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Rebel Wolves just released a lengthy in-game walkthrough of a quest from The Blood of Dawnwalker, its sick-looking debut vampire RPG. While most of the demo gives me major The Witcher 3 vibes – no surprise there, it’s made by some CDPR veterans – what surprised me most was how its main questline is ripping a page from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s playbook.
You might remember that in Breath of the Wild, you were free to barge into a Ganon-infested Hyrule Castle and roll credits pretty much from the get-go. The chances of you actually succeeding with only three hearts and well wishes in your pocket were very slim (unless you were a pro speedrunner), but you were free to try.
That structure is at least somewhat present in Blood of Dawnwalker. At a certain point in the demo, we see the towering castle of Greifberg, which has been taken over by a vampire regime that’s also imprisoned the protagonist’s family.
“In order to complete the main quest and save your family, you will have to storm the castle, alone or with the help of friendly NPCs,” designer director Daniel Sadowski explained. “We could do it right now if we wanted to, but it would be super challenging.”
The quest marker on the side of the screen lets us know we have 22 in-game days to infiltrate the castle, so I’m guessing that we’re free to try our luck at almost any point in the story.
We’ll see how that ‘Narrative Sandbox’ structure plays out when Blood of Dawnwalker comes out sometime next year.