Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, the CEO and game director of Rebel Wolves, says the sequel to The Blood of Dawnwalker may skip the divisive time mechanic that so many players disliked. “We will not force it,” he told Eurogamer.
The promise comes as the studio looks ahead to the next chapter in the saga. The Blood of Dawnwalker launched as a role-playing game with a limited resource that restricts what Coen — the player character — can do. Many players hated it.
The Clock Explained
Time is a finite resource in The Blood of Dawnwalker. You can only spend so much of it each day, and once it runs out, you are forced to manage your remaining hours carefully. That means you cannot wander everywhere, talk to everyone, or collect every side quest in a single sitting.
Our reviewer, Australian editor Shaun Prescott, found the clock worked in the early going. It added a sense of urgency, at least initially. But he also wanted to relax and fiddle with non-essential tasks on his own terms, at his own pace.
Prescott wrote that he wanted “to pick some nirnroot and play some Gwent, thank you very much” — a line that captured the frustration of players who felt the clock was getting in the way of fun.
The clock affects everything you do:
- You cannot explore freely
- You cannot dawdle
- You cannot treat the world as a sandbox to poke at
You are constantly checking your remaining time, planning your route, and cutting corners.
The Mod That Broke the Clock
The response from the modding community was immediate and decisive. One of the first mods to appear for The Blood of Dawnwalker was the “Better Story Timer.” It effectively eliminates the impact of the ticking clock entirely.
The Better Story Timer has since become, by far, the most popular Dawnwalker mod on Nexus Mods.
How much of an impact that reaction has had over at developer Rebel Wolves is impossible to say. But in an interview with Eurogamer, Tomaszkiewicz said the studio might not use the time mechanic at all in the sequel.
The Studio’s Promise
“We will play with it,” Tomaszkiewicz said. “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 key phrase is “we will not force it.” That is a direct response to the criticism. It is a notable shift for a game that shipped with a feature many players hated.
Tomaszkiewicz acknowledged the complaints directly. He also addressed the mods available to remove the clock. He does not have a problem with players downloading a fix, but he does encourage them to try Dawnwalker with the clock running first.
“We balanced [Dawnwalker] in a way that it’s possible to do around 80 percent of the content with the time mechanic so it’s not so bad,” he said. “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.”
The Choice Argument
The choice argument is a familiar one in the industry. It is the idea that games are interactive stories, and interactive stories necessarily leave things unseen. You cannot see everything because your choices determine what happens.
Tomaszkiewicz pointed to The Witcher 2 as an example. That game forces players to make a choice at a critical juncture that unavoidably excludes a significant amount of gameplay. The game is structured around branching paths, and you cannot walk both sides of the road.
He also mentioned Obsidian’s Pentiment, released to acclaim in 2022, which has a very strict time mechanic of its own that is essential to the experience. Missing out on things in video games is not all that new or unusual, he argued. It is the inevitable outcome of choice in video games that so many players say they want.
Complaints Have Tailed Off
Interestingly, Tomaszkiewicz said that complaints about the time mechanic have tailed off considerably now that Dawnwalker has been out for a couple weeks. People have finished the game and realized they actually had more time than they needed.
“There will always be people who will have a problem with that because they don’t like time mechanics at all, but I think that is fine,” he said. “They can download the mod and play without it if they want.”
The pattern he expects to continue as players keep wrapping up the game. Some will finish and find the clock was not so bad after all. Others will finish and still hate it. Both reactions are fine, he said, as long as the option exists.
The Sequel Already Exists
Even though The Blood of Dawnwalker has only been out for a couple weeks, Rebel Wolves is already eyeballing a sequel. The studio is now looking for a lead writer to help “craft the next chapter in the Dawnwalker saga.”
The clock mechanic may not survive the transition.
The Direction Ahead
The promise is simple: if the story fits the clock, it stays. If it does not fit, it goes. The studio is not locking players into the same loop that alienated so many this time around.
The modding community proved its power with the Better Story Timer. It showed that a large portion of the player base was willing to change the game themselves rather than accept it as-is. That kind of pushback matters to developers, and Tomaszkiewicz responded directly to it.
The clock is a divisive mechanic. It is the kind of feature that splits a player base in half, and the popularity of the Better Story Timer tells you which half was larger.
The Blood of Dawnwalker sequel may not have the divisive time mechanic that so many players disliked. That is the honest reading of what Tomaszkiewicz said, and it is a fair compromise.
The game is a pretty excellent RPG, but the clock was the sticking point. Now the studio is giving players a choice: keep it, ditch it, or mod it.
Source material: “The Blood of Dawnwalker sequel may not have the divisive time mechanic that so many players dislike: 'We will not force it,' game director says,” PC Gamer.
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