Certain as day becomes night, RPG-lovers will fall for this debut title from Rebel Wolves. The Warsaw-based studio was founded in 2022 with one purpose: to create single-player, story-driven, open-world role-playing games that they’d want to play themselves. Their debut title, 14th-century-set The Blood of Dawnwalker, is out now.
In Two Worlds
Deep in Europe’s Carpathian mountains, the vampire lord Brencis controls the Vale Sangora, and offers protection to its inhabitants—for a price. The game puts you in the role of Coen, ayoung man turned into a Dawnwalker – human by day, and vampire by night.
When his family is kidnapped by Brencis and his vampiric court, Coen has 30 days and nights to save them.
“The game plays differently during the day and during the night,” Rebel Wolves explains, and this dualism is key. “As a human, we have access to a different set of abilities than in Coen’s vampiric form. Many of the quests can be played differently depending on the time of day, and some activities in the open world are only accessible during the day or at night. But in The Blood of Dawnwalker, everything is ultimately about the story, and all of that ties into the concept we call a narrative sandbox.”
In other words, this is not a “corridor” game with only one way forward. “There’s no set order to the quests, and there’s no right or wrong path,” Rebel Wolves confirms. “You can unlock quests, meet characters who open up new storylines… or not. Everything is up to the player. You can discover something new with every playthrough We encourage gamers to keep experimenting with the story, see what else they can unravel.”
Keep It Optimal
The game is multi-platform and that development path shaped the team’s attitude to the challenge of optimization. “Because we had to fit within a set memory limits on consoles,” Rebel Wolves tells us, “the PC version also has low memory requirements. This is especially important nowadays, when not every player can afford to upgrade their equipment. We want to reach a wide audience, we don’t want hardware requirements to stand in the way of experiencing our title, which is why we pay special attention to this aspect.”
And they do mean special. How the title will play has been a core concern all along for the Rebel Wolves team. “Optimization is a process that begins early,” the team affirms. “For a game to be released in good condition, work must start with a good idea for code architecture, and optimization must continue throughout the entire production. Performance profiling, monitoring resource consumption—these are things we do every day. It is hard, tedious work, but nonetheless hugely satisfying. It is worth mentioning here that we will not stop optimizing the game even after its release, and we will continue to release further patches improving performance for a long time.”
Get Set
A game that looks this good and plays across a wide spectrum of hardware requires some settings tweaks. Rebel Wolves is there for you.“We want to release as best-looking game as possible, but we also want everyone to be able to play it the team tells us. “In the settings of PC games we find many options by which we can adjust the quality of the presented graphics to the capabilities of our hardware. Some games, including ours, also have a built-in automatic benchmark that can pre-set these options. For enthusiasts, however, it is a treat to go into the options and set everything up themselves, so it is perfect.”
Another way to get the best out of this title? Resolution. “It has a colossal impact on graphics performance,” the team says. “A strong graphics card is needed to support high resolution. If we do not have one, we can save ourselves with one of the image upscaling technologies, for example Intel® XeSS. We highly recommend enabling an upscaler; it really helps a lot.” We agree. The team went with Intel XeSSfor their first title, but not for the first time. “It went smoothly and without problems,” the team reports. “XeSS works and gives good results. At Rebel Wolves, this is the first time working with Intel, but we had the opportunity to work together before. As professionals with long careers, we worked in… previous companies, let’s say.”
We won’t pry, but there’s no need to be coy about how good The Blood of Dawnwalker is. Whether you’re a daytime player or a creature of the night—or a bit of both—the dual nature of this richly imagined RPG has something for you.
Purchase The Blood of Dawnwalker on Steam.