Tick tock

If you've given The Blood of Dawnwalker a go, odds are you've got thoughts about the 30-day and 3-night timer it applies to Coen's quest to save his family from fate most vampy. Devs Rebel Wolves are very much aware of how divisive the feature's proven, and now the game's director's made clear that it's not guaranteed to return in future entries unless it can be made to mesh with the story being told.

"We didn't decide it, to be honest," Dawnwalker director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz said to our network brethren at Europeanvideogamer when asked if the time mechanics will return. "We will play with it. If we will have parts of the story, or the whole story, to which it fits, then we will use it. If we will have stories where it does not fit, we will not force it. We will play with this system and we will try to use it to boost the urgency of some events in the game. But I'm not saying that in every game we will have the same scheme or loop - it's not like this."

The dev also teased that Rebel Wolves are "considering and researching some other crazy ideas which can make the RPG genre different", which is good news if you're like me and worry that ditching the time mechanics would render Dawnwalker a more plain Witcher-like. He's also more than happy for folks who want to use mods to make the timer longer or get rid if its threat entirely to do just that, though he does encourage such players to give the vanilla game a go first and make sure the regular timer's not to their liking in practice.

"The arguments of 'I want to see everything in one playthrough' I understand, but it's false to begin with, because even in games like The Witcher, you cannot see everything in one playthrough because you have choices and consequences, and different things happen when you choose different things [excluding other outcomes]," Tomaszkiewicz added. He also touched on the other side of the Dawnwalker timer coin - that some players felt the game suffered because the limits weren't strict or punishing enough to really make you agonise over which paths you take. Nailing a perfect balance for everyone's likely an impossible task, or at least a very difficult one the studio'll need a number of cracks at.

Having had a bit more time to reflect on my Dawnwalker review playthrough now a couple of weeks have passed, I fall on the side who reckon the timer could be more effective if it was a bit stricter. I'd probably have a lot stronger feelings on the topic if I thought it was venturing too far into punishing territory, though, somewhere I likely differ to our Edwin, who yearns for a tough vampiric time of it. As is, it's got just enough of a presence to help keep you focused on the need not to dilly-dally too much in your quest to save Coen's family, so I don't see its implementation as inhibiting Dawnwalker from being a top tier RPG.

There's definitely room for refinement, though, so it'd be nice to see Rebel Wolves find a way to integrate some time management into future games. Perhaps it's only present for certain quests where it makes sense, rather than tied to the main mission which everything revolves around. If not, those new ideas they've been workshopping will be key to ensuring the series continues to have enough in the chamber to set itself apart from The Witcher, despite embracing a lot of that series' fundamental mechanics/design choices.

The studio are seemingly just getting started on a Dawnwalker sequel, so the clock's not ticking too fast on the decisions they've got to make over timers just yet.