Who is Rebel Wolves? Meet the Witcher veterans behind The Blood of Dawnwalker
The Blood of Dawnwalker arrives on 3 September 2026, but behind one of this year’s most interesting RPG releases is a development studio releasing its very first game.
Rebel Wolves was co-founded in 2022 by veteran game developer Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, best known as game director of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
However, Rebel Wolves is not simply trying to recreate The Witcher under another name.
The Warsaw-based studio was established around a much bigger ambition: build story-driven RPGs where players have greater freedom to determine how their stories unfold.
Its first attempt is The Blood of Dawnwalker, an open-world dark fantasy action RPG set in an alternative version of 14th-century Europe.
And Rebel Wolves already has plans extending far beyond one game.
Rebel Wolves was founded in 2022
Rebel Wolves is a Polish game developer based in Warsaw.
The studio was co-founded in 2022 by Konrad Tomaszkiewicz alongside developers with experience working on major RPGs.
Bandai Namco describes the team as including members of the core development group behind The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and its expansions.
That immediately attracted attention.
The Witcher 3 became one of the defining RPGs of its generation, so a new studio involving developers who helped create it was always going to generate expectations.
Rebel Wolves has not tried to hide that experience.
However, the studio describes itself more broadly as a group of experienced developers and passionate newcomers united around one objective: helping shape the future of RPGs.
That distinction matters.
The Witcher connection explains where some of the studio’s experience comes from.
It does not necessarily tell us what Rebel Wolves wants to become.
Konrad Tomaszkiewicz is leading the studio’s first game
Konrad Tomaszkiewicz serves as game director and co-founder of Rebel Wolves.
His involvement gives the studio considerable RPG experience at leadership level.
Tomaszkiewicz previously directed The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, a game that helped establish CD Projekt Red as one of the world’s most recognised RPG developers.
Starting again at a new studio creates a very different challenge.
Rebel Wolves does not inherit The Witcher’s established world, characters or audience.
It needs to build everything again.
The studio.
The technology.
The characters.
The world.
And, perhaps most importantly, the intellectual property.
That makes The Blood of Dawnwalker considerably more important than an ordinary first release.
It needs to introduce both the game and the developer behind it.
Rebel Wolves wants to rethink how RPG stories work
The most interesting part of Rebel Wolves’ philosophy is not necessarily its combat or dark-fantasy setting.
It is how the studio thinks about storytelling.
Rebel Wolves says it wants to build RPGs around deep stories, rich mechanics and ideas capable of surprising players.
Central to that approach is something the developer calls a narrative sandbox.
The basic idea is that the story should belong more directly to the player.
Rather than simply following a predetermined sequence of main missions surrounded by optional side quests, players decide which stories deserve their attention.
Those decisions then help create a different narrative path.
The Blood of Dawnwalker is Rebel Wolves’ first attempt to put that philosophy into practice.
Dawnwalker’s 30-day system explains the studio’s philosophy
The easiest way to understand Rebel Wolves’ narrative sandbox is through The Blood of Dawnwalker’s unusual time system.
Protagonist Coen has 30 days and nights to save his family.
That sounds like a conventional time limit.
It isn’t.
Time does not continually disappear while the player walks through the world.
Instead, important quests and narrative actions consume portions of the available time.
That changes the meaning of a side quest.
Helping someone isn’t automatically the correct decision simply because an exclamation mark appeared above their head.
Helping them costs something.
Time.
Spend several hours dealing with one person’s problem and those hours cannot be used somewhere else.
Rebel Wolves has deliberately designed the game so that players cannot complete every story and narrative arc within one playthrough.
That is the narrative sandbox in practice.
The studio wants players to accept that they cannot see everything
This is an unusual philosophy for a modern open-world RPG.
Many games encourage completion.
Maps fill with icons.
Quest logs grow longer.
Players gradually work through everything until the world has been cleared.
Rebel Wolves is deliberately asking players to accept that some stories will be missed.
Your choices determine what becomes important.
Your inaction matters too.
That is one of the central ideas expressed in Rebel Wolves’ own description of the studio: it wants each player’s decisions to create a distinct narrative path.
If the system works, two people discussing The Blood of Dawnwalker after finishing it may discover that significant parts of their experiences were different.
Not because one bought different downloadable content.
Because they made different decisions about how to spend Coen’s limited time.
The Blood of Dawnwalker is not supposed to be The Witcher 4
The developers’ previous experience makes comparisons with The Witcher 3 inevitable.
There are obvious similarities.
Both are mature fantasy RPGs.
Both draw heavily from Central and Eastern European history, mythology and folklore.
Both use a third-person perspective.
Both place considerable emphasis on narrative decisions.
But treating Dawnwalker as an unofficial continuation of The Witcher misses what Rebel Wolves is attempting.
The Blood of Dawnwalker takes place in an alternative 14th-century Europe, centred around Vale Sangora in the Carpathian Mountains.
War and the Black Death have devastated the population.
Vampires use humanity’s weakness to emerge from hiding, overthrow the region’s feudal rulers and establish themselves as its new ruling class.
Coen then becomes something between the two worlds.
Human during the day.
Vampire at night.
That creates a completely different gameplay structure from controlling Geralt of Rivia.
Day and night are effectively two RPG toolsets
Coen’s transformation is another example of Rebel Wolves connecting narrative ideas directly to gameplay.
Human Coen can rely on swordsmanship and witchcraft.
At night, his vampiric abilities become available.
The difference affects combat, exploration and how players can approach quests.
A location inaccessible during the day might become reachable using vampire traversal abilities after dark.
A problem that suits human Coen may have a completely different solution at night.
