This article discusses plot details from throughout The Blood of Dawnwalker.  

They never invite you to a real monster mash in The Blood of Dawnwalker. By the end of the game, they’ve sketched the outlines of a whole supernatural society, but they aren’t ready to show it to you. The whole thing feels like a prelude to the game they really wanted to make. Dawnwalker is a cinematic choice-n-consequence RPG that follows very closely in the footsteps of The Witcher 3. It’s about vampires, but it keeps grafting more ideas onto vampirism until it recreates the entire Witcher loadout from spare parts, including the alchemical buffs, the outcast status, and slowed but not suspended aging.

The Dawnwalker, Coen, isn’t grizzled and cynical like Geralt. Instead he’s young and perpetually agog at all the gore and deviltry around him. (“What carnage!”, he often says.) He continues to freak out at the sight of corpses even to the end of the game, which is strange for a vampire drenched in the blood of hundreds. But you can’t let him get too worldly when you’re only in Chapter 1 of the planned Dawnwalker Saga. 

It’s easy to imagine, after toiling for years on new sardonic asides for Geralt to mutter, the relief that old Witcher devs would feel at casting off his baggage. Finally, a blank slate! But they overdid it: there isn’t much to the new guy besides his goodness and guilt. Even the structure of Dawnwalker reflects how unappealing he is.

A majority of the other vampires in the game would literally rather die than talk to him. You have to bother the villains with open-world activities to fill a meter until you finally unlock some face time. And even in that meeting they’re pretty dismissive, up until the point when you kill them. Then you get a post-death debrief where they finally explain their motivations, like the targets’ confessions in the original Assassin’s Creed. By the time you register that some of them, like the smirking Ambrus, deserved far more screen time, they’ve already been consigned to the shadow realm.

Coen’s romances are purely transactional. Both women (Anca and Lacra) make it clear they aren’t interested in a long-term relationship—then you’d have to write them into the sequels—and seem to lose interest as soon as he retrieves a mystical artifact for them. (There’s a male option too, Crake, but he’s such a loathsome version of a “complicated” character that I suspect even the writers didn’t like him, and were just imagining some other audience that might.) In their epilogues, Coen is like, “well, I never heard from her again, but it sounds like she’s doing great.”

Coen’s only real friend, Vicho, is suicidal. He’s introduced in a neat quest with a Witcher-style false ending, where you have to follow up on a loose end on your own time after the quest log marks it complete. Your reward for uncovering the truth is a recurring chore where you must deliver a vial of blood to Vicho at the same time every other night for the rest of the game or he will kill himself. You’re already carrying 50 blood vials and you routinely collect or destroy the vampire villains’ caches of preserved blood by the barrel. Yet this man, who is hundreds of years old, insists that you DoorDash him a single can of Mountain Dew at 4am every other night or he will end it all.

I don’t think the developers set out to make Coen a guy that nobody wants to hang out with. It seems like an unintended consequence of cutting out the middle of their story. Dawnwalker is missing the part of a traditional RPG where you spend enough time with the cast to grow attached to them, and all of the incidental episodes where they choose to spend time with the protagonist. 

There’s no party banter and no parties; there’s no equivalent to the loyalty missions in Dragon Age: Origins or Mass Effect, let alone the long stretches of palling around in The Witcher 3’s journeys; your off-mission conversations with allies feel perfunctory, and laden with teasers for sequels rather than anything interesting for its own sake; there’s a lack of connective tissue, of people involving themselves in any other character’s problems, of “funny meeting you here.” Everyone seems to be on their own story track in their own corner of Sangora Vale, connected to nothing else, and nobody gets derailed into a more interesting plotline than the one they started out on.

There’s a trollish propensity to introduce ideas and do nothing with them. At one point you go to a werewolf’s house, but he isn’t home. There are two different questlines where you rescue very ancient vampires from long, torturous imprisonment, and they both die immediately afterward. I don’t think there’s an easier way to add intrigue to your vampire story than introducing an extremely old guy with a weird agenda (see Buffy, Vampire Diaries, etc.), but here they leave the money on the table.

Dawnwalker’s best stories are surprises you find in its open world. If you climb one of the game’s map-scouting towers in the southwest, you’ll be transported into an elaborate dream sequence quest with no warning. If you visit the main city’s cathedral at night, you can ambush one of the game’s villains and fight her early (though this really just skips a chunk of a game that’s lean to begin with). If you enter a hidden burrow in the center of the map, you find a race of mean tooth fairies who eventually grant a true fairy-tale reward: they turn back the in-game clock by one day.

These twists make the process of working through the open world feel like something better than filling out a form. But they don’t make up for the overriding impression that the game’s story was cut to the bone. Rather than building a web of decisions and alliances that results in something like Dragon Age:Origin’s Landsmeet, Mass Effect 2’s suicide mission, or Fallout: New Vegas’s final tangle of possibilities, Dawnwalker gives you a choice between a few broad tracks. You can ally with the reckless vampire cop Lacra or with the secret royalist Crake. Or you can just do everything yourself, which turns out to be the best option, in keeping with the game’s low investment in any form of partnership.

No matter what you choose, the game ends with Coen leaving Sangora Vale and slamming the door on the way out. As he narrates the epilogue, he makes clear that all of the characters we met along the way are hereby dismissed from the Dawnwalker Saga. “They lived on, whether happily or not…I cannot tell. We were never to meet again,” he says of his family. The guy who runs at 60mph was too busy to visit?

It’s meant to be a bittersweet farewell to all the people Coen briefly interacted with, but it feels more like a reminder that they weren’t franchise material. What he’s really saying is: Enough of this starter zone and these starter people! I’m off to star in a real Dawnwalker game full of werewolves, elder gods, and vampires who actually return my calls. See you in six years!

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Chris Breault is a writer on the internet.