{"id":14883,"date":"2026-07-29T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-29T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nextlevelnews.co.uk\/blog\/2026\/07\/29\/i-have-a-personal-vendetta-against-filler-content-how-the-blood-of-dawnwalker-makes-its-open-world-feel-meaningful\/"},"modified":"2026-07-29T16:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-07-29T16:00:00","slug":"i-have-a-personal-vendetta-against-filler-content-how-the-blood-of-dawnwalker-makes-its-open-world-feel-meaningful","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nextlevelnews.co.uk\/blog\/2026\/07\/29\/i-have-a-personal-vendetta-against-filler-content-how-the-blood-of-dawnwalker-makes-its-open-world-feel-meaningful\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I Have a Personal Vendetta Against Filler Content\u2019 \u2013 How The Blood of Dawnwalker Makes Its Open World Feel Meaningful"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cA good open world has a meaning,\u201d Konrad Tomaszkiewicz tells me. And he\u2019d know a thing or two about that \u2013 he directed The Witcher 3, after all. And so for The Blood of Dawnwalker, his upcoming open world RPG at new studio Rebel Wolves, it was clear that he and his team had to build upon the foundations of his previous project. \u201cThat was our starting point, that it needed to have meaning.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I’m exploring it, can I learn more about the lore, more about the story of this region, about the people who are living there?\u201d he asks, all things that make The Witcher 3\u2019s world rich and immersive. \u201cWhen I’m playing open world games where I just have activities which give me XP and items, I don’t get this enjoyment and fun from it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Konrad\u2019s brother, Dawnwalker\u2019s creative director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz, has similar feelings. \u201cI have this personal vendetta against filler content,\u201d he says. \u201cI really dislike it. I know it’s very difficult to avoid in open worlds, but I personally really like handcrafted custom and unique content pieces. A little twist or at least some kind of new information that it brings to the table.\u201d<\/p>\n

From a game design perspective, then, The Blood of Dawnwalker\u2019s open world is a stage for a grand adventure inspired by the quests the brothers experienced in their mind\u2019s eye while playing tabletop RPGs. It\u2019s a playable reality, not a checklist of repeatable activities. \u201cWhat makes the open world and the game interesting is the connections,\u201d Konrad says. \u201cIf you explore, you sometimes open big branches of the story you cannot predict and something good can happen.\u201d The result of all this is that every quest is promised to connect to something, be that the narrative at the heart of Dawnwalker, or the anger and infamy systems that power the Vampire Court that rules over the valley<\/u><\/a>. By forging these connections, Rebel Wolves intends for your activities in the open world to achieve that aforementioned \u201cmeaning\u201d. <\/p>\n

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Those connections could not be forged without creating a similar bond between the studio\u2019s design disciplines. Gameplay and narrative teams had to be united for the mechanics of the open world to truly become a story experience. To find the right thematic base for Dawnwalker\u2019s world of Vale Sangora, narrative director Jakub Szamalek looked to his own homelands. <\/p>\n

\u201c<\/strong>Rather than particular historical moments, this game is inspired by the overall themes and main strands of Eastern European history and folklore,\u201d he explains. \u201cIt’s always been a place of migration and it’s always been a place of conflict. There’s a lot of blood that seeped into the soil of Eastern Europe, which is maybe why it’s so fertile and why we have such dark, dark stories. I think it has a distinct texture.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Blood of Dawnwalker isn\u2019t just the tale of Vale Sangora, though \u2013 it\u2019s much more personal than that. It\u2019s the journey of Coen, a man barely out of his teenage years who now carries the curse of vampirism. His life will never be the same, but that\u2019s not entirely the infection\u2019s doing. The abduction of Coen\u2019s family by the vampire lord Brencis forces him to leave his small village and explore the entire valley, taking him to places that he\u2019d never have seen otherwise. <\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the first major decisions was to have a massive Gothic cathedral in our capital,\u201d says Szamalek. \u201cPut yourself in the position of a medieval peasant who lived his whole life in a thatched cottage and then arrives in a local city, sees this massive structure built out of stone with intricate detail. All those dark scenes of suffering and executions that Catholic churches seem to be reverent of. [We wanted to] tap into that kind of frequency and vibe and amplify it by a hundred.\u201d<\/p>\n

