The Blood of Dawnwalker, and the White Wolf
Image Credit: Rebel Wolves Official Press Kit
I've had The Blood of Dawnwalker's preview footage sitting open in a browser tab for three days now. I keep replaying parts of it whenever I have a spare moment. That's usually a good sign. Games I don't care about don't earn that kind of attention.
For anyone who hasn't been following it: The Blood of Dawnwalker is Rebel Wolves' debut game, releasing September 3, 2026 on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S. Rebel Wolves is the studio Konrad Tomaszkiewicz founded after leaving CD Projekt Red, where he directed The Witcher 3 and served as second director and head of production on Cyberpunk 2077. The setup: a 14th-century Europe ravaged by war and the Black Death, a vampire lord ruling the region of Vale Sangora through blood tithes, and Coen — caught somewhere between human and vampire — trying to save his family in the thirty days he's got left.
(Official preview unavailable — substituted with an alternative video)
The First Impression
My first reaction watching the footage was something close to relief. Not excitement exactly — relief. This is a studio built almost entirely out of Witcher 3 veterans making a medieval dark fantasy RPG, and there was a real chance the whole thing could have felt like a victory lap. It doesn't. There's a texture to the world — mud-caked villages, the particular grey aura of a plague-stricken countryside — that feels considered rather than borrowed.
That said, I'd be lying if I claimed the resemblance to The Witcher 3 isn't the first thing anyone notices.
Déjà Vu
It's everywhere, honestly. The character modeling has that same CD Projekt style — weathered faces, the way cloth and hair move when someone turns their head. The combat animations carry a similar weight and follow-through, at least for now. The setting is in the same broad historical wheelhouse: medieval-adjacent, war-torn, folklore pressing in at the edges. Even the way story beats seem to be laid out — a main thread pulling you forward while side content sprawls outward in every direction — reads like a direct descendant.
I showed the footage to a friend who works as an animator, someone with zero investment in either studio, and her first comment was that it looked like "a modded Witcher 3." I don't think she meant it unkindly. If anything, it felt like an accurate description of what fourteen years of shared muscle memory between a studio and its former developers actually looks like on screen.
Is Anything Here Actually Ahead of Witcher 3?
This is the part where I have to admit my limits: I've only watched footage, not played the game, so everything below is inference, not a verdict.
Image Credit: Rebel Wolves Official Press Kit
With that caveat — a few things do look like real steps forward rather than a simple repaint. The day/night system is the clearest example. Coen plays almost like two different characters depending on the time of day — human swordplay in daylight and something closer to vampiric power after dark. The developers have reportedly described the split as close to building two games at once. The thirty-day timer is the other one — a soft pressure system where exploring and fighting don't cost you time, but quests and major choices do. It's a small mechanical device, but it changes the psychology of an open world completely: instead of clearing every icon on the map simply because there's no reason not to, you're actually forced to decide what's worth your remaining days. That's a genuinely different feeling from The Witcher 3's "go anywhere, do anything, eventually" structure.
Image Credit: Rebel Wolves Official Press Kit
The combat also looks like it's split the difference between two traditions — closer to Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2's deliberate, directional swordplay than The Witcher 3's looser sign-and-slash rhythm, at least from what's on screen.
What Rebel Wolves Actually Is
That's the part of this preview that actually has my attention more than the graphics. A team with Witcher 3-level craft, given the freedom (and the risk) of an original IP with no franchise expectations weighing it down.
Cold, Beautiful, and a Little Bit Lonely
Image Credit: Rebel Wolves Official Press Kit
Whatever else is true, the art direction is doing real work. There's a coldness to the color grading — pale skies, ash-grey stone, candlelight that looks more like a threat than comfort — and the character faces carry that same chill. Nobody in this footage looks warm. Even the more sympathetic characters have this guarded, wintered-in quality to their expressions. It suits a story about plague and blood tithes far better than a warmer palette would, and it's genuinely one of the more distinctive things about the footage once you look past the Witcher-shaped silhouette.
Image Credit: Rebel Wolves Official Press Kit
About That Combat Style
There is a very clear audience this game seems to be aiming for. If you were someone who secretly enjoyed The Witcher 3's combat more than you ever cared to admit, or if you've happily poured countless hours into Kingdom Come: Deliverance, there's a good chance the swordplay on display here is being built with your tastes in mind.
To be blunt, Witcher-style combat has never been universally loved. It is heavy, intentionally stiff, and far more concerned with the weight and commitment of a single stroke than with flashy, cinematic combos—which is precisely why so many players bounced off it in the past. This is what leaves me curious about Dawnwalker: I want to see exactly how they plan to win over, or at least answer to, the crowd that demands faster, more acrobatic action.
One Worry, and One Reason Not to Worry Too Much
The obvious anxiety here is Cyberpunk-shaped. Tomaszkiewicz was head of production on a game that, for all its eventual redemption, launched in a state bad enough to get pulled from the PlayStation Store entirely. That history doesn't just disappear because the new game looks good in a trailer.
But it's worth noting the team seems to know exactly what that anxiety is, and has said as much publicly — Tomaszkiewicz has talked about prioritizing optimization from early in development specifically to avoid repeating what happened with Cyberpunk 2077, rather than treating performance as a problem to solve at the end. Whether that actually holds up at launch is a different question, and no interview can answer in advance. But it's a different posture than "we'll patch it later," and coming from someone who lived through the alternative, that's not nothing.
Close to Launch, and the Real Answer Isn't Here Yet
None of this settles anything, obviously. No amount of trailer-parsing tells you how a thirty-hour RPG actually plays across forty or sixty hours, whether the narrative sandbox holds together, or whether the day/night split stays interesting past the tenth cycle. That only shows up once the game is actually in your hands.
But writing this kind of speculative rundown before a game comes out is genuinely one of the better parts of being a gamer, for me at least. Getting it wrong is part of the fun. I'll happily eat my words on the combat prediction if it turns out I'm wrong.
And a Word for Everyone Else Braving September and October
One more thing worth saying: Dawnwalker isn't launching into a quiet month. GTA 6 finally lands in November, and pretty much the entire industry has spent the back half of the year rearranging itself to stay out of its blast radius.
September alone is stacked — Dawnwalker opens it on the 3rd, and Capcom actually moved Onimusha: Way of the Sword up three weeks to land right beside it on the 4th, apparently preferring that traffic to the pileup later in the month. Insomniac's Marvel's Wolverine follows on the 15th, Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave lands on Switch 2 on the 17th, and Silent Hill: Townfall and Remedy's Control Resonant both drop the same day, the 24th. October isn't much calmer. It's a genuinely brutal release calendar for anyone with a finite amount of both money and time.
So here's hoping Dawnwalker holds its ground in that traffic jam, and here's hoping the rest of this fall's lineup does too. It's a rare kind of problem to have as a player — too many good things landing on top of each other — and I'd rather have that than nothing worth playing at all.
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