Blood of Dawnwalker takes after Baldur's Gate 3's "freedom of choice" and RPG classic Gothic's small but dense world design

• Copy link
• Facebook
• X
• Pinterest
• Flipboard
• Email

Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter

The Blood of Dawnwalker is built by devs with a clear, abiding love for the RPG genre, and creative director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz is no exception. He's taken with Baldur's Gate 3's approach to player freedom, and that spirit – making sure that players can feel their impact on the game world – has helped to inform Blood of Dawnwalker.

The efforts in modern games toward "maximizing player agency" is "very exciting" to Tomaszkiewicz, as he tells GamesRadar+. "I love the games that did this in the past, and I loved what they did with Baldur's Gate 3, for example, with this – kind of mixing this narrative experience and maximizing your freedom of choice: what do you want to do, which plot lines do you want to do or not do, and how does the game world react to this? I think this is very exciting."

As he puts it, "you can have a super well-crafted, very emotional, cinematic experience, but if you're basically like an observer with extra steps, to me, it's not as exciting as really participating and leaving my mark on the game world."

Article continues below

The idea with Blood of Dawnwalker is to provide a similar sort of "narrative sandbox." The devs want "to have these emotional and engaging stories, these characters that you like, or you hate, or get interested in, and also maximizing the player choice within that environment."

The Blood of Dawnwalker — Story Trailer [4K] [subtitles available] - YouTube Watch On

The notion of making choices that matter have driven RPG devs for decades, but the results have always been mixed, to say the least. I was enthralled the first time I played through Knights of the Old Republic, feeling like every choice I made would have ripple effects throughout the game. The reality that I was actually just getting a handful of different cutscenes for those choices hit pretty hard on the second playthrough.

Baldur's Gate 3 offers more consequential repercussions for your actions in large part by constraining the story to relatively small areas that actually can reflect your choices, and that idea of constraint is also something that Blood of Dawnwalker is pursuing. As an added bonus, a limited scope – notwithstanding the fact that Larian's game can run a hundred hours – can result in a more digestible RPG.

"I feel tired with games that are way too big," Tomaszkiewicz says. "I don't have that much time, and I prefer more condensed experiences, but I still enjoy open worlds. One of my favorites from the past were the Gothic games, for example, and they were much smaller worlds, but they were so dense with detail, quests, and characters, and it felt like you really inhabited that space. This is something I really enjoy also."

Sign up to the GamesRadar+ Newsletter

Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more

It's not purely a design decision to keep Blood of Dawnwalker's scope limited, of course. "Obviously we are kind of also doing it because we wanted to keep the scope contained to the specific size of the team, and we wanted to produce this in a reasonable way and so on," Tomaszkiewicz explains. "But I think it has this effect of having this smaller world that is dense with content, and you get a lot of the good stuff – you don't feel like you're just traversing empty spaces that much."

The Witcher 3 director says games like Crimson Desert and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 take him back to the RPG golden age of the '90s.

CATEGORIES

Dustin BaileyStaff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.

With contributions from

• Josh WestEditor-in-Chief, GamesRadar+

View More

You must confirm your public display name before commenting

Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.

Logout LATEST ARTICLES

1. 1Surprise! A new episode of The Bear co-written by Jon Bernthal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach has shadow-dropped on Hulu
2. 2PC gamers buy way more games that cost less than $30 at launch compared to PlayStation and Xbox players, analysts say, and it's "reshaping the PC market"
3. 3Windrose devs issue patch to address fears their open-world pirate game was slowly destroying SSDs
4. 4Microsoft finally admits everyone hates Copilot: Xbox CEO confirms it's "winding down" Copilot on mobile and ending it on console
5. 5Another friendslop hit prints money on Steam as Gamble With Your Friends sells 500k copies in 3 days: "Speechless"