[STEAM] The Blood of Dawnwalker director compares the RPG's excellent fantasy combat to Max Payne and Guitar Hero: "Oh god, it was a lot of iteration"

[Steam 0]

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

The Blood of Dawnwalker is taking remarkably big swings for developer Rebel Wolves' debut game. I

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, and came away fascinated by how physically it involves the player in its world. Time is an action point-style resource that keeps the game's world moving forward, while protagonist Coen's playstyle varies greatly as a vampire by night and human by day.

While its third-person action and open-world setting betray its developer's experience on RPG hits

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

and

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

,

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

shows a clear drive to go deeper on role-playing elements. Catching up with game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, I suggest that a lot of the game's depth is typically reserved for isometric-style RPGs – think Baldur's Gate and Fallout, wherein rules and systems are used to reinforce their respective fantasies.

In another life, The Blood of Dawnwalker could have mirrored those examples even closer. "At the beginning of the game, we knew we wanted it to be third-person," shares Tomaszkiewicz, "[but] when we started thinking about combat, we thought maybe we would make it isometric."

"In the end, we thought that telling the story and being immersed with your characters is best when you see it all the time on screen," the director continues. "A big part of RPGs is itemization – changing your character, putting new clothes and weapons on, and so on. You want to see them on your character all the time, and in isometric games it works but the characters are smaller and the details are harder to see. We knew we had the technology and know-how to do really detailed characters, knew those materials would be really good, and decided to create a third-person [perspective] where you can change the distance from the character."

Fighting talk

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

(Image credit: Rebel Wolves) Through the lens of combat, I get the impression that Rebel Wolves has spent the last four years untangling itself from the RPG genre's norms and expectations – instead following the fun and seeing where it leads. Its much-lauded time system is "like Persona," says Tomaszkiewicz, but argues The Blood of Dawnwalker's shifting day and night dynamic is unlike anything we've seen before. "There are no games we could have compared this to. We created two different loops, and [essentially] needed to create two games in one."

"You can play the same quest at day or night, and it's a little bit different," the director adds. "

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

– it's a lot."

[/url]

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up