If you thought Bloodlines 2 lacked bite, remember that The Witcher 3's director left CD Projekt to make a vampire RPG, and it's out next year

Fantasy RPG The Blood of Dawnwalker's protagonist, Coen, a half human half vampire being holding onto a pole and staring into the night.

(Image credit: Rebel Wolves)

2025 finally brought us Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines 2, but whether you liked or loathed The Chinese Room's follow-up to Troika's wildly ambitious and deeply flawed RPG, it's safe to say that it wasn't the follow-up most fans expected.

On a personal level, what I wanted from Bloodlines 2 was basically 'Bloodlines 1, but fixed', an RPG that took all the wild, unconstrained ambition of the original and brought it up to modern standards with a new story and exploratory space on top. Yet while Bloodlines 2 had its merits—like its brilliant Malkavian detective companion Fabien—it was mechanically much simpler than Troika's game, while also lacking meaningful side-quests and any real sense of character progression.

And get this, Tomaszkiewicz left the studio to make Dawnwalker because he believed it too ambitious to make there: "We had crazy ideas," he told PC Gamer back in January. " We knew that, you know, if we wanted to make them, we needed to open our own studio, because it would be hard to convince any big company—you know, with non-IP—to change, and do something new, and do something crazy. Actually, it’s risky, because we’re doing some solutions which are new."

The Blood of Dawnwalker — Gameplay Overview (Part II) [4K] [subtitles available] - YouTube

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What are these new ideas? Well, the Blood of Dawnwalker sees you play as Coen, a half-human, half-vampire who seeks vengeance on a group of powerful vampires who have kidnapped his family and taken control of a valley in the Carpathian Mountains. How you go about this will depend heavily on time, a key resource in The Blood of Dawnwalker in more ways than one.

For starters, your abilities differ depending on whether it's day or night. In the daytime, Coen's fights more like a human, though he can still dabble in magic through the power of hexes. At night, his vampire powers come to the fore, letting him rip his enemies apart with his claws.

But time also plays into the narrative, with different quest paths appearing depending on whether you tackle objectives by day or night, resulting in the story moving forward in diverging ways. This can have major implications for the story, possibly the fate of major characters. Even if it doesn't, Rebel Wolves want to let you kill important NPCs anyway, in the tradition of older RPGs like Morrowind.

While its DNA is understandably rooted more in The Witcher 3 than Bloodlines', er, bloodline, I'll happily take a Witcher-adjacent RPG with a little extra bite. There's no hard release date for The Blood of Dawnwalker yet, but it's expected to release next year.

Rick has been fascinated by PC gaming since he was seven years old, when he used to sneak into his dad's home office for covert sessions of Doom. He grew up on a diet of similarly unsuitable games, with favourites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was games editor of Custom PC magazine and associated website bit-tech.net. But he's always kept one foot in freelance games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, the Guardian and, naturally, PC Gamer. While he'll play anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a particular passion for first-person shooters and immersive sims.

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