And it's in their DNA. They know how dark fantasy works, and they know what kind of stories they want to tell. And we are in sync with that. So I think when it comes to the emotional impact, the cinematic feel of it, The Witcher 3 was definitely an inspiration.
And when it comes to time mechanics, stuff like Persona and Pentiment were the ones to look into how it feels to have this time and use it and decide what you want to do.
If I'm a player who maybe played this before and has extensive knowledge of the game, maybe I am aware of all the main details, where all the main points are, in theory, could I finish the prologue and then go straight to the ending of the game?
Fijałkowski: Yes. It will be really hard, obviously, but we do allow it. I'm guessing probably 12 hours after the launch, there will be a YouTube video, like day one ending, stuff like that. But we are aware of that, we are encouraging [players] to go wild, experiment, and we do give the opportunity to go straight to the castle, solo it, and stuff like that. And we are curious how players will tackle it.
On that, is there a prospect of multiple endings or revisions?
Fijałkowski: Yeah, we have multiple endings, and some of them might be surprising.
The post The Blood of Dawnwalker devs open up about day-night cycle, quest inspirations, replayability, and more appeared first on Destructoid.
