Rebel Wolves is preparing The Blood of Dawnwalker’s first major update, most likely landing in early October, and its headline addition is a new easier difficulty mode built for players who want the story without a punishing combat challenge. No exact release date has been locked in yet.
Game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz told Eurogamer that the studio is responding directly to player requests for something gentler than the existing options. The current Story mode is expected to get bumped up and renamed, with Tomaszkiewicz floating Demanding as a working title, while a brand new, easier Story mode takes its place at the bottom of the ladder.
What the New Difficulty Tier Looks LikeThe pitch is simple: a mode for people who just want to walk through the narrative without wrestling with gameplay systems. It’s a notable concession for a studio that built its combat and time-pressure structure as a core identity, and one that has already drawn some pushback over its ticking-clock mechanic since launch.
Mode Status New Story mode Easier tier aimed at players who want to skip combat challenge Current Story mode Expected to be renamed, tentatively Demanding Combat Escapes, Targeting, and PC PerformanceBeyond difficulty, the patch tackles a genuine annoyance: getting snagged on scenery while fleeing a fight. Tomaszkiewicz says the team is reworking escape and running behavior to ignore the nav mesh entirely, which should make bailing on a bad fight feel fluid instead of clunky.
The stun-and-target-switch quirk is also getting a look. Right now, stunning an enemy automatically shifts your camera lock to a different target, a deliberate design choice Tomaszkiewicz admits was his own call after watching people accidentally break their own stuns during review sessions. Post-patch, a stunned enemy will reportedly need three hits to lose the stun, though he’s framed this as a trial change that could shift again based on feedback, not a final answer.
PC performance remains a work in progress rather than a promise. Tomaszkiewicz points to the sheer variety of hardware configurations as the core challenge and says the studio is gathering player data and pushing fixes, but there’s no specific frame-rate target attached. He was also candid about the diminishing-returns complaints from players chasing triple-digit frame rates on a game that isn’t built around twitch reflexes, as TheGamer also reported from the same interview.
A New Game Plus mode, potentially with new enemy types thrown in for variety, was floated as a possibility rather than a confirmed feature. Tomaszkiewicz stopped short of committing to anything, joking that saying more might get him in trouble with the publishing team.
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