‘I’m Allergic to Antagonists Who Are Bad for the Sake of Being Bad’ – How The Blood of Dawnwalker’s Vampires Go Beyond Just Being Bosses

Everything that happens in The Blood of Dawnwalker is rooted in the vampiric takeover of Vale Sangora. During the peak of the Black Death plague, the evil Brencis murdered the valley’s human lord, Skender, and claimed the region for himself. To say he now rules with an iron fist would be putting it too bluntly – this bloodsucker is far more cunning than your regular warlord. Born to nobles during the Roman Empire’s glory years, he’s as cruel as he is dignified, and employs a carefully selected court to aid him in controlling the valley’s population. The people are his flock in both senses of the word; a religious congregation and a blood farm.

It’s safe to say, then, that vampires are very important to the story of The Blood of Dawnwalker. And so developer Rebel Wolves has carefully constructed its own version of the vampire myth to suit its story, crafting a villain that’s both enjoyably familiar and as frighteningly fresh as the blood he feeds on.

“If you were to reduce a vampire to one thing, what is it?” narrative director Jakub Szamalek had asked himself early on in the development process. “I landed on the fangs, the teeth. There's this beautiful myth about Cadmus who, when facing danger, would throw dragon's teeth into the earth and these fully fledged, fully armed warriors would spring up to life and defend him. And I thought that there's something interesting about the idea of teeth as seeds, teeth as the kernel of something.”

In the world of Dawnwalker, a vampire cannot sire a new spawn through bite and blood alone. They must sacrifice a fang, breaking it from their own jaw and burying it in the flesh of their intended. It’s a significant ritual, one not to be taken lightly. And as a result of this being a vampire’s procreation system, they naturally need a lot more teeth than a regular human.

“The older they get, the more teeth they have,” explains Szamalek. “They grow extra rows and, at some point, these teeth start bursting through their skin in weird, unexpected places. Some of the oldest ones are bristling with teeth sticking out of all sorts of weird places, and it turns into body horror.”

While Brencis and his court may be visually repulsive enough to rival horror cinema’s greatest ghouls, Rebel Wolves had to ensure they were compelling villains rather than just targets for your blade. That meant scripting them as people; men and women who have, over hundreds, sometimes thousands of years, been twisted by both the curse of vampirism and the curse of humanity. Each of the court’s four members has their own wants and wishes, backed up by a lifetime of personality flaws.

Some of the oldest vampires are bristling with teeth sticking out of all sorts of weird places. “I'm allergic to antagonists who are bad for the sake of being bad, and then they make illogical decisions just to deepen their badness,” says Szamalek. “I wanted Brencis to feel like a very rational actor who has a particular goal. He does want to take over and he does want to become a feudal Lord in this little valley, but he doesn't have some ‘mwahaha’ supervillain plan to kill everyone or destroy the world. He wants to turn his valley from a classical medieval feudal order into a new system that he's inventing, which we can call vampiric feudalism, where you pay taxes and blood and you swear allegiance to your vampire Lord.”

That brings us to how the vampire court shapes the structure of The Blood of Dawnwalker’s campaign. The game’s menu features a page depicting a web of quests with Brencis at the centre. Discover and complete each of the web’s quests and you’ll work your way up to his trio of lieutenants: Ambrus, Xanthe, and Bakir. Through defeating them, you’ll weaken Brencis and thus make your final confrontation with him at his castle much easier.

“We divided the valley into fiefdoms,” explains creative director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz. “Each vampire has their own fiefdom, each vampire has their own responsibilities. One of them takes care of the food supply. I like to say another is the ‘PR guy’, because he takes care of managing the rewards and punishments in the valley and keeping people in check so they don't rise up.

“There is another one, I call her the ‘R&D vampire’ because she's doing a lot of research and development into what they can use to empower the regime, but also how to empower themselves versus their personal power. Each of them has a specific role in the organization.”

“It was also a cool way to structure the open world content,” he adds. “It’s not just a set of activities that are not tied together thematically. All of these pieces of this regime are kind of built into the open world and feed into this theme.”

Tomaszkiewicz is keen to emphasise that all the vampire court quests, while helpful for breaking down each branch of Brencis’ castle defences, are ultimately optional. “You don't have to dismantle those levels of power. You can just stay under the radar, and choose to attack the castle while it's at full power. It's difficult but doable.”

It makes sense to weaken Brencis’ defences, then – a straight-to-the-castle run sounds great as a replay challenge, but not ideal for your first playthrough. There are consequences to disrupting the activities of vampire lords, though. They’re hardly going to sit back and watch you tear up all their work, are they? And so as you pick your way through a fiefdom and interrupt one of the three lieutenant's operations, you’ll build up their anger meter. Eventually, the region’s leader will become so furious that they’ll confront you in person. What you do with such an opportunity is up to you – perhaps striking a deal with them is more effective for your personal plans than driving a stake into their heart.

The anger system governs each fiefdom, but there’s a similar system tied to the valley as a whole: Infamy. “You will become more known in the valley,” reveals Tomaszkiewicz. “You have these edicts that Brencis will enforce as you cross certain thresholds in the infamy track. These are supposed to hamper your progress, make your life more difficult.”

Brencis may be a tyrant, but many people in the valley are his willing servants. After all, his supernatural powers rid the region of a deadly plague, and unlike the previous human lords, he doesn’t really care about money. “They're happy for you to keep your earnings; they just want you to pay blood,” says Szamalek. “And to a lot of people, it is a very attractive proposition. I think this explores the perennial question of safety versus liberty, and how much of our liberty are we willing to give up in order to feel safe?”

With that in mind, many in the valley will happily hunt you down if Brencis puts a bounty on your head. Higher infamy levels will result in the fanged lord’s loyal soldiers killing you on sight. Become too much of a thorn in the regime’s side and Brencis may even order an entire city be put on lockdown, making your navigation through the world and access to certain quests more difficult. It's these kinds of consequences that may have some players thinking that they should avoid building infamy at all costs. And while that’s a perfectly valid option – the aforementioned “under the radar” approach provides its own multitude of options – being infamous is not all bad.

“Some NPCs that are really on Brencis’ side might dislike you more, but it might be easier to intimidate them because you’re now famous as this really badass troublemaker,” Tomaszkiewicz explains.

“There are certain groups in the valley that dislike Brencis like you do, and they might be more compelled to actually work with you if you accumulated enough infamy, and doing so might unlock certain perks with them as well,” he adds.

All this paints a picture of an RPG that’s made up of many, many intricate systems. There’s the narrative sandbox – the idea that all quests are optional, and that failing quests can still lead to progress – and the much-debated time progression system, both of which will be explored in detail later on in this month’s IGN First. Those systems are linked to this fiefdom structure, where dynamic anger and infamy meters change the way the world reacts to you, providing different opportunities within the sandbox. There’s a lot of ambition on display here, and if nothing else, The Blood of Dawnwalker will very likely be the year’s most interesting RPG.

Matt Purslow is IGN's Executive Editor of Features.