Blood Of Dawnwalker's Latest Gameplay Trailer Starts Out Looking...

The Blood of Dawnwalker⁠—a new vampire RPG from former CD Projekt devs⁠—has been half on my radar, but its latest gameplay trailer (following a first one in June) really has the sauce: There's a lot of very apparent Witcher 3 DNA on display, but that just seems to be a comfortable starting point for a very different kind of RPG.

The trailer starts out looking like it could almost be a Witcher spinoff: The UI, music, voices, even the way the medieval city resembles Novigrad all smacked me in the face. Junior cadet vampire Coen has Geralt's signature messy high ponytail (but in brunette), and he also shares a name with a prominent book witcher absent from the games.

The quest in question is a Witcher 3 monster hunt almost to a T: Coen talks to some "cor blimey" yokels⁠—with, I do have to say, delightfully craggy, varied, character actor-type faces⁠—who point him in the direction of monster-type happenings to earn access to a cathedral's library. Coen uses the exact same Witcher Senses as Geralt (down to the sepia filter and red outlines!) to uncover a feral vampire's lair, and the beast even cribs the Bruxa scream attack from Blood and Wine.

That's not necessarily bad: There hasn't been anything quite like The Witcher 3 in the ten years since, and The Witcher 4 is a long way off. It's all super atmospheric, well-written and acted, and there's a notable surprise in the form of a "hex" Coen can use to speak with certain corpses, a more limited version of Baldur's Gate 3's Speak With Dead spell.

I love how much of the quest is just walking around and talking, slowly building up to the action. It did make me nervous that there wasn't a single conversation in the trailer with more than two dialogue choices, but great RPGs like The Witcher 3, Cyberpunk, and Mass Effect have also kept things more limited on that front. The Blood of Dawnwalker seems to flex its reactivity muscles elsewhere, and there was a nice, tense dialogue exchange between Coen and a blind priest that involved some timed decisions.

Dawnwalker's combat continues to look nice and crisp. It has a Sekiro parry (which I love), and dismemberment kills are always a huge plus for me. I started really paying attention, though, when we got to see Coen accomplish the same objective⁠—get into the church library⁠—but at night.

Coen gets different powers depending on time of day: Sword and hexes by day, claws and vampire powers at night. Time appears to advance more like Disco Elysium or Pentiment, with

Source: PC Gamer