The Blood of Dawnwalker is a game I have been shouting about from the rooftops to anyone who would listen. I first saw the game hands-off at gamescom 2025, and I knew it still wouldn’t be hands-on at Summer Game Fest 2026. However, when I received an email offering me an interview with the team from Rebel Wolves during the event, I was very, very curious. The not-E3 week is littered with game announcements, so I knew something must be coming, and I was so right.
In my whirlwind of managing a team through the announcements, I almost missed it. Rebel Wolves revealed that The Blood of Dawnwalker will not be a standalone title. The game will be the first in a saga. Making a statement like this three months before their title even launches is brave, and even a bit cocky, but after talking to the team, I can see why. Their confidence in The Blood of Dawnwalker saga is unwavering. I am completely sold, and I haven’t even touched the game yet.
I was able to sit down with The Blood of Dawnwalker Game Director, Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, and Narrative Designer, Piotr Kucharski, to pick their brain about the big announcement. Not only that, but this is really the first time we have had the chance to talk about The Blood of Dawnwalker in detail, so I made sure to get every juicy detail I could. We discussed unique mechanics, how Coen will come with us, story to story, and just where Rebel Wolves gets this bold confidence from.
Watch below to see our protagonist, Coen, in modern times, revealing a story following The Blood of Dawnwalker.
I’m very excited about The Blood of Dawnwalker. Every trailer I’ve seen, everything has been really exciting. But what can you tell us? Explain what we saw during the Summer Game Fest trailer.
Konrad Tomaszkiewicz: I knew that you would ask that.
Let’s start there, for our audience, and for me, because I’m nosy. What happened during The Blood of Dawnwalker trailer at Summer Game Fest?
Konrad Tomaszkiewicz: First of all, we decided that we want to set the bar higher, and for us, with the ambition and the challenge for us also, and we wanted to show the world what we planned, and we planned a saga from the early beginning when we created the company.
The idea is to create games which will lead you to the eras and different countries, different cultures, different local legends and myths and different species of the creatures of the night with Coen, our protagonist, and create the consistent story to lose through this time, which will end and lead to what you have saw, and this is only the beginning of this intro, we will try to do another part after every part of the next games.
And we have a really cool, consistent story, which will take you through that. Of course, the inspiration was Interview with the Vampire.
The promise is that we will keep this character, that we will grow with Coen, that you can shape him, that you can transfer your shapes, and your choices will be taken into consideration in the next parts. This way, you will be able to know some really consistent adventure, and this story through all the games.
So, players are staying with Coen through this whole saga after The Blood of Dawnwalker. It’s pretty brave to tease a second game before you even release the first one. Where does that confidence come from?
Konrad Tomaszkiewicz: I don’t want to be bold here, but we have co-created before, like big games, and when you start to play your game, at some point you feel if it’s good or not, and I love our game. I’m really confident about it, and as a game director, designer, and artist, and all of our team, we want to tell this whole story, not only the origin story.
Why not wait until The Blood of Dawnwalker drops, and then say, “By the way, there’s going to be more.” Why was now the right time to make the announcement?
Konrad Tomaszkiewicz: As I said, we like to challenge ourselves also, and our team already, like the writer’s team, and so on, are working on the next thing we will do. I cannot tell what it will be, but this statement also gives us the energy and the challenge, and the vision you can follow, and it’s important to us to have this post-side showing us where we are going.
Piotr Kucharski: And as Konrad said, it is a saga, and we want to frame it already, so everyone is aware of it, so we get the momentum going.
Konrad Tomaszkiewicz: Exactly, what’s also important, from a technical point of view, when we show these eras, we need to develop some additional systems, but also when we’re thinking about the story, we need to have the roadmap of all games we want to create and the story to connect them. Because from our perspective, if you don’t think about it before, it’s really hard later to do a smooth connection between those games, and you need to do a lot of work later. If you have planned it before, it’s easier.
I’m sure you can’t give me specifics, but how far is this planned after The Blood of Dawnwalker? I’ve now seen two time frames, but we’re saying it’s a saga. Do you have a set number of games, or do you want to keep it something open-ended that you can build on later?
Konrad Tomaszkiewicz: We are not yet speaking about that now, but yes, we have a plan.
As you said before, The Blood of Dawnwalker saga is looking very Interview with the Vampire, seeing him in the future in that trailer, or in the present, I guess. Was Interview with the Vampire an inspiration from the very beginning?
