“A good open world has a meaning,” Konrad Tomaszkiewicz tells me. And he’d know a thing or two about that – he directed The Witcher 3, after all. And so for The Blood of Dawnwalker, his upcoming open world RPG at new studio Rebel Wolves, it was clear that he and his team had to build upon the foundations of his previous project. “That was our starting point, that it needed to have meaning.”

“When I'm exploring it, can I learn more about the lore, more about the story of this region, about the people who are living there?” he asks, all things that make The Witcher 3’s world rich and immersive. “When I'm playing open world games where I just have activities which give me XP and items, I don't get this enjoyment and fun from it.”

Konrad’s brother, Dawnwalker’s creative director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz, has similar feelings. “I have this personal vendetta against filler content,” he says. “I really dislike it. I know it's very difficult to avoid in open worlds, but I personally really like handcrafted custom and unique content pieces. A little twist or at least some kind of new information that it brings to the table.”

From a game design perspective, then, The Blood of Dawnwalker’s open world is a stage for a grand adventure inspired by the quests the brothers experienced in their mind’s eye while playing tabletop RPGs. It’s a playable reality, not a checklist of repeatable activities. “What makes the open world and the game interesting is the connections,” Konrad says. “If you explore, you sometimes open big branches of the story you cannot predict and something good can happen.” The result of all this is that every quest is promised to connect to something, be that the narrative at the heart of Dawnwalker, or the anger and infamy systems that power the Vampire Court that rules over the valley. By forging these connections, Rebel Wolves intends for your activities in the open world to achieve that aforementioned “meaning”.

Those connections could not be forged without creating a similar bond between the studio’s design disciplines. Gameplay and narrative teams had to be united for the mechanics of the open world to truly become a story experience. To find the right thematic base for Dawnwalker’s world of Vale Sangora, narrative director Jakub Szamalek looked to his own homelands.

“Rather than particular historical moments, this game is inspired by the overall themes and main strands of Eastern European history and folklore,” he explains. “It's always been a place of migration and it's always been a place of conflict. There's a lot of blood that seeped into the soil of Eastern Europe, which is maybe why it's so fertile and why we have such dark, dark stories. I think it has a distinct texture.”

The Blood of Dawnwalker isn’t just the tale of Vale Sangora, though – it’s much more personal than that. It’s the journey of Coen, a man barely out of his teenage years who now carries the curse of vampirism. His life will never be the same, but that’s not entirely the infection’s doing. The abduction of Coen’s family by the vampire lord Brencis forces him to leave his small village and explore the entire valley, taking him to places that he’d never have seen otherwise.

“One of the first major decisions was to have a massive Gothic cathedral in our capital,” says Szamalek. “Put yourself in the position of a medieval peasant who lived his whole life in a thatched cottage and then arrives in a local city, sees this massive structure built out of stone with intricate detail. All those dark scenes of suffering and executions that Catholic churches seem to be reverent of. [We wanted to] tap into that kind of frequency and vibe and amplify it by a hundred.”

The Gothic “vibe” is important to Dawnwalker. Of course it is; this is a vampire RPG we’re talking about. But that extends far beyond just the look of the world. It influences the way you interact with the land, and how the moonlight hours unlock fresh new opportunities.

“When you are human, you fight differently, explore the world differently, and approach the quests differently in comparison to being a vampire at night,” says Konrad. “At night you have more options to travel and explore. You can find stuff that’s not reachable by a human [Coen]. You can find some good stories there, some challenges or cool items.”

The duality of human and vampire poses a unique challenge, as the development team needs to consider every opportunity in the world from two different perspectives. Is this an activity for the day, night, or something that should have multiple paths depending on when the player wants to approach it? But that’s not the only challenge the open world has posed. There’s also the issue of, well, challenge. When you can go anywhere and do anything, there’s no set pathway through the world and story, and thus no easy way to plot a difficulty curve.

“We didn't want to do full auto balancing like some games do,” says Mateusz. “My problem with this is, yes, it allows you to maximize player freedom by exploring whatever you want, whenever you want, but it takes something away from the feeling of progression. If the enemies are never under my level, they're always on my level, it feels like the leveling up and gaining gear is kind of pointless.”

While Dawnwalker’s enemies do not automatically scale to match your level, the increased challenge posed by certain regions of the map is not intended to prohibit you from exploring them earlier than the developers intended. “You're not railroaded in this one correct way of playing it,” Mateusz assures me. “It's like, I can gather some experience here and there and maybe explore it in different directions than other players do. Because it's an RPG, you collect items, you become stronger and so on and so forth. At every point we wanted you to have options.”

