‘The Game Doesn’t End When You Run Out of Time’ – How The Blood of Dawnwalker’s 30 Day Countdown Works

“The game doesn't end when you run out of time,” says Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz, creative director of The Blood of Dawnwalker.

Time is, without a doubt, the most controversial subject when it comes to developer Rebel Wolves’ debut RPG. And, unless you’ve paid very close attention to what the creators have previously said, your idea of how time in The Blood of Dawnwalker works may potentially be far from the truth. There is no ticking timer. You do not have to complete the game in a certain number of hours. The journey does not end at some pre-determined minute. Instead, that much-discussed “30 days and 30 nights to save your family” applies to just that – saving your family. If you don’t reach them in time, life goes on. The game continues and the story changes.

“I really hope some people will play it and let time run out,” Mateusz continues. “I think it's very interesting, you get some content that you don't get otherwise if you play this way.”

It’s understandable why Dawnwalker’s time system has caused so much confusion. While there are several games with similar approaches – Persona’s calendar, or Fire Emblem: Three Houses’ school year – there’s nothing that works quite like Rebel Wolves’ game. Following the prologue, the main quest puts Coen on the clock to save his family from the evil vampire Brencis.

But that doesn’t mean time is constantly running out. Each of the 30 days and nights is represented by a bar split into eight segments, and completing quest objectives will consume one of those pieces, pushing the world forward from day to evening, to night, to morning, and repeat. Only actions marked with an hourglass icon progress the day, and between those actions you can freely explore the world for as long as you please without the clock ticking by even a second. In short: think of time as a “currency” used to pay for unlocking quests, and you start the game with 480 “time dollars”. That’s a lot of time to spend.

Since the time pressure only applies to Coen’s quest to save his family, you can decide how long you want to endure it. If you’re brave, you can make a beeline for Brencis’ castle and rescue them right away, completing Dawnwalker’s main quest in just a couple of days. But assaulting a heavily-defended vampire castle is more than a little difficult, and you’ll likely need to spend time gaining allies and dismantling Brencis’ power structures before making your final attack. That does mean time becomes a significant stressor, and you’ll want to carefully choose which of the world’s quests are worth taking on.

“You have to think about how you want to play around with this resource,” says narrative director Jakub Szamalek. “Another way of responding to it is that you may get to see all of the content if you don't care about the fate of Coen’s family. You're very free to check every nook and cranny if you're okay with them ending in a bloodbath. It's another choice for you as a player to engage with.”

Think of time as a “currency” used to pay for unlocking quests, and you start the game with 480 “time dollars”. Rebel Wolves is keen to frame the time system as something that facilitates choice and consequence, rather than something that exerts unwarranted pressure. For instance, if you do decide to ignore the 30-day countdown and let Coen’s family die, that doesn’t mean you’ll get the “bad ending”. Instead, Mateusz compares it to playing a Dark Urge/evil campaign in Baldur’s Gate 3. “[Developer Larian Studios] don't try to frame it like you're the good guy now and this [evil path] was right,” he says. “It's not morally right, but it's a viable way to play the game. It's not the fail state. And this is exactly our approach as well.”

Regardless of how you play, the way the time system shapes your experience is something Rebel Wolves’ staff feels very passionately about. “Some people might be worried, ‘Oh, my content got cut off. That's actually a bad thing,’” says Mateusz. “Well, yes and no. Yes, because you might miss out on some content. But on the other hand, you get a vastly different experience than your friends and you get to compare these experiences. It feels like your own thing that you shaped and not just the linear experience you consumed, then you moved on.”

But while the time system defines much of a player’s journey, it’s not the complete story. For many players, The Witcher 3 did not end when Geralt and Ciri’s journey was over – there were dozens more hours of quests to complete. Not a post-game, as such, but the many, many side quests that you didn’t get around to during the “main” playthrough. The same applies to The Blood of Dawnwalker. You can continue to play long after those 30 days and nights are over, mopping up quests and finding the world’s secrets.

“It's really important to understand that the time [system] is connected with the story, it doesn’t end the game,” explains game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz. “Most of the activities we have are not really connected with the event which happens after 30 days, and they still [make] sense after the 30 days.”

For those who are really concerned about the time system... well, The Blood of Dawnwalker is a fantasy game. Time manipulation isn't out of the question. We'll explore more about that in a future IGN First article.

The time system works hand-in-hand with what Rebel Wolves calls its “Narrative Sandbox”, a seemingly fresh approach to structure that’s actually incredibly old school.

