The Blood of Dawnwalker "isn’t that big" because its small team with Witcher 3 vets would rather prioritize "layers" and "didn't want to make an open world for, like, 400 hours"

The Blood of Dawnwalker is going to be a pretty reasonable length compared to today's other open-world RPGs because the developers, which include some Witcher 3 veterans, are more interested in making the game dense rather than long.

Speaking to GamesRadar+ at Gamescom 2025, Rebel Wolves' senior quest designer Patryk Fijalkowski said the upcoming vampiric romp "isn't that big" - it's "dense, but we didn’t want to make an open world for like, 400 hours." Instead, a single, average playthrough should take you "give or take" 40 hours to beat, which is again pretty reasonable.

"Compared to other big open worlds, it's not much, but thanks to that, we could go crazy with the actual content. Quality over quantity, and that helped us keep it in scope," Fijalkowski continued.

Fijalkowski also explained that meticulous pre-planning was really important to make a game this layered from the very beginning. You see, Blood of Dawnwalker has a 30 day or so time limit to complete the 'main quest', and you can also tackle any quest when the sun sets to show your more bloodthirsty side, drastically altering how certain parts of the game play out.

"From an early point of production, we had a clear vision – and we had to, because to create the time progression system, for example, we had to have the entire game at an early stage," he said. "A skeleton of it, like the number of quests, how they interact with each other, what we can do with them."

"Thanks to that, we knew that the scope was, you know, scaled back from a super huge open world. And having this skeleton at an early stage gave us the space to experiment, and put those layers on and iterate, iterate, iterate."

The Blood of Dawnwalker dev says comparisons to The Witcher 3 are inevitable, but it's OK because "we are not compared to a bad game" and "we are making our own kind of beasts"