The Blood of Dawnwalker

been good

I bought this game day one as its made by ex CDPR devs and it reminded the opening cinematic reminded a lot of the Witcher 2 opening cinematic. I hoped it was another similar excellent game made on a slightly lower budget but having the same wonderful storytelling and world of the Witcher 2 and later Witcher 3. Story and game design And yes, this game scratches that itch, even more than the Witcher3 or Cyberpunk in certain regards. What I mean by that is that depending upon your actions, you can have drastically different outcomes to the story right from the very start. You make a simple mistake, and your mother gets torn to pieces in the prologue. You win a certain battle in the prologue, and you can end the game before it ever starts with some new dialogue where the bad guy acknowledges just how ridiculous it is that you managed to do that. These sorts of unknown encounters are everywhere, and often where you least expect them. For example, I wound up causing the death of an important character by treating the game like most other games and wandering off in the middle of a mission to go do my own thing, because I found myself underpowered. Came back an in game day later, and that important character was now a corpse. Did not expect that at all. So many quests have alternative outcomes that sometimes only a few people might ever see, which says a lot about the effor they went through. The story is great. I felt drawn into the narrative from the start; its clear what Coen's motivations are and what your goal is. Your family is taken by Vampires that rule over the region and you have 30 days to rescue them. And that timer hangs over you and reminds you constantly that you are running out of time. I heard a lot of people hate it, but I personally love the fact that a developer took such a risk. Another bit of innovation is the fact that you are human during the day and vampire at night. Its another risky decision they made, and it works well. There are lore reasons for why you can't use your witchcraft abilities at night or your vampire abilities during the day, and some quests and activites are only available at the right time of day. Your traversal changes drastically depending on whether its night or day. During the day, you are limited to climbing and jumping, but at night, you can teleport across gaps, walk up walls, or slide down drops without taking damage. Combat- This was my biggest irritaiton, at least at the start. But you really get the hang of it after a few hours, and it works pretty well. Is it the best combat system I have seen? no. But its definitely engaging enough and challenging enough to be fun. My main issue is how slowly you switch from the target you are aiming at to another one, and the fact that locking onto a target means its easy to suddenly get hit by someone else from the side. If you don't lock on, certain abilities will completely switch your target and its difficult to get back to the guy with 10% hp you want to finish off rather than a brand new enemy with 100% hp. Negatives Artstyle, Graphics and performance- The art style is ok. I can't help but compare it to the witcher 3, and it really comes up short there. The wilderness all looks identical, its clearly just something they barely put any human touch on, and it looks like something created quickly using UE. There are barely any distinct biomes and the sound design of the forest isn't great. Remember the creaking trees in Witcher3? or the fact that you could tell where you were just by looking at the sort of trees and bushes that were around? yeah, you get none of that here. Its all the samey looking forests with mostly nothing interesting but some random hostile wolves or boars or a bear. They really could have put in more effort here As for the city, its servicable, but again, nothing when compared to Novigrad or Oxenfert or Beauclair. Buildings all look like they were copy pasted with barely any difference. doors are all the same, windows are all the same, assets within the houses are all the same, and for some reason all the houses are bare and look like they are abandoned, even in the city. The cathedral was the only real impressive building I have seen so far. Another irrating thing is that a lot of dungeons and tunnels seem to use the exact same assets and sometimes even layouts, and the same is with caves. So it really screws with the sense of discovery and exploration when you know things have just been copied across the map. There are some unique places, but not many. The art style is also not my favorite, it goes for the typical UE hyperrealistic look, and I am not a fan of that at all. It just looks so generic. But the worst thing about all this is the crappy performance. I am using a 4070 super on 1440p, and I had to turn down the settings quite a bit and turn on frame gen to get a steady 90fps. with everything on high and without DLSS and frame gen, I was barely getting 70, with dips below 60 that made the game unplayable. This is just horrible optimization and games like this have made me really hate UE.