Wherever you decide to explore, Rebel Wolves wants each region and location to have a genuine sense of culture. To do that, the developers needed to look to humanity’s own history. That’s something that came easy to Szamalek, who has a PhD in archaeology. “There is something striking about seeing works of art from a long, long time ago and trying to grapple with what they mean and what the specificities were of the people who painted them,” he says. “I wanted to have that in the game, to capture that fascination and translate this into an experience that gamers can participate in.”

“We thought that each of the sentient monster races in our game should have their own art that is a little bit different, that is unique to their sensitivities or culture,” Szamalek explains. “And the more you engage with that and the more you try to understand what they're trying to communicate, the easier you will find it to talk to them.”

Szamalek tells me of his fascination with Italian frescoes, the beautiful (and often eerie) work of historic artists that were painted directly onto wet plaster. They become part of the wall, part of the building, part of the location’s aura. And in The Blood of Dawnwalker, you’ll find many ancient artworks that depict tales from Vale Sangora’s ancient past. As we saw in an earlier gameplay video debuted as part of IGN First, careful study of these frescoes can reveal hidden truths and guide Coen to special items.

Like in our own world, these works of art are totally unique. “My request was that we won't reuse them, so that you won't be seeing the same frescoes or the same paintings over and over again in different ruins,” says Szamalek. “It ruins the immersion for me. I realise, ‘Oh, that's just an asset. It doesn't have any meaning.’ So I want art that gives context to what you're exploring and is unique to the location you're exploring.”

I’ve seen little of The Blood of Dawnwalker’s open world so far – most of my hands-on preview was spent within the boundaries of the prologue’s village. But what I have seen suggests a smart melding of Ubisoft’s climb-towers-to-scout-locations format with more bespoke activity ideas, like swamp-dwelling mini-bosses and glowing wisps that guide you to scenes of environmental storytelling. As a smaller studio operating on a less-than-gargantuan budget, I’m not going in expecting Rebel Wolves to have produced the kind of simulation we’d see in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 or Red Dead Redemption 2. But from my small sampling and conversation with the dev team, the world of Vale Sangora is showing plenty of signs that it’s a place worth getting invested in.

The Blood of Dawnwalker is our IGN First for July 2026, and we have a month's worth of exclusive content. After playing the vampire RPG for four hours and spending another four hours interviewing its developers, we're ready to go deep on all of the most important systems, mechanics, and lore. Catch up on all the month's content below:

Matt Purslow is IGN's Executive Editor of Features.

Keanu Reeves has never guest starred on The Simpsons, but if he did, this is how his iconic assassin John Wick might look.

Why has Wick been Simpson-fied? Well, of course, it's because he's the star of a new Fortnite update — specifically for its popular Reload spinoff mode. Players will be able to meet and unlock Wick for themselves (as long as they own the current battle pass) as they delve back into the game's excellent recreation of Springfield.

Fortnite first hosted The Simpsons' home town during a popular mini-season at the end of last year. Now, the map is back for the game's Reload offering, which grants players three lives and quick respawns before they're out completely.

With a match size of 50 players and Simpsons items, this sounds like it will recreate some of mayhem from last year's main battle royale offering. But there's a few new twists this time around, as well. Firstly, an area of the map will be dedicated to The Confidential, a neutral zone with passive healing.

Proximity chat is enabled inside The Confiditional, which could prove interesting (or incredibly annoying). Players can also choose to break the peace and begin firing, though at the penalty of being marked for all players, with higher-quality loot for the opponent who then takes you down. Is it worth the risk? Si vis pacem, para bellum.

Players who have been sticking with the main battle royale mode's compulsive Sprite collecting will likely be tempted to try Reload by the addition of an exclusive John Wick Sprite that can be extracted for use elsewhere (it reveals nearby enemies after knocking or eliminating an opponent).

Other changes to Reload will allow solo players to earn additional reboots by damaging opponents. Finally, chests will restock over time — a first for the game. Tempted to drop in? John Wick will be joining Homer Simpson in Fortnite Reload tomorrow, Thursday July 30, with around three weeks to unlock him for yourself.

Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

From a distance, The Relic: First Guardian looks like it could be a solid addition to the growing ranks of B-list action games that punch above their weight. The sort of recommendation you drop your friends who are looking for something to scratch that itch between big games to let them know you’re into this action-game lifestyle, for real. Upclose, The Relic is the exact opposite. It’s clearly inspired by bigger games within and around the FromSoftware lineage, but doesn’t even come close to meeting the high bars they set. It doesn’t even execute its own goals well – shoddy and broken throughout, barely propped up by its engaging combat and let down by how lackluster or straight up unacceptable every other piece of it is.

Visually, The Relic does not make a good first impression nor does it make a great impression at any point afterward. Most character models are bland, either run-of-the-mill medieval European fantasy peasants, knights, and preachers; or designs bizarre enough to be curious but feeling incomplete like your Bloodborne Doll stand-in, Elisa. Faces, and especially your protagonist's mug, seem to have no actual detail on them, short of eyes that glow sometimes. And they all have a sort of low-res fuzz surrounding them akin to the infamous bloom effect from the old Fable games.

The lands you explore have the mood of a dead world with how most of its settlements are ghost towns and all of its fortresses are ruins, and yet they all look nearly identical from one crumbling building to another. The few towns that do still have people in them feel almost indistinguishable from one another. The mix of geography and whatever hazy color filter is fogging everything up is the biggest indicator of which of the three main regions you’re in. The Faded Mist Forest is a dense hinterland with a minty green tint. Hillsbrad has that yellow glow like American movies in the 2010s set in foreign countries, lathered over its rolling hills while a vomit emoji green tint covers its swamps. These color filters get oppressive in burning villages, where everything has an orangey red glow that makes details like pathways to progress hard to find and the overall image quality look smudged. Then you have caves that artificially narrow your field of view by darkening the edges of the screen, really testing your peripheral vision.

I did find exploring the regions to be occasionally intriguing, so long as I could avoid getting stuck on random geometry or loading waist deep into the ground at a checkpoint. There is genuine intrigue in finding a promising cave mouth or walking up a flight of stairs into a mysterious tower, which would only lead an elevator to bring you back down from the top. But sometimes it results in time spent trying to understand how a fast travel point ended up completely embedded inside a wall to be inaccessible and completely useless. It’s very easy to get pulled away from main paths and into side quests or dungeons around the corner because records left behind by lost or fallen characters. These dot the countryside, leading you into points of interest like a breadcrumb trail. These often reveal stories of loss told by your character making Batman-like deductions based on some sort of noteworthy thing in the environment like a broken cart, or told in the voice of the characters involved who conveniently left progressively revealing notes behind right before their demise. Seriously, I know every game does a version of this kind of storytelling, but The Relic really abuses this particular storytelling technique with a frequency and reckless abandon I don’t think I've seen before.

Many of these side stories, based on Korean folklore, are somewhat compelling, even moving at times. A memorable one involved a woman running out to the forest to find her husband who hadn’t returned home with the other soldiers from a battle. When you retrace her steps, you find that her grief had turned her into a monster (an admittedly common trope The Relic leans on to punctuate these stories with boss fights). They don’t all end with a bang, though. One story had me trek up a mountain reading scraps of notes from a wife waiting for her husband to return as their daughter gets more and more anxious, playing with pinwheels to pass the time. At the top of the climb was just a grassy plateau, filled almost hauntingly with pinwheels presumably left there by a daughter who eventually stopped waiting. I liked the rare occasions when a story resolved in a subversive way, and was disappointed when these kinds of stories had boss fights wedged into them awkwardly.

The side stories and dungeon bosses are the best way to get loot of any meaningful value in The Relic. The rolling hills, deep forests, and dank dungeons of its world have hundreds of shiny little loot markers scattered into every nook and cranny, and almost all of them are just a scant pile of 30 to 50 gold. You’ll sometimes find chests guarded by bad guys or tucked at the end of a divergent path in a cave, and almost all of them have about 600 gold. If you’re thinking, “That's weirdly specific,” well, so did I for about 20 hours until I stopped touching any of those all together since I was already carrying more gold than I could responsibly spend by the third act. As someone who genuinely enjoys clearing activities and map markers in games, my 30-or-so hours with The Relic is the first time I can remember being turned off at the idea of getting loot all together.

That said, many of these stories are often overwritten and put together in a strange way that suggests it was essentially put through translation software without any other linguistic touch or localization effort. This goes for most dialogue as well; whenever I think a shopkeeper or guard whose conversation I’m eavesdropping on is done, more lines of dialogue keep pouring out clumsily. The text in the captions also regularly don’t match what you hear coming from voice lines, and this is made even worse by the generally poor voice performances across the board – I almost couldn’t believe that some of the takes I heard made it into the final game.

