Attention Blood of the Dawnwalker players! Put down the mod that lets you bypass the game’s time constraints and get one that actually improves your experience: a goddamn minimap. I’ve been having a great time playing Blood of the Witcher 3 Walker. The characters and performances are great, the combat is exhilarating, and the story is damn engrossing. Dawnwalker is one of those games that’s easy to get lost in, but trying to un-lose yourself after spending an hour going down a side-quest rabbit hole is annoying as hell.
Let’s say I need to find the nearest save point to level up.
Hits the PS5 DualSense touchpad
Selects map
Checks direction
Closes out of map
Wait, which direction am I going again? East or west?
Hits the PS5 DualSense touchpad
Selects map
Checks direction
Closes out of map
Ahh shit, I took a wrong turn.
Hits the PS5 DualSense touchpad
Selects map
Checks direction
Closes out of map
This is an infuriating cadence of actions that I still haven’t grown used to despite doing it repeatedly over the last 20 hours of gameplay. Dawnwalker‘s world is vast and I don’t mind that it’s saturated with all kinds of shit I can get up to. I enjoy that on the way to one objective, I will frequently run into another. But I’m one of those players whose sense of direction is in the negatives. Having to drill down into the menus to get to the map to get back on track is seriously killing the vibe, as every third second I’m taken out of the game to recheck my direction.
I don’t even want a dedicated minimap taking up screen real estate. I really like that the UI is uncluttered because I can see more of the gorgeous environments (and where the next attack from the 4+ enemies I’m always fighting at any one time is coming from). Maybe instead of a permanent fixture on my UI, I can bring up a transparent map that overlays the game screen. Or, to maintain the sword-and-sorcery vibes, the devs can implement a pathfinding visual that’ll take me to whatever quest I have selected. I’m just looking for something, anything that’ll cut down on the number of button presses it takes to help me find my way.
So, Dawnwalkers, go ahead and get that minimap mod so that I may live vicariously through you, because until there’s some kind of console hotfix, I’m just gonna keep getting lost.