Players can develop human, vampire and shared abilities, allowing them to decide which side of Coen they want to emphasise.
Rebel Wolves therefore isn’t simply telling players that its protagonist struggles between humanity and vampirism.
It wants them to experience that conflict through the game’s mechanics.
Even progression reflects player decisions
The same philosophy extends to character progression.
Players earn experience through quests, exploration, bosses and other activities.
However, not every ability simply appears because a number increased.
Swordsmanship can require finding manuals.
More advanced witchcraft may depend on discovering magical knowledge.
Vampiric progression is connected to Coen embracing his supernatural nature.
That gives exploration a practical role beyond collecting loot.
Finding knowledge can change what Coen is capable of doing.
The design also reinforces the idea that players should not automatically unlock everything during one playthrough.
The version of Coen you create depends partly on the opportunities you choose to pursue.
Rebel Wolves partnered with Bandai Namco
Building a large open-world RPG requires substantial resources, particularly for a new independent studio.
In October 2024, Rebel Wolves announced a strategic partnership with Bandai Namco Entertainment Europe.
Under the agreement, Bandai Namco became the global publisher of Rebel Wolves’ debut game and took responsibility for its physical and digital distribution.
That gave the new developer an established international publishing partner while allowing Rebel Wolves to concentrate on development.
The partnership also demonstrates the scale of the project.
The Blood of Dawnwalker is not positioned as a small experimental indie RPG.
Bandai Namco describes it as a AAA action RPG aimed at mature audiences.
It launches simultaneously on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.
Unreal Engine 5 gives the studio another foundation
Rather than building a proprietary engine for its first project, Rebel Wolves is developing The Blood of Dawnwalker using Unreal Engine 5.
For a new studio, that decision makes practical sense.
Creating a large open-world RPG is already difficult.
Developing and maintaining an entirely new engine alongside it would add another enormous technical challenge.
Unreal Engine also gives Rebel Wolves an established development ecosystem while the studio concentrates on the areas it wants to differentiate: world design, combat, storytelling and player choice.
The finished game’s performance will ultimately determine how successful that technical decision has been.
However, the studio has already been unusually willing to show development-state gameplay.
An August 2026 gameplay deep dive, for example, used footage captured from the PC version’s pre-beta build, with Rebel Wolves explicitly describing it as representative of the game’s state at that point rather than footage receiving additional behind-the-scenes polish.
For a new studio approaching its first launch, that kind of transparency is useful.
Historical authenticity matters to Rebel Wolves
The studio is building a fantasy world filled with vampires and supernatural powers, but that does not mean history is irrelevant.
Dawnwalker draws heavily on its 14th-century European setting.
Rebel Wolves has used the Carpathian Mountains, medieval architecture, regional mythology and historical beliefs as foundations for Vale Sangora.
That attention extends beyond visual design.
The game’s main musical theme was composed by Nikola Kołodziejczyk and performed by the AUKSO Chamber Orchestra of Tychy.
Kołodziejczyk has explained that the music uses sounds and instruments associated with the game’s location and historical period as part of an attempt to maintain authenticity.
That approach gives Rebel Wolves another opportunity to separate its world from generic medieval fantasy.
The supernatural elements may be fictional.
The culture surrounding them can still feel rooted in a recognisable place.
The Blood of Dawnwalker is only the beginning
Perhaps the most important thing to understand about Rebel Wolves is that it is not building Dawnwalker as a one-game experiment.
The Blood of Dawnwalker is officially the first chapter of an original dark-fantasy saga.
In June 2026, the studio revealed more about what that means.
Future instalments are intended to move across different historical eras, locations and cultures.
Coen’s immediate conflict with vampire ruler Brencis will conclude within The Blood of Dawnwalker, so the first game is still designed as a self-contained story.
However, Rebel Wolves says attentive players will find clues connected to a larger narrative running through the saga.
That dramatically expands the ambition behind the studio.
Rebel Wolves isn’t only trying to launch a successful RPG.
It is trying to establish its own long-term universe.
That makes September especially important
New studios rarely get unlimited opportunities to establish themselves.
Rebel Wolves has experienced developers, a major publishing partner and considerable attention because of the team’s history.
Those things create opportunities.
They also create expectations.
Calling your first game the opening chapter of a larger saga requires confidence.
Players still need to care about the first chapter before they become interested in the second.
That puts enormous importance on 3 September 2026.
The Blood of Dawnwalker will launch on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S as Rebel Wolves’ first game.
Only then can players properly judge whether the studio’s narrative-sandbox philosophy works outside developer presentations.
Why Rebel Wolves is a developer worth following
There is no guarantee that experience automatically produces another great RPG.
A new studio has different teams, different resources, different technology and different pressures.
That is why Rebel Wolves should not simply be described as “the people who made The Witcher 3”.
Its previous experience is important.
Its new ideas are more interesting.
The studio is attempting to solve a problem that has existed in open-world RPGs for years: how do you give players enormous freedom while still making their choices feel important?
Its answer is to make time valuable.
Make quests compete for that time.
Allow players to miss stories.
Give actions and inaction consequences.
Let the protagonist’s human and vampire identities change how the same world can be approached.
Then accept that the player might experience only part of what the developers created.
It is a risky philosophy for a genre where many players hate permanently missing content.
But it is also considerably more interesting than simply making another enormous map and covering it with activities.
Rebel Wolves describes itself as a studio born from a love of RPGs.
On 3 September, The Blood of Dawnwalker will show whether that love can translate into something genuinely different.
And if the studio’s plans for the wider Dawnwalker saga succeed, this may only be the first time we hear its name.
