The Blood of Dawnwalker tops out at 40fps on consoles - and plenty of players won't even get that

Before you hit pre-order, a question that has nothing to do with the game: what refresh rate is the TV in your living room?

Ask it now, because new console footage from Rebel Wolves and Bandai Namco has confirmed how The Blood of Dawnwalker will run when it arrives on 3 September. Two modes, both at dynamic 4K: a Quality mode targeting 30fps, and a Balanced mode targeting 40fps. That's it. No 60fps option on PS5, no 60fps option on Xbox Series, and - this is the part that stings - no 60fps option on PS5 Pro either. The Pro reportedly buys you a prettier picture inside the same two frame rate targets, not a smoother one. PC is, for now, the only place the game is expected to go past 40.

Forty is a number with a hidden requirement

Here's the bit that tends to get lost in the headlines. A 40fps mode isn't a random compromise a developer picked out of the air - it exists because 40 divides cleanly into 120. Three display refreshes per frame, perfectly even pacing, no judder. Which means the whole trick only works if your TV can actually accept a 120Hz signal in the first place.

And that's where the announcement quietly changes shape depending on where you live. In our region, a 4K set with HDMI 2.1 and a real 120Hz panel is still very much the upper shelf of the store, not the default. An awful lot of people here bought a perfectly good 4K 60Hz TV four or five years ago, hooked a PS5 up to it, and have no plans to replace a working television because a vampire RPG asked them to. For those players, "Balanced" isn't a choice. It's a greyed-out menu entry, and the real spec sheet reads 30fps.

So the honest version of this story is that a chunk of the audience is buying a 30fps game in 2026, six years into a console generation, and the hardware upgrade that's supposed to fix that - the Pro model, several hundred euros more - explicitly doesn't.

I want to be fair to Rebel Wolves, though. This is a first game from a studio built largely out of people who worked on The Witcher 3, and they're swinging hard: an open-ended vampire RPG built around a ticking clock rather than a checklist. Stating your targets clearly a couple of weeks before launch is a lot more respectable than promising 60 and shipping a stuttering 45 that gets quietly patched in November. A locked, well-paced 40fps also genuinely feels better than 30 - anyone who has played a game with a proper 40fps mode knows it's not marketing nonsense.

But the pattern is getting hard to ignore. "No 60fps mode" has gone from an embarrassing exception to a normal line in a launch FAQ, and the usual advice - just play it on PC - lands badly right now, when RAM and SSD prices are doing what they're doing and building a machine costs more than it did a year ago.

My take: I'd rather a studio be upfront and patch a 60fps mode in later than fake it at launch. Just check the back of your TV before you decide which box you're buying this on. That spec sheet is doing more work here than the console is.

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