Rebel Wolves is preparing the first large post-launch update for The Blood of Dawnwalker, and game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz told Eurogamer in an interview that it is currently expected around the start of October. He called it a big patch with a long list of changes, several of them aimed at complaints players have raised since the RPG launched in early September.
A new lowest difficulty
The headline addition is a new difficulty level, and it sits at the bottom of the range rather than the top. According to Tomaszkiewicz, the studio considers the existing Duelist setting, which removes directional attack indicators, demanding enough, while many players have asked for something gentler. The new mode will take over the Story name and is intended for players who want to follow the narrative without the combat challenge. The current Story setting will be renamed; Tomaszkiewicz floated "Demanding" as a possible name. The change brings the game to five difficulty levels.
We will introduce an additional difficulty level, but an easier one, because many people are asking for a more easy difficulty.
Combat, escapes and performance
Targeting and the camera are also being reworked. Tomaszkiewicz addressed a frequent complaint in which using a stun-style crowd-control ability moves the player's lock-on to a different enemy. He told Eurogamer that the behavior was a deliberate choice he had made himself, but that the patch will remove it in response to player criticism, and that a stunned enemy will then need to take three hits before the stun breaks.
Disengaging from fights is being smoothed out as well. Running away from combat will ignore the game's navigation mesh so that players stop snagging on scenery, Tomaszkiewicz said, and animals provoked while the player passes in wolf form or witch-sprint will no longer pin the player in place if their attack misses.
PC performance, a recurring theme in Steam reviews, remains an ongoing focus. Tomaszkiewicz said the range of PC hardware combinations is too large to test fully, and that the team is collecting hardware details from affected players and continuing to ship fixes, following earlier hotfixes for performance and controller support.
One thing that will not change is how long enemies take to defeat. Tomaszkiewicz said enemy durability depends heavily on a player's build and gear, and that cutting enemy health further would let strong builds finish opponents in a single hit.
Asked about a New Game Plus mode, Tomaszkiewicz told Eurogamer the studio is exploring one but declined to elaborate, and said new enemy types were a possibility he was not ready to discuss. Eurogamer noted that the game has passed one million sales.
