The Witcher 3 Director Launches Rebel Wolves With Vampire RPG

After seventeen years at CD Projekt Red, Konrad Tomaszkiewicz has stepped away from the corporate machinery to build something smaller, riskier, and more personal. His new studio, Rebel Wolves, is developing The Blood of Dawnwalker, a vampire-themed action RPG that deliberately breaks from the formula that made The Witcher 3 a commercial juggernaut.

The studio's Warsaw offices feature a wall mural reading "A studio born out of love for RPGs." It's a fitting sentiment for a team that includes Tomaszkiewicz's brother, Mateusz, as creative director, alongside veterans from the Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 projects. By April 2026, the team had grown to 160 employees, up from around 20 when the studio launched in February 2022.

Tomaszkiewicz's departure from CD Projekt in May 2021 followed an internal investigation into workplace bullying allegations that ultimately found him not guilty. He took an extended break afterward, then founded Rebel Wolves with a clear mandate: avoid the "same-but-new" trap that plagues established IP holders.

"When you release the one game and it is a success, people want more of this, but they don't want you to change it because they love this particular idea," Tomaszkiewicz told IGN. "And obviously when you have these stakeholders or the stock market and so on, there are the needs from those sides and it's quite hard to please everyone."

The Blood of Dawnwalker's core innovation is a 30-day time limit. Players control Coen, a Dawnwalker with both human and vampiric qualities, racing against a clock to save his family from vampire lords. Actions that affect the plot advance time; exploring the open world does not. An hourglass on-screen indicates how much time each quest will consume.

This creates genuine pressure. The game's hunger system can override dialogue options when Coen is starved of blood. Ignore the cravings long enough and you may involuntarily drain a major NPC, permanently removing them from the story. It's a mechanic that forces players to feel the physical weight of their choices rather than just selecting dialogue options in a vacuum.

Day and night cycles fundamentally alter gameplay. During daylight, Coen fights with swords using directional blocking—players must select one of four directions to attack or parry. At night, he transforms, gaining the ability to walk vertically on walls and use Shadowstep to teleport across distances. Combat shifts from swordplay to claw-based attacks with bite mechanics for health regeneration.

The game is being built in Unreal Engine 5 and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment. It's scheduled for release on September 3, 2026, for PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S. The setting is Vale Sangora, a fictional 14th-century kingdom in the Carpathian Mountains where vampires impose a "blood tax" on human populations.

What makes this genuinely different from The Witcher 3 is the narrative sandbox structure. There's no mandatory main quest line. After the introduction, players can explore freely and complete quests in any order. Some overlap, creating deeper political connections, but none are required. You can theoretically go from tutorial to final encounter if you want.

Tomaszkiewicz's motivation runs deeper than mechanics. He's spoken openly about using RPGs as escape during a difficult childhood marked by his father's alcoholism. "RPGs were the most immersive because when I went into the role, it was really important for me to solve those mysteries or go through the adventures," he explained. "This escape was really perfect for me because I could forget about reality in those games."

That personal history informs his design philosophy. He cites Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines as a formative influence—despite acknowledging it was "buggy as hell." The game's clan system and multiple playstyles showed him what RPGs could achieve when they let players genuinely choose their path.

At CD Projekt, Tomaszkiewicz rose from junior tester to director over 17 years. He also served as head of production for Cyberpunk 2077. The scale of those projects—over 500 employees—became part of what drove him toward smaller, more focused development. "I wanted to shift to smaller projects with a smaller team, hoping to avoid the challenges he faced while working on large-scale games," according to Wikipedia's documentation of the studio's formation.

Whether this actually translates to something meaningful remains to be seen. The game is estimated to take 50 to 70 hours to complete, which suggests substantial content. But ambitious mechanics often stumble in execution, especially when they're being pioneered rather than refined.

Tomaszkiewicz acknowledges the risk. "I want to show to the industry that it's possible to do this risky stuff, and to change the feeling of the genre," he said. "Maybe in the future some other people will try to do the 'narrative sandbox'."

That's the real question here. Will other studios follow this model, or will The Blood of Dawnwalker become another cautionary tale about what happens when you try to reinvent a genre that's already been perfected? The September 2026 release date gives players time to wait and see. Whether they actually do is another matter entirely.

Artūras Malašauskas is an AI Systems Integrator with 20+ years of production-grade web engineering experience. He has designed, shipped, and scaled enterprise Python/PHP systems for logistics, SaaS, and public-sector clients. For the past year, he has focused exclusively on AI integrations: deploying open-source LLMs, building generative media pipelines (image, audio, video), and engineering multi-agent workflows for real production environments. His standard: reproducibility, security, cost-efficient inference—no vaporware. He documents and evaluates emerging AI tooling, separating verified capabilities from marketing noise. Technical editor at: muza-ai.eu, ai-verslas.lt, ai-naujinos.lt Connect on LinkedIn