I’ve had a hunch ever since playing The Blood of Dawnwalker that its divisive time limit feature – whereby you have 30 in-game days and nights to save your character’s family from a nasty pack of vampires – isn’t as strict as Rebel Wolves once intended it. And it turns out I was right.
I shared the hunch with game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz in a recent interview, explaining that I’d found the time limit overly generous when I reviewed The Blood of Dawnwalker. I rarely had to seriously deliberate about what I wanted to do and I defeated the final boss with only half my allotted time used.
The full-game experience was in stark contrast to that of the game’s prologue, where time is severely limited and you do have to choose your quests carefully. My question to Tomazkiewicz was whether he and Rebel Wolves pulled back on this approach in response to public concern after the game was announced.
His response caught me slightly off guard. “Obviously!” he said, as if I’d asked him something ludicrously, well, obvious. “Obviously. Yes. We had at first a more restricted time where it was harder to beat the game, but after all of those voices, before release even, we knew that it can be a problem and we rebalanced it this way to give the buffer for the people to not fear this.
“The prologue was the first small test-field for time,” he added, “and we didn’t change it because we wanted to give this experience for people and show them what they can expect. Actually later on we changed the main game, besides the prologue, because we were afraid that people will complain too much that it’s too restricted.”
“We had at first a more restricted time where it was harder to beat the game, but after all of those voices, before release even, we knew that it can be a problem” -Konrad Tomaszkiewicz
The way time works in The Blood of Dawnwalker is every quest-related activity you do costs a segment of time, and the cost is clearly marked on a time gauge. And this is the only way time moves forward; it does not progress while running around the world, or while selling things or battling incidental packs of wolves, say. Factor in that you have 16 segments of time a day and most quests only cost a few segments, and there’s a lot you’re able to accomplish.
How much stricter was the original vision? “Quite [a lot],” said Tomaszkiewicz. “You needed to think about everything even more carefully. But we started to speak with Mateusz [Tomaszkiewicz, creative director and Konrad’s brother] and the rest of the team about what we wanted to achieve, and we figured out that we don’t want to create a mini-game from it. We wanted to give the player the proper feeling and proper emotions in the main story. This is the purpose of the main story, not to create a challenge for it.”
One of the ways much of your time is used is by spending skill points to learn skills, surprisingly. Skills can be upgraded multiple times and as they get stronger, the cost increases too, often to include segments of time. It’s not uncommon to have many amassed skill points to spend at a shrine, and for day to turn into night while you do so.
I’ve always thought that was an odd design decision – why tax people for powering up? But I discovered there’s a solid reason for it. “You know the source of it is quite simple,” Tomaszkiewicz explained. “We figured out that if we don’t have it, then what players are doing is skipping the whole content. They are farming the boars, wolves, and other enemies to [level up and earn skill points]. They’re learning the perks and then they just go, on the first day, to kill Brencis.” Brencis being the main antagonist and boss.
Something else I wondered: why aren’t there, if you have a time system like this, events that progress in the world according to their own fixed timetables? As in, events which may or may not be available depending on when you discover them? The time system seems ideally suited to this, and there was, apparently, a discussion.
“We spoke about it,” Tomaskiewicz said, “and we were afraid that it’s too risky to show the player that something happens somewhere and you are not taking part in it. You are not aware that it’s happening. That’s why we decided that we will approach it in a different way. We will approach it this way: that you are encountering some stuff, and if you decide that you don’t want to be part of it and you’re just going to do other things, then we have the choice of doing the quest or event or doing something else in the world.”
The time mechanic has been – and continues to be – a major part of the conversation around The Blood of Dawnwalker. Indeed, one of the most popular mods for The Blood of Dawnwalker after the game was released this month was a mod to remove it. But just because the time limit is central to this game doesn’t mean it necessarily features in what Rebel Wolves intends to be a Dawnwalker series. “We are also considering and researching some other crazy ideas which can make the RPG genre different to surprise people in the future,” Tomazkiewicz told me in a separate Blood of Dawnwalker news story.
Meanwhile, Rebel Wolves continues to address feedback and update The Blood of Dawnwalker post-release. To this end, Rebel Wolves is preparing the first big Blood of Dawnwalker patch for early October, addressing combat, difficulty, performance, and more fluid traversal around the game’s world.
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