"Yes. We had at first a more restricted time where it was harder to beat the game, but after all of those voices, before release even, we knew that it can be a problem and we rebalanced it this way to give the buffer for the people to not fear this.
"The prologue was the first small test-field for time. And we didn't change it because we wanted to give this experience to people and show them what they can expect. Actually later on we changed the main game, besides the prologue, because we were afraid that people [would] complain too much that it's too restricted.
"[In the older version] you needed to think about everything even more carefully. But we started to speak with Mateusz [Tomaszkiewicz, creative director and Konrad's brother] and the rest of the team about what we wanted to achieve, and we figured out that we don't want to create a mini-game from it. We wanted to give the player the proper feeling and proper emotions in the main story. This is the purpose of the main story, not to create a challenge for it," via Eurogamer.
Listen—I like The Blood of Dawnwalker, I've had a pretty good time with it thus far, but by far its most interesting mechanic from the preview I played, the time limit, is by far the least impactful element of the full game. It's still kinda there, you still kinda need to keep an eye on it, but short of doing a full completionist sweep of the worldmap? It doesn't really stop you from doing what you want to do.
And hey, I understand why some folks didn't like that, and moved faster than a hungry vampire in a blood bank to mod it out of their games. But I actually wanted to go the other way—I wanted it to be harsher. And to hear that it was harsher at some point in development actually makes me kinda disappointed.
In particular, hearing about the prologue being a field test is disheartening, because the prologue is by far the most interesting the time limitations actually get. You've only got a day, which means that certain side-quests (like chasing a ragebaiter down to beat him into the mud) fall by the wayside in favour of, at least in my playthrough, saving lives and making sure your family is okay.
It also makes me more entrenched in the belief that Rebel Wolves shouldn't have tried to thread the needle all on its own, and instead, given players a few different settings—both harder and easier—than the main game for time management. If I want the looming threat of my family's demise breathing down my neck, then why not? Similarly, if you don't want that, I shan't blame you. It's a singleplayer game and I'm not your dad, unless I've got some vampiric sires I don't know about.
