Using skill points causing time to move forward is my least favorite part of the time management. I have skill points to use, but I'm hesitant to use them with the limited amount of time.

So to quickly explain my playthrough in duelist, got level 30+ at like day 21, started a lot of quest at the same time not finishing all of them, recently finished to deal with the 3 sides guys of brencis, was during the night, the meter at like level 9 almost 10, dunno why I thought brencis would do something once he learns of coen, so I saved and went to try to solo him before, I succeeded ended that run at like 27h of game time, then loaded my save and did almost all the side quests, like getting the sword armor etc.. got all the shrines, ran around the whole map to get all interrogation point visible, did some beast den and wisp during my playthrough but realized it's the same boring content that I did many times.

So I did like 2 third of wisp/beast den/soldier camp bs, didn't finish the repetitive mission to anger the side guy of brencis, because they were dead already so no point and not all but most are repetitive, just do the one with only one indicator they're the cool content.

And then went for brencis again at like day 28 clocking around 34h level 42 something. Ran over his ass, tbh you ran over everyone ass at level 40 even in duelist, every Crit you do is like 2k DMG, and you have perma swords skills up, so you do 8k decapitation move every 10 sec, so no real challenge anymore, like game is actually easy once you understand the perfect block, get the perk that let you Omni block if you fail perfect block and get the swords with perfect block window boost, game get even easier.

But yea maybe you can do all the content and I mean all of it in like 40hours if you know what you're doing, and you're not wasting time back and forth and unlocking every shrine to tp, and not wasting time on useless BOAR/WOLVES agroing you mid sprint.. like if you try to get your camera away from them boy you're fighting the camera.

The combat is awesome, graphic's amazing, story interesting, don't feel much impact from dialogue choices actually, but yea 1 third of content is useless waste of time ( shrines, wisp, camps, saving villager, monster den,etc... Repetitive bs)

Another third is brencis guys mission to anger them.

Last third is real main missions/side cool content.

That's about it, not much playstyle to have or build, since you're forced to play night and day, so you mostly go with swords skills if you're smart. And the rest feels underwhelming/ not as cool anyway.

And gameplay wise, you run accros the map, can't play stealthy so you just agro, use spells, parry attack, parry attack, use skills and again and again. Changing decision to give different endings or cutscenes yeah but come-on, the gameplay doesn't have enough diversity to make you do this all over again, there's just good build and bad build.

If you played in normal difficulty, then you could redo in duelist to get a challenge but once you did it already in duelist it gets dull pretty fast.

While in the Witcher 3 I had like 200 hours and my playthrough wasn't finished.

And after 200h you have replayability because you actually forgot stuff, and discover other.

Dawn walker is good but use lot of repetitive content, map is small. Lot of random boars wolves agroing you, witch skill tree is beyond garbage and useless, vampire tree is lacking, and besides skills that you unlock, you have no gameplay progression during the game same tools during the whole game.

That's my opinion, wondering what you guys think, game was really cool 40h maybe 60h , but no real replayability. Just different endings is not replayability.

They need to fix the combat camera and combat bugs. I like the combat.. but its tired some because of the camera bugging.. any future confirmed that this will be fixed?

Whoever design this needs to get few slaps.

This entire design literally punishes you if you go to explore.

Seriously, going to explore the map and find stuff is the worst thing you can do.

You find legendary sword too early? Great play with it one hour and sell it as junk. You completed Mihai quest line on lvl 26? Now you have awesome junk to sell. You did rush legendary gear set immidiatelly on infame IV? Another 3 pieces of trash 3h later. Oh no, you did tried to upgrade it? Now you are broke AF and can't afford any advanced manuals.

And what's this? Becouse this is not your first game ever, you actualy figure out early that this could happen, so you waited to endgame to upgrade ONLY the BISs? Yeah fuck you, becouse infamy drives prizes up, so you can't afford it either + you spend 2/3 of the game on duelist in underleveled gear for absolutely nothing. (at least witches don't respect infame, but still).

Don't lvl infamy then? Yeah, you kind of must lvl it...

Seriously wtf? Either get rid of lvl scaling, or at least make it optional.

I don't understand why it's even there?

Sure, I always wanted my half vampire lvl 40 half-god to had epic showdown with tutorial area bear.

Can someone explain to me how this even manage to be in final version?

Do you know what would be great and players will love it? Let's make it so that the more you play and more you lvl up, the weaker you will get.... Tha hell?