Fighting the looters and monsters that roam the land is where The Relic is at its most cohesive, but thats a relatively low bar that it barely clears. Each of the five available weapons are distinct from one another; while each one only has one combo string, you can’t just mash it out since each subsequent swing requires the proper timing. The sluggish responsiveness from the controls make this rhythm a chore to lock down in the early game, and I found myself dropping strings that felt right even after some practice. Only your defensive options cost stamina, encouraging you to be aggressive more freely – however, enemies rarely stagger or flinch from attacks , so you’ll spend plenty of time waiting for openings anyway. Like you, enemies can be stunned when they’ve run out of stamina through either your attacks or when you parry theirs, but it’s frustrating that they don’t have visible stamina bars so you’ll never know how close they are to a full stagger until it happens.

Each of the three regions (with the second being split into two subregions) have their own roster of key bad guys specific to them, but none of the regular fodder test your skills all that regularly on their own. In packs, they can present moments where you need to think tactically to minimize harm – archers hiding behind a double-wide brute with an axe become priority targets for your own self-recharging elemental spell bolt, for example. Groups of monsters are the most dangerous when they join the fray, due in part to the janky lock-on system and jittery camera becoming woefully unreliable. Foes can trap you and wear you down partially because you can't switch between targets fast enough or get a read on what’s going on, but that doesn’t necessarily negate actual interesting encounter design.

With the exception of a few standouts like a weird cultist who holds a brazier on his head or some unfortunate cave dwellers with mining equipment for heads, enemies don’t have the visual appeal worthy of a top tier grimdark fantasy world. They feel like they’re trying to be like some other creatures in a FromSoftware game or ape the twisted nature of that aesthetic. After a while, they just become annoyances, neither valuable for farming materials since they only drop middling amounts of gold, only good for buying basic items or low-level crafting items that I could just go buy somewhere. By the late game, I would do my best to completely avoid them out in the world, running past them to the next checkpoint while in dungeons as I ran out of patience for their nonsense.

Bosses have a bit more going for them in both these respects, as their attacks create way more of a puzzle to solve and generally look more detailed and more interesting then run of the mill mooks. But these fights are also where I had to employ the most tedious tactics in order to avoid the cheapest deaths. There are a lot of bosses – over 75 to be clear, and most of them are optional. The worst of these take advantage of The Relic’s aforementioned technical woes while also having to contend with environmental hazards, status effects they cheese on you, or relentless offense that you can’t reliably interrupt. A handful of these fights also just break completely in weird ways. For example, the boss just stopped moving completely in one of these fights, awed by my desperate dodge rolling, I’m sure. In another, the boss would sometimes just not show up at all when I respawned, leaving me in an empty room that they could occasionally fire into, which I couldn't leave without reloading my entire session.

As a consolation, weapon skills really spice up combat, adding some punchy offensive and defensive options into the mix. The more skills you unlock for each weapon, the more complete they feel with a more fleshed out moveset, and each weapon has a two-sided skill tree that firmly divides them into even more distinct playstyles. The battle staff is a good example of this, with one side making you a dangerous whirlwind in melee and the other giving you some very powerful ranged options that almost fills the role of a traditional mage. However, the massive amount of relic points required to unlock all these skills on any one path will make it hard to see the full scope of a style before very late game. You can’t grind these points either, as they only come as either rewards from certain boss fights or some quests, or can be found at specific blue shrines out in the world. With an item that is really easy to come by, you can refund any points invested and respec as you see fit. I did this many times in order to try out or switch between different playstyles if I thought a new approach was needed to get through a new boss.

Equipment have passive abilities and drawbacks, some of which have pronounced effects on combat. One of the two-handed weapons lowers the stamina cost of blocking while raising the cost to dodge. A battle staff has a small chance of replenishing all of your cooldowns when you connect with a skill. Relics are stones that modify or enhance your stats, and add an extra layer of customization. With some outside the box thinking, these can bring flair to your builds, which worked well enough to where I didn’t care much that there is no regular stat progression or leveling up at all. Most relics are basic, raising hit points or stamina, bolstering defenses, and so on, but some can offer some unique features like temporary invincibility when you take fatal damage. There's a pair of relics that interact with special attacks that seem like they would be a cool combo, but like most of the sloppy design in The Relic, it didn’t explain which special attacks they applied to or even what special attacks are at all.