The Blood of Dawnwalker’s Kill-Anyone Promise: Real RPG Freedom or Marketing Trap?

What Caught My Eye at Gamescom

When a studio led by The Witcher 3’s director says, “You can kill everyone and still beat the game,” I perk up-and immediately start asking questions. Rebel Wolves’ The Blood of Dawnwalker is a third-person action RPG set in the 14th-century Carpathians where you play Coen, a reluctant vampire racing against a 30-day clock to save his family. At Gamescom, director and CEO Konrad Tomaszkiewicz pitched the kind of player agency we almost never get in big-budget RPGs.

• You can kill any character and still finish the story-difficulty and endings adapt.
• A 30-day deadline doesn’t trigger a hard Game Over if you fail.
• After the prologue, you can beeline straight to the final castle, Breath of the Wild-style.
• Big promise for a new studio-execution will make or break it.

Breaking Down the Announcement

Here’s the core pitch: only one objective is mandatory—save your family. Everything else is optional or expendable, including the people giving you quests. As Tomaszkiewicz told us at Gamescom, translated from French: “At first we were quite afraid that if we allowed this, it would be very complicated to fix certain things. But in the end we thought it depends on the players, because the story works like this: you have just one mandatory objective—save your family—and the rest are side quests. If you don’t do them, if you skip them or even kill the characters, it’s not a problem. There are other ways to progress, and you can always attack the castle yourself and reach the goal. You can still finish the game—it’s up to you whether it’s harder or easier, and how you choose to get there.”

This isn’t just “you can punch a vendor and they get back up.” The studio is claiming literal kill-anyone design, with the world and difficulty rebalancing around your choices. Also notable: the 30-day timer won’t instantly fail you if you run out of time—expect diverging outcomes or “bad” endings, not a restart screen. And yes, you can sprint for the endgame after the prologue if you think you’re built different. That’s a bold combination of systemic freedom and time pressure.

Why This Matters (and Why I’m Skeptical)

We’ve seen pieces of this vision before. Obsidian’s Fallout: New Vegas let you break quest lines and still find a way through. Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3 famously lets you shank a quest-giver and the game keeps rolling. Dontnod’s Vampyr made every citizen a meal, with meaningful consequences to city stability and difficulty. Even so, true kill-anyone RPGs are rare because they’re brutally hard to pull off without collapsing into bugs or narrative nonsense.

That’s where the skepticism comes in. Rebel Wolves is a team of CD Projekt veterans, sure, but it’s a new studio attempting one of the hardest designs in the genre. For this to work, they need:

• Robust systemic quest logic that reroutes objectives when NPCs die—no dead ends, no “come back later” soft locks.
• Reactive writing and VO coverage to account for missing characters, alternate quest starts, and faction shifts.
• A combat/stealth toolkit deep enough that a castle rush isn’t just a meme for speedrunners but a viable (if brutal) path.
• Clear UX for the 30-day clock so it pressures you without becoming a panic attack—think Majora’s Mask done modern, not Dead Rising spreadsheet anxiety.

The Witcher 3 offered huge choice, but it still leaned on invulnerable NPCs and curated quest chains. Dawnwalker is promising fewer invisible walls and more “you did it, now live with it.” If Rebel Wolves hits that balance—freedom with legible consequences—it could set a new bar for narrative agency in action RPGs.

The Gamer’s Perspective: What I Need to See Next

The premise is strong: a gothic, third-person RPG where your vampire powers tempt you to take shortcuts—drain a key character for strength now, accept the political chaos later. But the systems have to sing. I want real build diversity: stealthy night predator, social manipulator who weaponizes fear, or a blade-forward brawler who trades humanity for raw power. If the “kill-anyone” promise is genuine, the game should also provide non-lethal routes and meaningful reasons to keep people alive.

On the 30-day timer, let me set expectations. A flexible time system—resting costs days, feeding buys power but risks exposure, districts change as nights pass—could be incredible. Locking the whole campaign to a hard timer without options would alienate players who explore slowly. Accessibility toggles (or modes that extend the clock) would go a long way without nuking the creative vision.

Finally, that Breath of the Wild-style “storm the castle” promise is only exciting if getting there is legitimately possible in multiple ways. Can I infiltrate via sewers at night? Charm a guard captain? Scale ramparts with a risky vampiric leap? If the only answer is “grind until overleveled,” then it’s not freedom—it’s marketing.

Looking Ahead

On paper, The Blood of Dawnwalker is the kind of ambitious, systems-driven RPG we keep asking big studios to make, and rarely get. If Rebel Wolves sticks the landing, we’ll be talking about it the way we talk about New Vegas, BG3, and yes, that first time someone ran straight to Hyrule Castle with three hearts and a stick. If it wobbles, expect the usual: immortal “essential” NPCs quietly creeping back in and a lot of “we meant kill-almost-anyone.” I’m hopeful—but I want to see those reactive systems working in extended gameplay, not just in quotes.

TL;DR

Dawnwalker promises real RPG agency: kill-anyone, timer-driven stakes, and an optional sprint to the final boss. It could be special if the systems truly react. Cautious optimism until we see raw gameplay that proves the freedom isn’t smoke and mirrors.