Dawnwalkers are gonna have an easier time in Vale Sangora soon. In an interview with Eurogamer, Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, The Blood of Dawnwalker‘s director, has shared what’s in store for the blood-drinking time-management sim‘s first big patch. For starters, there’s gonna be a new difficulty added. The Blood of Dawnwaker currently has four difficulty modes: Story, Fair, Challenging, and Duelist, and you can further customize difficulty settings to build an experience tailored to your taste. But it seems the current “story” difficulty is misnamed because you still have to fight.
“We will add a new Story mode which will be even easier for people who don’t want to experience the combat,” Tomaszkiewicz said. So the current “story mode” will be renamed something else, and the new story mode will be squarely focused on narrative sans fighting. It’ll be interesting to see how this works in action. Big boss fights, I imagine, can be easily cut, with the game fading to black whenever protagonist Coen challenges one of the vampire lords or similar enemies. But a big conceit in Dawnwalker is that the more you annoy the HVIC, the more they send their goons after you, posting guard checkpoints throughout the map to jam you up. Will those go away, or will they potentially become skippable?
Speaking of combat, the Dawnwalker patch will change how targeting works in specific instances and make it easier for you to disengage from combat encounters altogether. Currently, when Coen stuns an enemy, the game automatically changes your target because that’s just how the devs wanted it to be. While that’s useful for juggling encounters with fuck-you numbers of mobs, it can be kind of annoying when you want to focus on whittling your enemies’ numbers down. Going forward, Tomaszkiewicz said the game will keep you locked on a stunned target and make it harder for damage to break a stun. “There will be three hits you need to take off this stun,” Tomaszkiewicz said. “We will see how people will react to that…if they want to just stun, it will be fine, and if they want to stun and hit a few times, it will be also fine. We will see.”
As for escaping battles, Tomaszkiewicz said, “We’re working on escaping from combat and running in combat and it will be a big change for people.” Thank the blood gods for that. In fights, there were a lot of times when I would get stuck on geometry while trying to put distance between myself and the aforementioned fuck-you numbers of enemies.
The big patch is coming sometime in early October, and Tomaszkiewicz hinted that there may even be a new game plus mode in the game’s future. “There is a chance but I don’t want to speak about it yet,” he said. “We will have the proper beats with our publishing team and if I tell you more, they will kill me.”