There’s a lot of blood that seeped into the soil of Eastern Europe, which is maybe why we have such dark, dark stories.<\/section>\n

The Gothic \u201cvibe\u201d is important to Dawnwalker. Of course it is; this is a vampire RPG we\u2019re talking about. But that extends far beyond just the look of the world. It influences the way you interact with the land, and how the moonlight hours unlock fresh new opportunities. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you are human, you fight differently, explore the world differently, and approach the quests differently in comparison to being a vampire at night,\u201d says Konrad. \u201cAt night you have more options to travel and explore. You can find stuff that\u2019s not reachable by a human [Coen]. You can find some good stories there, some challenges or cool items.\u201d <\/p>\n

The duality of human and vampire poses a unique challenge, as the development team needs to consider every opportunity in the world from two different perspectives. Is this an activity for the day, night, or something that should have multiple paths depending on when the player wants to approach it? But that\u2019s not the only challenge the open world has posed. There\u2019s also the issue of, well, challenge. When you can go anywhere and do anything, there\u2019s no set pathway through the world and story, and thus no easy way to plot a difficulty curve. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe didn’t want to do full auto balancing like some games do,\u201d says Mateusz. \u201cMy problem with this is, yes, it allows you to maximize player freedom by exploring whatever you want, whenever you want, but it takes something away from the feeling of progression. If the enemies are never under my level, they’re always on my level, it feels like the leveling up and gaining gear is kind of pointless.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Dawnwalker\u2019s enemies do not automatically scale to match your level, the increased challenge posed by certain regions of the map is not intended to prohibit you from exploring them earlier than the developers intended. \u201cYou’re not railroaded in this one correct way of playing it,\u201d Mateusz assures me. \u201cIt’s like, I can gather some experience here and there and maybe explore it in different directions than other players do. Because it’s an RPG, you collect items, you become stronger and so on and so forth. At every point we wanted you to have options.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Wherever you decide to explore, Rebel Wolves wants each region and location to have a genuine sense of culture. To do that, the developers needed to look to humanity\u2019s own history. That\u2019s something that came easy to Szamalek, who has a PhD in archaeology. \u201cThere is something striking about seeing works of art from a long, long time ago and trying to grapple with what they mean and what the specificities were of the people who painted them,\u201d he says. \u201cI wanted to have that in the game, to capture that fascination and translate this into an experience that gamers can participate in.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe thought that each of the sentient monster races in our game should have their own art that is a little bit different, that is unique to their sensitivities or culture,\u201d Szamalek explains. \u201cAnd the more you engage with that and the more you try to understand what they’re trying to communicate, the easier you will find it to talk to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Szamalek tells me of his fascination with Italian frescoes, the beautiful (and often eerie) work of historic artists that were painted directly onto wet plaster. They become part of the wall, part of the building, part of the location\u2019s aura. And in The Blood of Dawnwalker, you\u2019ll find many ancient artworks that depict tales from Vale Sangora\u2019s ancient past. As we saw in an earlier gameplay video debuted as part of IGN First<\/u><\/a>, careful study of these frescoes can reveal hidden truths and guide Coen to special items. <\/p>\n

Like in our own world, these works of art are totally unique. \u201cMy request was that we won’t reuse them, so that you won’t be seeing the same frescoes or the same paintings over and over again in different ruins,\u201d says Szamalek. \u201cIt ruins the immersion for me. I realise, \u2018Oh, that’s just an asset. It doesn’t have any meaning.\u2019 So I want art that gives context to what you’re exploring and is unique to the location you’re exploring.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve seen little of The Blood of Dawnwalker\u2019s open world so far \u2013 most of my hands-on preview was spent within the boundaries of the prologue\u2019s village. But what I have seen suggests a smart melding of Ubisoft\u2019s climb-towers-to-scout-locations format with more bespoke activity ideas, like swamp-dwelling mini-bosses and glowing wisps that guide you to scenes of environmental storytelling. As a smaller studio operating on a less-than-gargantuan budget, I\u2019m not going in expecting Rebel Wolves to have produced the kind of simulation we\u2019d see in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 or Red Dead Redemption 2. But from my small sampling and conversation with the dev team, the world of Vale Sangora is showing plenty of signs that it\u2019s a place worth getting invested in. <\/p>\n