The Witcher 3 may notionally be about helping Ciri defeat The Wild Hunt, but real heads know CD Projekt’s RPG is really about mending Geralt’s fractured relationship with Yennefer with the help of a stuffed unicorn. Navigating the love triangle between Geralt, Triss and Yen was a big part of CDP’s 2015′ masterpiece, so naturally fans are curious about what role, if any, romance will play in The Blood of Dawnwalker, the new game from The Witcher 3’s director and lead quest designer, the brothers Konrad and Mateusz Tomaskiewicz
Indeed, this question was posed directly to Rebel Wolves creative director Mateusz Tomaskiewicz this week. In an interview during the New Game + Expo, Tomaskiewicz was asked by streamer Luality if romance will feature in The Blood of Dawnwalker.
Tomaskiewicz did talk about relationships in The Blood of Dawnwalker in a different way, however. His discussion with Luality focusses mainly on one of your main enemies in the game—Brencis, a vampire who has built a quasi-religious cult of personality around himself. Tomaskiewicz says that Rebel Wolves want Brencis to be an “active antagonist”, one players will feel responding to your actions over the course of their adventure.
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“In a lot of games, the antagonists are out there to be defeated. But generally speaking you have free rein, you do your own thing, and it doesn’t really change much in how they approach you. In this game, what we wanted to do was have Brencis react to your actions as you complete different activities throughout the valley, as you maybe undermine his operations.”
Tomaskiewicz then explained how this works. “If you undermine Brencis, you will gain notoriety. The more notorious you are, the more edicts Brencis will pass in order to thwart you. So for example, he might send out more soldiers to patrol roads and villages, right? He might, in some extreme cases initiate a lockdown in the city to hamper your ways of traversing it.”
It’s a neat idea, kind of like the dynamic revenge system in Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain but with a more personal aspect. It always bugs me when your main opponent in a game mopes about in his castle waiting for you to overthrow him, so incorporating some pushback into the systems is a smart touch. Tomaskiewicz adds that these edicts are designed to “twist and change the general open world gameplay”, so it sounds like you can expect some significant modifiers to the world state depending upon your actions.
We shouldn’t have too long to wait to find out exactly how these and The Blood of Dawnwalker’s many other systems will function, as the game is due out sometime this year. Given we won’t be seeing The Witcher 4 any time soon, plus how long it’s been since we last saw a great vampire RPG, I’m itching to sink my teeth into Rebel Wolves’ moody debut.
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