It's Mass Effect all over again, maybe. You'll be able to carry your save from The Blood of Dawnwalker into future Dawnwalker games, developer Rebel Wolves and publisher Bandai Namco have confirmed.

I learnt this information in two parts. The first part came from speaking to the Blood of Dawnwalker game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, while he was explaining how the Summer Game Fest 'saga' trailer - in which we see a delivery person in the present day drop off a box of blood sachets to an ailing vampire - is actually a post-credits scene in the upcoming game.

"From the beginning," Tomaszkiewicz told me, "when we talked about the Blood of Dawnwalker, we talked about the whole cycle, because we planned a few games and we wanted to tell the particular story we thought about. When you know what you want to say in the next games and where they lead, it's easier to plan the story for [the first] game and to put some events and story elements in which will be the hooks for the next things which will happen.

The present day Blood of Dawnwalker trailer aired at Summer Game Fest, which gave me distinct Interview with a Vampire vibes. But who is that shadowy floating figure at the window?Watch on YouTube

"If you are not thinking about it then later you have a problem because you start the next game, you have some ideas for the story and you start to think, 'Okay, I will move the saves for the players and what kind of decisions I should predict, and how should it be connected? And how to make it smooth and organic?' And so on. We prefer to do it this way."

The second part came from the game's publisher, Bandai Namco. I wanted to clarify some comments Tomaszkiewicz made about the upcoming RPG's save data, as he inferred it would be accessible in future titles. "There will be an option to carry the save from the first game," Bandai Namco told me.

It's an eye-catching development for a game - and apparent series - which already has ambitious ideas around player freedom and time management. However, the reality of dealing with all of the choice-and-consequence associated with save-game imports may be a different matter, as BioWare discovered with Mass Effect. It's telling that the studio never tried the same approach again.

Similarly to Mass Effect, Dawnwalker is a series about a single protagonist, a half-human, half-vampire person called Coen. Yet unlike Shepard in Mass Effect, Coen can seemingly live for hundreds of years, because he's alive in the SGF present day trailer some 600 years after the events of The Blood of Dawnwalker, which is set in the 14th century. But this doesn't mean a new Dawnwalker game will be set in the modern day. "No," Tomaszkiewicz said. "No, no, no."

"This is the kind of thing exactly, to travel through the ages and through cultures" -Konrad Tomaszkiewicz

Rather, it means the Dawnwalker series will be able to leap around through the ages, from the 14th century to the present day, theoretically leaping to Paris during the French Revolution - or somewhere else entirely. "This is the kind of thing exactly," Tomaszkiewicz remarked, "to travel through the ages and through cultures.

"This is really important for many reasons. There's more fun in telling different stories from many places on Earth, because we need to learn those cultures, we need to learn those legends, we need to think how to fit into these historical events, which are in that particular place. This will be a refreshment for us in every next part of the game, because we have this challenge in front of us, of doing something really fresh, something really cool. And at the same time, we know that we are doing a consistent story and we know where it's leading."

It sounds a bit like Assassin's Creed, which has used many famous time periods as settings for its games, all linked together with one wobbly overarching story about clever machines that let you inhabit assassins from the past. It's similar to a degree, Tomaszkiewicz agreed. "This idea but made differently," he said.

"I would prefer to use the Interview with the Vampire example [an example I surfaced] because there is more fantasy about this particular way and there is more storytelling in this. Assassin's Creed is a cool game but from my perspective, it's like those are separated stories and separated heroes, and we want to tell the story about this particular hero and his adventure, and the plot through all of this stuff."

And despite The Blood of Dawnwalker not being out yet - it releases 3rd September - there are already ideas about where it will go and "a lot" of work has been done on it. "We're thinking about it for a long time," Tomaszkiewicz said, "and we know how this whole story arc will look of the other game[s], and we already start to think about the sequel, about the events we want to have there, because we needed it to put the particular stuff in this game."

So, yes, a time period has already been chosen. "Yeah," said Tomazkiewicz, very coyly.

Environment artist Adam Payet added: "I've heard rumors and I'm excited. I've heard from people what we're considering, and as an environment artist - because Konrad mentioned about variety - if the saga had however many games and all of them were 14th century, at some point you'd get sick of 14th century and doing the same thing."

I wonder which time period it will be. It has to take place after the 14th century because that's when Coen becomes a vampire, but will it tread on settings Assassin's Creed has already attempted, such as Renaissance Italy, the French Revolution, Feudal Japan, Industrial Britain, and the American colonial frontier and golden age of piracy? I'm intrigued.

I'm also intrigued by The Blood of Dawnwalker generally. I spent four hours playing it recently and came away very encouraged. It's very similar to The Witcher 3 in tone, perhaps obviously given Tomaszkiewicz directed that game, but it's big and perhaps controversial ideas around time-manipulation and having no main quest work really well in practice.