The Blood of Dawnwalker is getting a proper "just let me play the story" mode in October

Can I tell you who I thought about first when I read this? My sister. She watched me play The Blood of Dawnwalker over two evenings, loved everything about Coen and that ticking 30-day clock, and then put the controller down after her first proper fight and said "nope, you do it." That's the person this update is for.

Rebel Wolves has confirmed that the first major patch for its vampire RPG lands in early October, and the headline change is a brand-new easiest difficulty. Game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz described it to Eurogamer as an option for people who don't want to experience combat at all. It replaces the current easiest setting, takes over the Story Mode name, and the old one shifts up a notch - so there'll be five difficulties on the ladder once the update is live.

I love this for a very simple reason. Dawnwalker's whole hook is the story - a peasant turned half-vampire racing to save his family, day and night playing by different rules. That's a premise my nephew, my sister and my non-gamer friends all get excited about the second I describe it. The combat is good, but it's also the one wall that stops some of those people from ever seeing the ending. Lowering that wall doesn't take anything away from anyone playing on Duelist. It just opens the door a little wider.

The rest of the patch sounds like the team has actually been listening. Running away from a fight is supposed to get a lot less clunky, animals will still lunge at you but shouldn't lock onto you once you've dodged them, and the target-switching behaviour that players complained about most is being reworked. Rebel Wolves also says it's still chasing frame-rate and controller issues after the earlier hotfixes, which - on PS5 and Xbox Series especially - I'll be watching closely, because the launch wasn't perfectly smooth on either.

A small pushback, kindly: it would've been lovely to have this mode on day one. Plenty of people bounce off a game in the first week and never come back, and "story mode" is exactly the kind of thing that keeps them. Still, three weeks after launch is a fast turnaround for a studio this size, and they're not hiding behind excuses about it.

So yes, I'm texting my sister. October, Coen, second attempt. I think she'll actually finish it this time.

Image: Sergey Galyonkin / CC BY-SA 2.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Playstation_Dualsense_controller.jpg