The Blood of Dawnwalker is a pretty excellent RPG, but there’s one aspect of it that not everyone loves: Time. Simply put, it’s a limited resource in the game, which restricts what Coen—that’s you—can do. Our reviewer, Australian editor Shaun Prescott, found it injected a sense of urgency into the game, at least in the early going, but said he’d “also like to pick some nirnroot and play some Gwent, thank you very much”—that is, have the time to relax and fiddle with non-essential tasks on his own terms, at his own pace.
Other players clearly felt the same way: One of the first mods to come out for The Blood of Dawnwalker is the “Better Story Timer,” which effectively eliminates the impact of the ticking clock entirely—and which has since become, by far, the most popular Dawnwalker mod on Nexus Mods.
How much of an impact that reaction has had over at developer Rebel Wolves is impossible to say, but in an interview with Eurogamer, studio CEO and game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz said it might not be used for the game’s sequel.
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“We will play with it. If we will have parts of the story, or the whole story, to which it fits, then we will use it,” Tomaszkiewicz said. “If we will have stories where it does not fit, we will not force it. We will play with this system and we will try to use it to boost the urgency of some events in the game. But I’m not saying that in every game we will have the same scheme or loop—it’s not like this.”
Tomaszkiewicz acknowledged complaints about the time mechanic, and the mods available to remove it. He doesn’t have a problem with that, but he does encourage players to try Dawnwalker with the clock running first: “We balanced [Dawnwalker] in a way that it’s possible to do around 80 percent of the content with the time mechanic so it’s not so bad.
“The arguments of, ‘I want to see everything in one playthrough,’ I understand, but it’s false to begin with, because even in games like The Witcher, you cannot see everything in one playthrough because you have choices and consequences, and different things happen when you choose different things,” Tomaszkiewicz said.
I have that same feeling myself with most games—I want to see everything the first time—but Tomaszkiewicz is correct: The Witcher 2 forces players to make a choice at a critical juncture that unavoidably excludes a significant amount of gameplay, and that seemed fine; Obsidian’s Pentiment, released to acclaim in 2022, has a very strict time mechanic of its own that’s essential to the experience. Missing out on things in videogames is not all that new or unusual—if anything, it’s the inevitable outcome of choice in videogames that so many players say they want.
Interestingly, Tomaszkiewicz said that complaints about the time mechanic have tailed off considerably now that Dawnwalker has been out for a couple weeks, because people have finished the game and realized they actually had more time than they needed—a pattern he expects to continue as players continue to wrap it up.
“There will always be people who will have a problem with that because they don’t like time mechanics at all, but I think that is fine,” he said. “They can download the mod and play without it if they want.”
And yes, even though The Blood of Dawnwalker has only been out for a couple weeks, Rebel Wolves is already eyeballing a sequel: The studio is now looking for a lead writer to help “craft the next chapter in the Dawnwalker saga.”
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