Rebel Wolves may not have yet launched its first game, The Blood of Dawnwalker, but the studio’s CEO and co-founder, Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, is already thinking about not just further games in the saga, but a whole new IP.
From almost the start of The Blood of Dawnwalker’s promotional campaign, Rebel Wolves has been upfront about the fact it considers the RPG the start of a saga. Last year, at Gamescom, creative director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz told us “There is this whole hidden world that we are not exploring on purpose in this first game. We want to leave a lot of fuel for the sequels and so on. But we do leave breadcrumbs and hint at these things. So yeah, we have a general idea of where we want to take [protagonist] Coen.”
While visiting Rebel Wolves’ headquarters in Warsaw, Poland, I asked studio CEO, co-founder, and game director, Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, if he envisioned being dedicated to Dawnwalker for the next couple of decades, or if he wanted to explore other areas of the RPG genre?
“I think that it’s really smart to work how Blizzard worked before,” he answered. “They had Warcraft, but they also created StarCraft. It’s smart because people need refreshment. And at some point we need to create a second IP.”
“I think that, some time from now, we will do one game from [the Dawnwalker] IP and a second game from a different IP, and then back to [Dawnwalker],” he continued.
As part of the larger interview, Tomaszkiewicz touched on his frustration with working on projects that are “the same but different”. His hope is that both he and his team can avoid that frustration by feeling good about the games they work on, and that the “refreshment” offered by a new IP can help secure that.
“Here in the studio, the most important [thing] is to obviously create the cool stuff, but we’re saying that the team [comes] first,” Tomaszkiewicz explained. “We want to work with the people we have as long as it’s possible. We need to create the environment, starting from how they feel in the company, but also how they feel working on this particular game now.”
Tomaszkiewicz is, of course, no stranger to the refreshment that comes with exploring new IP. A 17 year veteran of CD Project Red, he worked on The Witcher trilogy from 2004 all the way into 2018, when he was made design director of Cyberpunk 2077. He worked on the sci-fi RPG for three and a half years before departing the company and setting up Rebel Wolves.
Before we get anywhere close to a second IP from Rebel Wolves, we first get The Blood of Dawnwalker, which launches later this year on September 3. To learn more, check out our preview of the RPG’s consequence-filled prologue, as well as our interview with game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s Executive Editor of Features.