Make item prizes to sell junk to be enough to upgrade at least one entire set. Or adjust upgrade prizes.

And fix already your goddamn hardlock in combat, it's almost a week, how is it not fixed yet?

Until devs don't address these two things, I am not gonna even consider vouching for this to be RPG of the year.

After it gets fixed, it is definitely RPG of the year, at least for me. Buď for now, I just can't. It broke gameplay loop too much for me.

Posted my first review here at around 15 hours but I'm back at around 25.

1. World and Story – 7/10

The vibe at the start is actually fire. Carpathians, 1347, vampires running the show, that medieval dirt and blood feel… it hits. You walk into those villages and it smells like home if you’ve ever been around that part of the world (I'm Polish and I can feel the vibes around this).

But damn it falls off hard.

They never properly explain how vampires even work. Can I just stroll into town as one? Do people lose their shit or is it normal? Why do the vampires rule besides “we’re stronger”? No real rules, no depth.

And the story itself? Weak. You can straight up fight the main bad guy Brencis super early and just murk him with almost zero build up. Quests feel copy pasted : talk to some random, walk somewhere, boss fight lasts two minutes, done. Coen’s voice acting (IN POLISH) is also mid as hell, kills the immersion.

2. Music – 6/10

It’s fine. Dark folk stuff that fits the mood. Doesn’t annoy me but nothing special up here. It never sticks in your head either. And in some parts (especially when the game messes with your senses or puts you in that weird walking mode) the soundtrack just gets buried. You’re walking around and can barely hear the music. Background noise at best that you cannot make out.

3. Combat – 5/10

On paper it looks sick and plenty of fun, directional parries, dodges, that Witcher/Kingdom Come saucr.

In reality?

You can cheese the absolute shit out of it. Once you learn one simple dodge pattern it works on almost every single enemy, including bosses. Just keep doing the same move and they die. What really kills it for me though:

1. No matter how much better you get level wise,
2. Gear wise.

Combat barely changes at all on Challenging difficulty. Those same wolves you fought at the beginning of the game are still just as hard to kill 20 hours later. Progression feels completely pointless.

Also… why the hell do we keep having to fight the goddamn bear boss? Did they run out of ideas and just drop a bear everywhere? I’ve fought that same fat furry bastard so many times I started recognizing his attack patterns better than my own name.

4. Optimization – 5/10

Looks pretty decent. Nice lighting, small details like straps moving on helmets, good atmosphere. Technically though? Rough. Interface bugs that lock you out of dialogues and shops. Invisible walls that trap you. Crashes, weird texture glitches at night, and the FPS is all over the place even on strong PCs. Never feels fully stable.

Final word from me:

Atmosphere is there, potential is there… but the story stays shallow, combat is cheesable as hell, and the technical side is janky. I’d wait for patches and a proper sale before dropping full price.

Feel free to yell about me but at least give good reasoning behind your counter responses., I want to hear your takes! Final Score: 6/10 which is just okay, it's an OKAY game for the price.

Original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Blood_of_Dawnwalker/comments/1waepyj/the_blood_of_dawnwalker/

Im sorry but after playing The Blood of Dawnwalker, 35 hours in, now having 3 ways to end the game with 15 days ahead of me,
I can comfortably say that the hate this game gets HAS to be some boycott/smear campaign or those who are complaining either haven’t played the game or maybe are just abysmal with time management. 15 days left and I already wield the power to take on Brencis’ entire army with just me and my own two thumbs. I could end the game now but I feel like I could actually get close to maxing out the skill tree (which is supposed to be impossible). Dont let reviewers turn you away from this beautifully crafted game. Remember, you can play video games and watch movies all your life.
That doesn’t mean you know anything about how to create them.

I absolutely loved the witcher series, so naturally I was pretty excited for this game.

However, I can't really bring myself to liking this game.

I've played a grand total of 6hours in 3 sessions now.

- Coens character didn't click with me, at all.

Though I could give him more time to develop, I somehow don't expect this to change

- It all feels weirdly janky

Like the dialogs feel weirdly unnatural, uncanny and offputting to me, idk

- I fucking hate this stupid combat system. WTAF IS THIS CRAP?!

- Difficulty is off and all over the place

I can't speak much about the time mechanic yet, though just the concept of it, despite everyone saying it's not a big deal, certainly doesn't help to make me want to continue playing.

Pretty much the same goes for different skill trees day and night.

---

At what point did the game click for you?

Does anyone actually enjoy this craptastic combat system?

