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Upcoming RPG The Blood of Dawnwalker has a lot going for it, what with it being directed by Konrad Tomaskiewicz, the man who led development on The Witcher 3. Besides studio Rebel Wolves boasting some game dev pedigree, the project holds a distinct selling point of having no central questline for players to follow.
Or, as Tomaskiewicz put it to Eurogamer: "There's no main quest." He continues at length: "You build your experience from the quests you encounter. You know where your [enemy is]. You can attack this place anytime you want to. It's up to you if you want to do it by yourself, or if you want to build yourself, find the powerful items, develop your character, or do some quests and find allies to help you do it."
The idea, in his mind, is to "bring video games closer to pen-and-paper RPGs and give you the freedom to experience what you want to experience." Taking place in the 1300s in part of the Carpathian Mountains, a large mountain range located mostly in Romania but which touches on several countries, The Blood of Dawnwalker has you play as a half-vampire, half-human named Coen, who's racing against time to save his family.
Games have been incorporating elements of tabletop role-play for decades now, and Tomaskiewicz harkens back to a particular benchmark for such things. "Our game is more similar in this area to the old Fallout, the first and second [games], where you have a clear goal and everything is optional - you decide. You travel the world, you decide what you want to do," he says.
Of course, Geralt of Rivia's shadow looms too. "We're taking from our previous experience [The Witcher 3], the things we feel that makes the quest cool - how to build the storytelling in a way that you are engaged and you are immersed, but giving you more freedom," Tomaskiewicz states.
With the likes of Baldur's Gate 3 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, The Blood of Dawnwalker has an uphill battle to stand out. But then, that's the kind of situation any Witcher thrives in.
