The Blood of Dawnwalker, the upcoming debut project from former CDPR developers, has a "limited time" quest system that reminds me a lot of the Persona and Metaphor games.
Dawnwalker ticks a lot of boxes for me. It's a big open-world RPG from a team of genre veterans under the Rebel Wolves banner, it has legitimately scary looking vampires, and it seemingly borrows from some of my favorite JRPGs ever. I was instantly intrigued by its time-limited main story when I heard about it during the game's reveal stream, but I was working with pretty limited information. I still am, but it's slightly less limited now thanks a few new tweets from the developers.
Admittedly, time-limited quests and stories in video games can be a pain in the ass if they're designed in a way that makes you feel rushed and stressed out. Thankfully, the official Dawnwalker Twitter account confirmed in response to a fan that "The game itself doesn’t have a hard time limit and it doesn’t require you to rush anything."
Following up on that, Rebel Wolves senior PR manager Mateusz Greiner added, "In short - the player has limited time to complete the main goal - exploring the world doesn't move the time forward, but every quest does. It plays a huge role in our narrative setup, and we'll be expanding on what it means later on."
That to me just smacks of Persona, which pretty much lets you explore the world as much as you want until you're ready to proceed, at which point the in-game clock ticks forward. It's still not entirely clear how Dawnwalker handles the whole system, especially factoring in the day/night cycle, but I like how it's sounding so far.
Greiner confirmed that "all quests" move the in-game timer, but assured "it will be always clearly telegraphed to the player if an activity moves time forward (and by how much) - players will have control over it."
Finally, much to my relief, Greiner said it "won't necessarily be game over" when the timer runs out after 30 in-game days and nights, but stopped short of explaining any further.
Blood of Dawnwalker was finally fully revealed just this week almost two years after Rebel Wolves' formation, and it looks like it just might be worth the wait. Again, I'm a sucker for spooky RPGs and vampires in particular, but from the four-minute cinematic it looks like quite the production. I'm excited to see more of the gameplay this Summer.
In the meantime, here are the best RPGs you can (and should) play right now.
