My mind was blown twice by The Blood of Dawnwalker‘s prologue, and I’m not afraid to admit it.
Developer Rebel Wolves held a massive preview event recently, in an actual crypt, and I got to play the first three hours of the game, which is basically the entire prologue.
For the most part, this played out pretty much as I expected. I already knew the game is an open world RPG from a number of former Witcher developers.
This time they’ve made a game about a vampire, and the twist is that it has a cool day and night cycle. By night, the hero Coen has all sorts of vampire powers, but by day it’s more of a sword fighting game.
There’s also a kind of ticking clock mechanism that means you can only do a certain amount of quests and important tasks in one in-game day. Then it will turn to night again, and there’s only 30 days and nights before you need to get to his family, because bad things are gonna happen to Coen’s family.
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So, I knew all that going in, and the prologue essentially teaches you all that stuff. It shows you that if you accept any side quest, it will take up a certain chunk of a day. You can’t physically do all of the things that are in the prologue town before the day ends and there’s a big thing going on at church, and you’ve got to get there.
In that time, I saw some cool stuff. There was a fun little side mission involving a guy running around town just insulting you and your parents, and you have to chase him down and fight him. Good fun.
I also found a guy stood in a field, who, every time I walked past, he was just saying something. So I assumed, “Oh, I bet this guy’s got a quest.”
I went over and he was like, “I’ve lost me brother.” And then you go looking for his brother. In classic Witcher 3 fashion, this quest starts simple and then goes off the rails. You end up going into this old tomb, and there’s a little boss fight down there with a big creature.
That was all cool stuff, but the prologue overall played out pretty much as I expected – until I chatted to the developers, and they mentioned to me that you can actually complete the entire game from the prologue. That was the first thing that blew my mind.
So, you’re still in the prologue. After the drama at the church, the prologue ends with your first confrontation with the boss, and I wrongly assumed that this was one of those fake boss fights where you can’t actually win it. It’s just some action to set up the stakes, right?
Wrong! Apparently, if you’re really good at the combat, you can actually beat the boss three hours into the game, credits roll, and I look forward to seeing speed runners get to that point. I think that’ll be really fun.
And then, the second major thing that blew my mind is something that I found out as I was leaving the event. I was chatting to someone and they were like, “Did you save [SPOILER REDACTED] character?” And I was like, “You can save them?!”
The character they were talking about is a fairly major one, and they very much died in my playthrough. During the prologue. There was a whole cutscene about it.
Part of the inciting incident of the plot is that your family gets taken away, and one of them dies, and I thought that was set in stone. But apparently, if you do a certain quest and you remember at the crucial moment one detail from that quest, one of the members of your family will survive the prologue… but they won’t if you don’t.
All this stuff tells me that the game is all about player agency. It’s about choice. It’s about actions having consequences, and if you remember the right thing, you might keep a character alive. If you forget it, well… my bad.
The Blood of Dawnwalker launches 3 September on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. You can order your copy now.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
