The new game from The Witcher 3's director revives the best tradition of Morrowind by letting you kill off 'really important NPCs'

The Blood of Dawnwalker's antagonist vampire, Brencis, looking at the game's protagonist, Coen.

(Image credit: Rebel Wolves)

Time was, videogames let you just kill whoever. Plucky sidekick, love interest, authoritarian father figure, plot-critical NPC—all these and more were fodder to a sufficiently trigger-happy player.

The best games to ever do it were, I reckon, Fallout: New Vegas and The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind. The former was designed to adjust the plot whenever you summarily executed a critical NPC, while the latter just flashed up a card whenever you merked someone vital to the main quest, suggesting that you might want to not do that. Maybe. If you like.

These days, though, we baby all our VIPs, and the best you can expect is to knock them out for a bit. Not so in The Blood of Dawnwalker, the new, vampiric RPG from former Witcher 3 quest lead Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz (and former Witcher 3 game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz) and studio Rebel Wolves. In a chat with GamesRadar, Tomaszkiewicz says they're getting old-school with it: "we allow you to kill off a lot of NPCs, and a lot of them can be really important NPCs." You are playing a creature of the night, after all.

It's a big shift from the Witcher 3, of course: it's not like you could up and gut the Bloody Baron if you wanted to, and Tomaszkiewicz says it's about creating options. "It's a sandbox, meaning we're trying to maximize your options of your choice in the game," he says, although he stresses that there's still plenty of emphasis on "good storytelling, interesting characters and a lot of lore to find."

Killing important people, it turns out, has consequences. "Sometimes this can lead to alternate outcomes or even cut off certain questlines," said Tomaszkiewicz, in a statement I have to believe he tailored to appeal to sickos like me specifically. It even sounds like you might wake up with blood on your hands whether you want to or not, if you aren't careful. "You being a Dawnwalker means that you have this blood hunger during the night time, so this can actually lead to these NPCs dying if you're not careful."

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.