The Blood of Dawnwalker

The Blood of Dawnwalker is an upcoming action role-playing game developed by Rebel Wolves and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment. It is scheduled for release on September 3, 2026, for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC via Steam. It is the first game from a studio co-founded by the director of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and built almost entirely from CD Projekt Red veterans, and the first chapter of a planned multi-game saga set across different centuries and cultures.

It is a single-player dark fantasy RPG set in 14th-century Central Europe, in a valley claimed by vampires during the Black Death. The player character is a man who has become something neither fully human nor fully vampire — and who changes between the two depending on the time of day.

Technical Specifications

Rebel Wolves: The Witcher 3 Alumni

Rebel Wolves was founded in 2022 by a group of developers who had worked extensively at CD Projekt Red. The studio’s leadership reads as a roll call of key contributors to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015):

Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, game director and co-founder, directed The Witcher 3. He also worked on Cyberpunk 2077 before leaving CD Projekt Red.

Jakub Szamałek, narrative director, was one of the lead writers on The Witcher 3 and its expansions, responsible for much of the questline writing widely cited as the game’s strongest feature.

Piotr Musiał, one of the lead composers, was responsible for much of The Witcher 3‘s atmospheric exploration music — the ambient, folk-inflected tracks that defined the game’s sonic identity between combat encounters.

Mikołaj Stroiński, a second lead composer, contributed to The Witcher 3 alongside Musiał and separately composed the complete score for The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (2014) and the atmospheric score for Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 (2017).

As of April 2026, Rebel Wolves employs 160 people and is headquartered in Poland. The Blood of Dawnwalker is the studio’s first title.

Vale Sangora: 14th-Century Carpathian Mountains

The game is set in Vale Sangora, a valley in the Carpathian Mountains during the mid-14th century — the era of the Black Death, when bubonic plague moved across Europe and killed between one-third and one-half of the continent’s population. The valley’s capital is Svartrau.

The premise exploits the plague’s historical reality with dark imagination: when the Black Death weakened the human population and disrupted the social order, a clan of powerful vampires used the chaos to seize control. The previous lords of the valley’s castles are gone; the vampires now rule them. Humans who survived the plague survive under vampire dominion.

The Carpathian Mountain setting is specifically chosen for its cultural texture — the folklore, architecture, and landscape of what is now Romania, Poland, and Slovakia provide a visual and cultural vocabulary distinct from both Western European medieval fantasy and the more generic fantasy template. The design team has cited this specificity as intentional, with narrative director Jakub Szamałek noting that the setting “will allow us to surprise [players] more than once” despite its apparent familiarity.

Coen and the Dawnwalker

The player character is Coen, a man whose status as a Dawnwalker — a hybrid of human and vampire — was not chosen but imposed. His motivation is personal and grounded: his family is held captive under the vampire lord Brencis, and the game’s primary drive is saving them. The main antagonist is Brencis himself, the vampire controlling Vale Sangora.

Coen’s hybrid nature means he exists between two states, and the game’s design is built around this duality. The story trailer shown at the April 2026 Road to Launch event introduced supporting characters he will encounter — some becoming allies, others enemies — as he navigates the valley’s fractured politics and violent geography.

Former UFC heavyweight champion Jan Błachowicz contributes to the game via motion capture, playing one of the antagonists opposing Coen’s path.

The Day/Night System: Two Forms, One Character

The most structurally distinctive feature of The Blood of Dawnwalker is its day/night cycle, which determines which form Coen operates in:

During the day, Coen is human — with the limitations that implies against creatures who have strengths he lacks in this form, and with the social access and trust that being visibly human provides.

During the night, Coen becomes a vampire — gaining access to abilities including Shadowstep (rapid movement across rooftops and through environments) and Focus Mode (a perceptual state that highlights hidden points of interest and environmental elements invisible to human senses). Night also changes how the world responds to him: the power dynamics in the valley shift when the creatures who control it are at their strongest.

The second gameplay overview (November 2025) specifically demonstrated the same quest played twice — once in the day as a human, once at night as a vampire — to show how approaches, abilities, and outcomes diverge. The scenarios produced meaningfully different gameplay and narrative interactions, confirming that the dual-form system has practical consequence rather than being primarily aesthetic.

Time is explicitly described as “a precious resource” — suggesting the game incorporates some form of time management or urgency mechanic tied to the day/night cycle, though the full specifics have not been detailed.

The Narrative Sandbox

Rebel Wolves has consistently described The Blood of Dawnwalker as a “narrative sandbox” rather than a traditional open-world RPG — a distinction they’ve been careful to maintain. The emphasis is on non-linear quest structure, quest design that responds to how players approach it, and a world populated with emergent storylines that unfold in response to the player’s presence and choices.

The third gameplay trailer (May 2026) and the Summer Game Fest presentation (June 6–7, 2026) showed exploration that can “unlock new abilities, reveal hidden secrets, or introduce unexpected challenges that may alter the course of their journey.” The design approach draws on Tomaszkiewicz’s experience with The Witcher 3‘s interconnected questlines — where side quests had narrative consequences, and where the player’s choices in apparently minor situations echoed through major storylines — without replicating that game’s exact structure.

The Dawnwalker Saga

At Summer Game Fest 2026 — held June 6–7, two weeks before this writing — Rebel Wolves and Bandai Namco confirmed the release date alongside a CGI teaser for something larger: The Dawnwalker Saga, the overarching series of which this game is the first entry.

The teaser showed Coen in a completely different context: a modern, 21st-century environment, unambiguously not the Carpathian Mountains of 1348. The implication is clear — future instalments of the saga will move Coen’s story across centuries and cultures, from the medieval setting of this game forward through history.

Tomaszkiewicz was explicit about the structure: “I would like to emphasize that each installment in the series will be a standalone game with its own story, without narrative cliffhangers, unresolved plot threads, or time travel ideas.” The story of Coen and Brencis in Vale Sangora concludes in this first game. Future entries share the character and the saga but not the continuity obligation. Szamałek added that “attentive players will certainly come across breadcrumbs related to the overarching plot spanning the saga” — laying groundwork for later entries without withholding anything necessary to complete the first.

Pre-Release Reception

As of June 2026, The Blood of Dawnwalker has not yet been reviewed — it releases in 75 days. Pre-release coverage has been broadly positive, driven largely by the pedigree of the development team and the quality of the gameplay overviews. The first major gameplay presentation in September 2025 described the game as being in “pre-beta stage” at the time; the April 2026 presentation showed footage from “the most recent PC build” in what appeared to be a substantially more complete state.

The announcement at Summer Game Fest of the future saga direction — specifically the modern-day CGI teaser — generated significant discussion, with some players surprised by the franchise’s stated ambition and others noting that the commitment to standalone stories addressed concerns about potential multi-game narrative dependency.

The Blood of Dawnwalker is available for pre-order on all three platforms. System requirements were revealed at the April 2026 Road to Launch event and are available on the game’s Steam page.