“We really love these old RPGs, like Fallout 1 and 2, that did this kind of structure,” explains Mateusz, “where the majority of the game content, even the significant plot lines, you could cut off by just doing a rampage in the city or picking specific choices that basically cut off an arc or changed it significantly. It's something that felt very right.”

In The Blood of Dawnwalker, there is no linear sequence of main quests. Instead, the mission to save Coen’s family is the only “main” quest, and everything else is optional. That’s not to say those other quests are inessential – they could provide you with allies and weapons to use in the fight against Brencis, or kill off one of his lieutenants in order to weaken him. They’re as important as any other game’s missions. But by breaking the idea of a “chain” of objectives, where one quest leads to the other, Rebel Wolves has been able to create a very different kind of RPG campaign.

“It's really difficult [in traditionally structured RPGs] to kill NPCs or remove quests because they are so connected that it would break the whole story,” explains Konrad. “This philosophy of the Narrative Sandbox is different because you have only one quest which ends the game and you can achieve this goal in many ways. When you are creating other stories, they are satellites around [the main quest] and they are not connected in the chain way, which means that if an NPC dies or even a quest disappears, it will not break the whole story. It will just close one branch. This way you feel more like in the pen-and-paper RPGs because it's your choice, the game reacts to it and it adjusts.”

Because you have so much freedom to forge your own path through the campaign, Dawnwalker’s finale has been a huge logistical challenge for the design team. The attack on Brencis’ castle has to account for dozens of permutations, changing the events based on which allies you recruit, how many members of the vampire court you killed or bargained with, and numerous other factors.

“They are vastly different quests,” Mateusz says of the variations. “There are a lot of differences in how it plays out in the castle itself and outside of the castle – you can unlock certain endings without hitting the castle. So I would say they're vastly different experiences.

If an NPC dies or even a quest disappears, it will not break the whole story. It will just close one branch. “And, of course, there are also combinations,” he continues. “It's not binary, right? It's not just either you killed all the vampires or dealt with them in some way, or not. You maybe dealt with one of them and left the rest of them and so on.”

There are a lot of choices that the finale needs to adapt to, then, but the consequences of your actions will (hopefully) extend far beyond that castle assault. As revealed at this year’s Summer Game Fest, The Dawnwalker Saga is planned to span multiple eras, following Coen as his unnaturally long life takes him into the 21st century. That modern-day-set sequel is multiple games away and, naturally, will only happen if this first chapter and any follow-ups are successful. But even though the future is uncertain, Rebel Wolves is still planning a saga that will carry your choices through from game to game, Mass Effect-style. That means the team has to consider how all that works now, even if their plans never come to fruition.

“When you design the sequel, you have to think of which of the choices you can take into consideration, how plausible it is,” says Mateusz. “When I think about canon, there are certain things that have to be true for the game to make sense and the saga make sense. You have to be turned into a dawnwalker because otherwise the games wouldn't make sense. So there are certain truths that have to stay true throughout, but we try to limit those to the bare minimum and the rest is up to you.”

Quite how future games will deal with this remains to be seen. When so much of the story is shaped by the player, it’s presumably incredibly difficult to reflect your choices two, three, perhaps even four games down the line. Maybe that’s where the eras idea comes into play – if there are significant time gaps between games, Coen becomes the only constant, his human friends having aged and died between games. A fresh cast with each installment creates unique opportunities and limits the plot points that need to cascade across the series.

But that’s all for the future. Right now, here in 2026, all we need to concern ourselves with is the complexities of The Blood of Dawnwalker’s narrative sandbox, and how the time system impacts the way we navigate it. It’s been a long time since a video game RPG had the courage and conviction to structure itself like this, but in a post-Baldur’s Gate 3 world where old-school roleplaying sensibilities are in vogue, Rebel Wolves couldn’t be trying it at a better moment.

The Blood of Dawnwalker is our IGN First for July 2026, and we have a month's worth of exclusive content. After playing the vampire RPG for four hours and spending another four hours interviewing its developers, we're ready to go deep on all of the most important systems, mechanics, and lore. Catch up on all the month's content so far below:

• The Blood of Dawnwalker: 8 Minutes of Quest Gameplay
• The Blood of Dawnwalker Let Me Be a Vampire, Detective, and Witch Lover in the Space of 4 Hours
• ‘There’s Something So Satisfying About Making People Explode’ – The Cursed Abilities That Power The Blood of Dawnwalker’s Skill Tree
• ‘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

[/url] Matt Purslow is IGN's Executive Editor of Features.