Taking back a bad build
About six weeks after launch, Rebel Wolves is finally letting you take back a bad build. The Blood of Dawnwalker’s Update 1.1, due next week, adds a way to wipe your abilities and start again, along with a gentler difficulty option, bigger subtitles and, yes, directional animal petting.
The studio announced the update on X on October 16 with an infographic that’s refreshingly specific for a patch tease. Here’s what’s in it, and what isn’t.
A potion that refunds your time, not just your points
The headline feature is the Draught of Mind Rebirth. Drink it and Coen forgets all of his Swordmastery, Witchcraft and Vampirism abilities, and you get to “use the time you spent learning them to master a different set of abilities,” in Rebel Wolves’ words.
That wording matters in a game where time is the currency. Learning abilities eats into a limited clock, so a full respec that also hands that time back is far more generous than a simple points refund. If you sank days into a Witchcraft build and found yourself wishing you’d gone sword-first, this is the fix.
Story mode gets easier, and the old one gets a new name
The old Story difficulty is being renamed Forgiving, and a new Story mode sits below it with extra combat assistance. It’s a sensible change for players who are here for the vampire drama rather than the directional sword fights.
Accessibility gets a lift too. You’ll be able to increase the subtitle font size and turn on subtitles for all dialogue lines.
Combat and PC fixes ride along
- FrameGen: an update to the frame generation tech, with its own dedicated settings.
- Camera: adjusted animations and camera movement in combat.
- Combat: better targeting, locking on and disengaging from enemies.
- Traversal: more responsive targeting and attaching to surfaces with Shadowstep and Planeshift.
- Japan: the Japanese Steam version will no longer censor blood and gore.
- Everything else: “over 1100 other improvements & fixes”, which Rebel Wolves hasn’t itemised yet.
The frame generation change is the one PC players should test when it lands. Rebel Wolves hasn’t said exactly what’s changed. The game already offers DLSS Frame Generation on RTX 40 and 50 cards, so if you use it, it may also be worth trying Nvidia’s new faster Frame Generation preset.
The clock that splits players is staying put
What 1.1 doesn’t do is touch the time limit, which has been the game’s most divisive system since launch. As PC Gamer pointed out, the most popular Dawnwalker mod on Nexus Mods is one that effectively removes the ticking clock. Game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz told Eurogamer he’s fine with that, saying the game is balanced so you can see around 80% of its content with the timer on, and that complaints have tailed off as people finish it.
We think that’s a fair line to hold. The clock is the game’s identity, and Rebel Wolves, which Tomaszkiewicz founded after directing The Witcher 3, clearly sees it as a design choice rather than a bug. The respec potion is the smarter compromise: it doesn’t take the pressure away, but it does stop one early mistake from costing you a whole playthrough.
The Blood of Dawnwalker is $69.99 on Steam, where players rate it Very Positive. Rebel Wolves hasn’t given an exact day for 1.1 beyond “next week”, so expect full patch notes when it drops.
