Blood of Dawnwalker's Director Already Beat It on PS5

"I already finished The Blood of Dawnwalker on PS5, and it's great."

That's Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, the game's director and the man who also directed The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, casually dropping what might be the most telling detail about where this game actually sits in development. In an interview with The Game Business, Tomaszkiewicz revealed that Rebel Wolves' debut RPG isn't just playable on consoles; it's completable. He's done it himself. The studio is already heading into certification.

For a game that hasn't locked down a specific release date beyond "2026," that's a level of readiness that caught me off guard. Most studios at this stage are still putting out fires, optimizing late, and praying their console builds hold together. Tomaszkiewicz described the opposite experience: "I'm surprised that it went so smoothly, to be honest. Right now, the console versions are stable, it's working really well, and we're going to certification."

Console builds that actually work

The director credited an outsource company, run by friends of the Rebel Wolves team, that was embedded from the start of development. Rather than bringing in optimization specialists at the eleventh hour, they had people watching the builds early, flagging asset issues and optimizing gameplay code as the game was being built. It's a small detail, but it explains a lot. Console ports that go wrong almost always go wrong because optimization gets treated as a late-stage problem. Rebel Wolves apparently didn't make that mistake.

Tomaszkiewicz also shared that the game has already cleared friends-and-family testing and professional focus tests, with what he described as "really good" feedback. "Even from the focus tests, we have really good results that make us confident we have a really cool game," he said. "I'm surprised that we didn't encounter big problems. That's my biggest surprise."

I'll be honest: I didn't expect this game to be this far along. Rebel Wolves was founded in 2022 with around 160 employees, and building a AAA open-world RPG from scratch with a new team, new IP, and new studio infrastructure is usually takes longer than anyone plans. The fact that Tomaszkiewicz is playing finished builds on PS5 suggests the 2026 window is real, not aspirational.

The interview also addressed the elephant that follows every ex-CD Projekt RED developer: The Witcher 3 comparisons. Tomaszkiewicz was a senior designer on the first Witcher, lead quest designer on The Witcher 3, and second director on Cyberpunk 2077. Several Rebel Wolves staff are CDPR veterans. The DNA is obvious, and Tomaszkiewicz said he's "really comfortable" with those comparisons. "I feel really confident about our game."

But he was clear that Rebel Wolves isn't trying to be the next CD Projekt. He described wanting to stay at 160 people, fund two more games off the back of Dawnwalker's sales, and resist the gravitational pull of corporate expansion. "I'm afraid that if we grow more, we'll lose this communication and process we have right now," he said. "I want Rebel Wolves in 10 years to be exactly the same size."

That philosophy extends to the game itself. Tomaszkiewicz talked about incorporating indie-style design risks into a AAA framework, citing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Crimson Desert as recent examples of big-budget games that aren't just iterating on what already exists. Blood of Dawnwalker features a day/night cycle that gates the protagonist Coen's vampire abilities to nighttime, and a time-pressure system that prevents players from completing every sidequest in a single playthrough. You'll have to make choices about what to pursue, which is a very different approach from the "clear every icon" open-world template.

"Opening a new company to do exactly the same things we did in the past is a problem, because we'll not feel that we're evolving, or developing ourselves," Tomaszkiewicz explained. "We want to push the boundaries of AAA RPGs by adding some risky stuff, which gives you more immersion, more emotions, and a different feel when you play."

I like the ambition. A time-constrained open world where you can't do everything is a design choice that most AAA studios would never greenlight because it means some players will miss content they paid for. But it's also exactly the kind of structure that makes a second playthrough feel necessary rather than redundant. If the execution matches the pitch, this could be one of the more interesting RPG designs we've seen in years.

The Blood of Dawnwalker is in development for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S, with a 2026 release confirmed. You can wishlist it on Steam now.