Konrad Tomaszkiewicz: It was inspiration from the very beginning, yeah. That was in our minds. In our country, we have this sentence that “The travels evolve you or enrich you,” and I believe that when it comes to video games, this subject is not explored enough. When you make it a good way, you can tell the stories from the countries which are not often used in the games, and bring the interesting cultures and myths and other things, which enrich you when you play the games.
What other inspirations for The Blood of Dawnwalker saga have there been, whether it’s for this reveal or just the game overall?
Konrad Tomaszkiewicz: There was a lot of inspiration.
Piotr Kucharski: Quite a lot of those, of course, some novels, books, horror stories, classical ones like Dracula. I think Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu also worked for us as well. Of course, some other media series.
Konrad Tomaszkiewicz: TV series, True Blood.
Piotr Kucharski: Heavy top RPGs, like, of course, World of Darkness and Vampire: The Masquerade, so quite a lot. What I like about working with vampires is that everyone knows something about vampires, but we are also able to add our own twists and our own quality to it.
How did that come to be? Because, as you say, everybody knows vampires, but we all have our own version, like Twilight vampires or True Blood vampires or something more old school. There are different varieties. How did you land on this version?
Piotr Kucharski: Basically, after what started it is, we all grew up in Slavic culture, but also very close to Romania, and everyone knows the stories about Dracula, so that was the basis, but then I think, well, you guys…
Konrad Tomaszkiewicz: When we start to speak about the vampires, we search for the twist, and how to create our own lore with the vampires. And the lore is really rich; I cannot spoil too much, because it’s deep in the game, and it’s also some secrets you will discover later—but as we showed before, our vampires are different.
They have more fangs—an older vampire, the more fangs it has. We are not changing humans into vampires in the traditional pop culture way that they are just feeding with the blood, and so on, but to change the human to vampire, the vampire needs to take off his fang and put it into the heart of the victim, and it works this way. It’s connected with other things in the game, and, as I said, I don’t want to break your playthrough, but it’s interesting, and quite worth it to explore.
Okay, just for The Blood of Dawnwalker saga overall—we’re saying saga now, that’s fun—there are a lot of really unique mechanics that I’ve only seen bits and pieces of so far. Can you tell us a little bit about those, and how this is going to be different than just a normal RPG or action-adventure?
Konrad Tomaszkiewicz: Our game is quite unique, and we shape it; first of all, we create our protagonist in quite a unique way. The idea was that it starts from this: we wanted to touch the vampire subject, but we didn’t want to create the protagonist who is overpowered. Usually, when the vampire is strong, it’s really hard to deliver opponents, and the stories which will be a challenge are harder to create.
We wanted to have the grounded protagonist, and we talked about vampires, but also we talked about the werewolf, and the werewolf is the character who is the human in the day and the beast at night, right? We thought, “Okay, what would happen if we created this kind of hero, but a vampire version?”
And when we started to think about it, we thought about this lung illness, which is a real illness, actually. And what would happen if Coen worked in these silver mines and had silver in his body and blood? What would happen if someone would try to change him into a vampire? And we created the Dawnwalker, this, let’s say, creature, which is between two words.
Because of the silver in the body, he cannot change fully into the vampire, and when the sun is coming up there is this change coming back, and he’s a normal human and can be killed easily. This protagonist opened a lot of doors in front of us because, as I said, the stories we can tell are more interesting. The actor is more grounded. It also changed our thinking about the game itself, because this duality needs reflection in gameplay.
At night you will do quests in a different way; in the day you will do the quest in a different way. That was the first design challenge: the story design and the quest design challenge—how to approach those quests to allow you to complete them differently, and to give you this feeling that you are a different creature at night.
Later on, we started to think about the structure of the game, and we thought it would be really cool, especially that we have those, let’s say, two protagonists—the human and almost vampire being—how to create the structure of the game to fully use this potential. We decided to do our narrative sandbox, which actually is quite similar to the table we have in front of us. Here in the center you have your main goal to help your family, and everything around is these satellites.
This means that it’s total freedom, which brings our game closer to pen and paper RPGs, and allows you to choose whatever you want to do in this world. You don’t have this classic main quest structure, which forces you to do some things. The only obligatory thing after you exit the prologue is this main thing in the center. The rest is optional; it’s up to you how you build your way.
If I’m not mistaken, there’s a time mechanic in The Blood of Dawnwalker as well, right? You have a finite amount of time, and some quests will progress that?
Konrad Tomaszkiewicz: And this thing was the last thing we designed because we thought, we have this duality, we have the goal to help our family, but if there is no stake, if it will work like in the other games, that it will not be freezed in the time, then you don’t have these feelings about, these emotions about what would happen if I will not manage to do that.
