Vampiric RPG The Blood of Dawnwalker has, you shouldn’t be enormously stunned to learn, launched with a bunch of issues on PC (thanks GamesRadar). It’s hard to think of an RPG that doesn’t, and it’s downright expected when you remember this is a game created by a group of CD Projekt vets. However, developers Rebel Wolves are already working on fixing the main complaints, and have issued a few workarounds for some of the common gripes.
The Blood of Dawnwalker currently sits on a very respectable 84 on Metacritic for its PC version, and has 75 percent positive reviews out of over 1,400 on Steam, so it’s clearly far from a disastrous launch. (Those scores are doubly impressive when you consider how it will be unfairly compared to The Witcher 3.) However, some of the issues being encountered are slightly more egregious than others, like the inability to remap buttons on a PS5 controller, or requiring fullscreen to run properly. The most significant problem, however, where the game crashes during its initial shader compilation, is a relatively easy—if somewhat tiresome—fix.
Posting to the game’s X account, Rebel Wolves lists the four issues that have come up the most, and current solutions if there are any. They are:
- Game stuttering when in Windowed / Borderless mode – please try launching the game in Full Screen
- Game crashing on compiling shaders – please update your BIOS, that should fix it (link)
- Missing option of mapping buttons on a PS5 gamepad – we’re already working on it
- Sprinting stops when changing directions on a gamepad – we’re working on a fix, but in the meantime you can try changing the sensitivity of your controller from 1 to 0.8 (in the console settings)
The crashing issue appears to be based on a player’s BIOS being out of date on Intel Core CPUs and then conflicting with Oodle and Unreal. Intel identified the issue back in 2024, so those afflicted are really in need of running some updates on their machine.
The poor performance in windowed/borderless is a much bigger bummer, and the “solution” of just running in fullscreen is less than ideal. Hopefully this will be optimized in a future patch.
Another common complaint that’s not mentioned in this brief post is the lack of some basic accessibility options. UI text and subtitles are pretty small and there’s currently no way to scale them, which is deeply tiresome. Again, hopefully the developers will hear the appeals and address this quickly.