“A good open world has a meaning,” Konrad Tomaszkiewicz tells me. And he’d know a thing or two about that – he directed The Witcher 3, after all. And so for The Blood of Dawnwalker, his upcoming open world RPG at new studio Rebel Wolves, it was clear that he and his team had to build upon the foundations of his previous project. “That was our starting point, that it needed to have meaning.”
“When I’m exploring it, can I learn more about the lore, more about the story of this region, about the people who are living there?” he asks, all things that make The Witcher 3’s world rich and immersive. “When I’m playing open world games where I just have activities which give me XP and items, I don’t get this enjoyment and fun from it.”
Konrad’s brother, Dawnwalker’s creative director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz, has similar feelings. “I have this personal vendetta against filler content,” he says. “I really dislike it. I know it’s very difficult to avoid in open worlds, but I personally really like handcrafted custom and unique content pieces. A little twist or at least some kind of new information that it brings to the table.”
From a game design perspective, then, The Blood of Dawnwalker’s open world is a stage for a grand adventure inspired by the quests the brothers experienced in their mind’s eye while playing tabletop RPGs. It’s a playable reality, not a checklist of repeatable activities. “What makes the open world and the game interesting is the connections,” Konrad says. “If you explore, you sometimes open big branches of the story you cannot predict and something good can happen.” The result of all this is that every quest is promised to connect to something, be that the narrative at the heart of Dawnwalker, or the anger and infamy systems that power the Vampire Court that rules over the valley. By forging these connections, Rebel Wolves intends for your activities in the open world to achieve that aforementioned “meaning”.
Those connections could not be forged without creating a similar bond between the studio’s design disciplines. Gameplay and narrative teams had to be united for the mechanics of the open world to truly become a story experience. To find the right thematic base for Dawnwalker’s world of Vale Sangora, narrative director Jakub Szamalek looked to his own homelands.
“Rather than particular historical moments, this game is inspired by the overall themes and main strands of Eastern European history and folklore,” he explains. “It’s always been a place of migration and it’s always been a place of conflict. There’s a lot of blood that seeped into the soil of Eastern Europe, which is maybe why it’s so fertile and why we have such dark, dark stories. I think it has a distinct texture.”
The Blood of Dawnwalker isn’t just the tale of Vale Sangora, though – it’s much more personal than that. It’s the journey of Coen, a man barely out of his teenage years who now carries the curse of vampirism. His life will never be the same, but that’s not entirely the infection’s doing. The abduction of Coen’s family by the vampire lord Brencis forces him to leave his small village and explore the entire valley, taking him to places that he’d never have seen otherwise.
“One of the first major decisions was to have a massive Gothic cathedral in our capital,” says Szamalek. “Put yourself in the position of a medieval peasant who lived his whole life in a thatched cottage and then arrives in a local city, sees this massive structure built out of stone with intricate detail. All those dark scenes of suffering and executions that Catholic churches seem to be reverent of. [We wanted to] tap into that kind of frequency and vibe and amplify it by a hundred.”
The Gothic “vibe” is important to Dawnwalker. Of course it is; this is a vampire RPG we’re talking about. But that extends far beyond just the look of the world. It influences the way you interact with the land, and how the moonlight hours unlock fresh new opportunities.
“When you are human, you fight differently, explore the world differently, and approach the quests differently in comparison to being a vampire at night,” says Konrad. “At night you have more options to travel and explore. You can find stuff that’s not reachable by a human [Coen]. You can find some good stories there, some challenges or cool items.”
The duality of human and vampire poses a unique challenge, as the development team needs to consider every opportunity in the world from two different perspectives. Is this an activity for the day, night, or something that should have multiple paths depending on when the player wants to approach it? But that’s not the only challenge the open world has posed. There’s also the issue of, well, challenge. When you can go anywhere and do anything, there’s no set pathway through the world and story, and thus no easy way to plot a difficulty curve.
“We didn’t want to do full auto balancing like some games do,” says Mateusz. “My problem with this is, yes, it allows you to maximize player freedom by exploring whatever you want, whenever you want, but it takes something away from the feeling of progression. If the enemies are never under my level, they’re always on my level, it feels like the leveling up and gaining gear is kind of pointless.”
While Dawnwalker’s enemies do not automatically scale to match your level, the increased challenge posed by certain regions of the map is not intended to prohibit you from exploring them earlier than the developers intended. “You’re not railroaded in this one correct way of playing it,” Mateusz assures me. “It’s like, I can gather some experience here and there and maybe explore it in different directions than other players do. Because it’s an RPG, you collect items, you become stronger and so on and so forth. At every point we wanted you to have options.”
Wherever you decide to explore, Rebel Wolves wants each region and location to have a genuine sense of culture. To do that, the developers needed to look to humanity’s own history. That’s something that came easy to Szamalek, who has a PhD in archaeology. “There is something striking about seeing works of art from a long, long time ago and trying to grapple with what they mean and what the specificities were of the people who painted them,” he says. “I wanted to have that in the game, to capture that fascination and translate this into an experience that gamers can participate in.”
“We thought that each of the sentient monster races in our game should have their own art that is a little bit different, that is unique to their sensitivities or culture,” Szamalek explains. “And the more you engage with that and the more you try to understand what they’re trying to communicate, the easier you will find it to talk to them.”
Szamalek tells me of his fascination with Italian frescoes, the beautiful (and often eerie) work of historic artists that were painted directly onto wet plaster. They become part of the wall, part of the building, part of the location’s aura. And in The Blood of Dawnwalker, you’ll find many ancient artworks that depict tales from Vale Sangora’s ancient past. As we saw in an earlier gameplay video debuted as part of IGN First, careful study of these frescoes can reveal hidden truths and guide Coen to special items.
Like in our own world, these works of art are totally unique. “My request was that we won’t reuse them, so that you won’t be seeing the same frescoes or the same paintings over and over again in different ruins,” says Szamalek. “It ruins the immersion for me. I realise, ‘Oh, that’s just an asset. It doesn’t have any meaning.’ So I want art that gives context to what you’re exploring and is unique to the location you’re exploring.”
I’ve seen little of The Blood of Dawnwalker’s open world so far – most of my hands-on preview was spent within the boundaries of the prologue’s village. But what I have seen suggests a smart melding of Ubisoft’s climb-towers-to-scout-locations format with more bespoke activity ideas, like swamp-dwelling mini-bosses and glowing wisps that guide you to scenes of environmental storytelling. As a smaller studio operating on a less-than-gargantuan budget, I’m not going in expecting Rebel Wolves to have produced the kind of simulation we’d see in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 or Red Dead Redemption 2. But from my small sampling and conversation with the dev team, the world of Vale Sangora is showing plenty of signs that it’s a place worth getting invested in.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s Executive Editor of Features.