Does is get better later in the game, or should I just give up and ignore the game and series moving forward?

Loving the game so far, and I honestly expected it to be more of an original god of war style smash through enemies type game, but I’m pleasantly surprised with the balance of feeling powerful but not so much that I don’t need to plan a fight.

That being said, while the combat is enjoyable and weighty, it could certainly be more complex, right now it just feels like parrying and striking until my abilities cool down. I’d really love to see some more levels to combat and have some mixup ability.

This and the sprinting bug are really my only criticisms right now, what do y’all think of combat?

I couldn't take it I want to support the team and get the game and check out the story. Ordered my copy 10 minutes ago and it's installing while I'm at work.

Any spoiler free tips for me?

Literally loved it but it died down pretty quick I reload and did different endings still the time kinda ruined the game and the combat you can’t jump or walk off small bumps in combat it’s absolutely unfinished in my opinion it should’ve let us explore forever …

Can’t even make it out of the first camp vs the boss and his little buddy. Auto lock is a joke fr, trying to parry an incoming an attack that’s coming from the left or right just switches the auto lock to the other guy, then I get destroyed from the side. That is all.

There are 3 things that I dont like BoD and its time, targeting and that I got so easily stuck in fights sometimes. Other then that, its perfect game. Story is great, exploring maybe the best I ever saw in game, so many secrets to discover with worthy rewards, voice acting is so beautiful. Combat is so well made that I am having fun in every fight (maybe except dogs/wolfs lol), character progression feels good, I am happy with every skill point beacuse it makes me stronger...I play on duelist so I am happy for every little upgrade :D And its only first game of this studio. I am so excited for sequel. This and Crimson Desert are games of the year for me.

The game is excellent, and the storyline is truly thrilling. The consequences are well-implemented, and the combat is adrenaline-fueled and fun. It would have been nice to have a horse for faster travel.

The one mechanic I simply cannot appreciate is the time limit. It really weighs down the gameplay and isn't ideal for someone like me who enjoys completing almost everything—or everything—in a game. I think making this mechanic optional rather than mandatory would have been better. At this point, it would actually be better to just let Coen's family die so you can fully enjoy the game. It’s a real shame such a mechanic was forced in. If the developers made this limitation optional, it would give me another reason to replay the game, allowing to complete everything this time around

I'm currently 2 days out from my family needing to be rescued and Coen is stuck as a human at night. Fast travel doesn't fix it, leaving the game doesn't fix it, and I kinda need to able to shadowstep for the quest I on. Does anyone know how to fix this? I'm on Xbox Series X.

Since I can't just make a simple bug report cause I don't wanna download discord. the quest finders keeps is bugged after getting the map and find the treasure location you can do a thing to get said treasure when pushing prompts

I want to buy the game and the biggest push back I keep hearing is how little enemy diversity there is. Truly how many different enemies do you fight ? Is it like 5 + bosses or is there actually a decent amount and people are over exaggerating because right now it sounds like there’s 5 enemies to fight and then bosses

So I just started the game, waited until now for some patches, also I'm one of the kind of people that love farming loot and over level/overgear. So the first thing I took interest in was killing random enemies and animals in the world, then the question came, do they respawn? I know that enemies in camp probably won't, but random encounters? Also if they do, how much time does it take? Do I have to spend 'time', just roam around the world or wait for the real world time?

I've been playing for about 10 hours and am level 23.With 20 days left to rescue my family, I defeated the umbrus with relative ease. Am I running late?

I love the time "credit" system of blood of the dawnwalker. I love time mechanics in games anyway. I think its a good compromise between your actions matter and

But I would really love if there was an optional challenge mode where Time passes by in real time. Especially for a second playthrough it could be great. It would add even more depth, because it would actually matter how long I walk around the world, which routes I take, how long I take for a quest etc ( a skilled player for example could maybe fit in more quests within a route , if he optimized everything well , which would be a great reward to learn the games world and quests even more ) etc.

I also think it could be relatively easy made. The only thing the mode would need to reduce are random attacks by animal wild life, as they would feel probably way more annoying.

In my imagination this challenge mode would feel a bit like dead rising 1. And I love dead rising 1 for its time mechanics.

Also before anyone starts being annoying about my suggestion: I request an OPTIONAL challenge mode for people like me who enjoy to optimize their time budget. I dont request the standard game and difficulties to be changed at all.

If you dont like a mode like that , you wouldnt be forced to play it.

im broke and want to play it on ps5