We decided to add the time mechanic to give you this feeling of fighting the time to achieve your goal. But what is important, this is only the story goal; the game does not end if the time passed, and we use this mechanic to make those emotions more real.
So you can essentially fail the main story but keep playing the game. Is that right?
Piotr Kucharski: It’s about consequences, right?
I am going to cry so much!
Piotr Kucharski: We were thinking about, we didn’t want the players to feel like the clock is ticking all the time, and we have to rush through the game, because that’s not the point, but giving time as a resource is what makes all the decisions really important. We think that they are impactful, and in that way, the players will be able to grab their own story.
They will not see everything; probably, when playing the game, they will have to replay it. I know we’re looking forward to all those Reddit stories about people, “Oh, I haven’t seen that. Have you?” We think it’s really cool.
I think that’s really cool too. I know my opinion doesn’t really matter, but that’s so cool.
Konrad Tomaszkiewicz: I would add to this one thing: in video game creation, the most important thing is immersion, and we don’t want to do another RPG like the classic structure, and everything that you saw before. Our goal is to create games that, 15 years from now, or 20 years from now, you will remember, and that it would be an important milestone in your experience of video games.
This is our goal, and it is really important that we work and do everything to boost this immersion. This time thing is also boosting immersion, because it feels real as the first thing, and the second thing, we also have the events in the game, which happen right now, like in normal life, and if you decide not to take part in it, it’s also a choice, which will have consequences. It’s adding to this layer of choices and the consequences, another complexity.
It makes the game feel real, and it’s really important for us now.
A lot of RPGs will have you make choices, and there are “consequences” like people are mean to you, but the story is still mostly going to end up the same. Is that the case with The Blood of Dawnwalker, or will the story end the same either way?
Konrad Tomaszkiewicz: The story changes. And, as I said, you have these satellites, which means that in our game you can kill everyone, and if you eat the person who wants to help you, she or he will not help you, and you need to find another way to achieve your goal. As I said, we want to give you as much of an immersive experience as we can.
And there are a variety of endings in The Blood of Dawnwalker, so every time we play through…
Konrad Tomaszkiewicz: Exactly. A lot of them.
Okay, I was just going to ask, is it just one or two…
Piotr Kucharski: There is a lot of branching. We had a lot of fun with design quests in such a way that there will be so many branches.
Konrad Tomaszkiewicz: A lot of pain. [laughs]
Piotr Kucharski: Oh yeah, of course, I mean it was difficult, it was challenging, but also it’s very satisfying when you get a quest in which…I believe in failing forward, so even if you do something that is a failure, let’s call it, it’s not about breaking up the quest or losing, it’s about pushing the plot in a different direction, simple as that.
Obviously, you’re not going to be able to tell me what they are, but does everyone on the team like have a favourite ending, essentially?
Piotr Kucharski: I know I do!
Konrad Tomaszkiewicz: Me too!
Are they the same though? Is there going to be like one popular one?
Konrad Tomaszkiewicz: I don’t think so.
Piotr Kucharski: I think it’s quite hard to say, because it also, I think, depends on what kind of Coen you want to play, because you also have some influence on how Coen turns out by the end of the game. I think that the game really supports your choices, because you can embrace the day side, you can embrace the night side, so you can have fun with that, and in the end, I think the epilogue you will get will be the one you crafted on your own.
This is the first time we’re really getting to talk about The Blood of Dawnwalker in detail, at least in North America. So, if there is one thing that you want people to know about the saga, what do you want to tell them?
Konrad Tomaszkiewicz: I will tell you that it will be a really cool adventure through many cool places, and through different emotions, and I think that it’s worth it to try because the game is different, but in a good way, and it will bring emotions in a really strong way.
Piotr Kucharski: I just want to say that I think that we, as a team, we crafted quite a lot of those single stories inside of the big story that they, of course, they support the overarching goal, but I just hope the players, when they go inside to the sandbox, they will all just find the toys they want to find, they will have fun with those, and basically we just hope that they will have as much fun playing it as we have had making the game.
Have you seen people hands-on with The Blood of Dawnwalker yet? Have there been other play tests for the game? How’d that feel?
Konrad Tomaszkiewicz: Great. That’s why we can, back to your first question, why we are so confident, because I think that people like it.
That’s all I have for you guys. But thank you so much. I am wildly excited for The Blood of Dawnwalker.
The Blood of Dawnwalker releases on September 3, 2026, on PlayStation 5, XBOX Series X|S and PC.
