Blood of Dawnwalker takes notes from Guitar Hero for the vampire RPG's parrying: "It's so cool that we believe most people will play this way"
It's easy to see why there's The Witcher 3 DNA in Rebel Wolves' Vampire RPG, The Blood of Dawnwalker. After all, the two games share a director, Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, not to mention a number of principal developers who previously worked at CD Projekt Red. Environmental artist Adap Payet has said Anne Rice's formative novel Interview with the Vampire was another inspiration, and again, that's no surprise given its influence on the genre. Possibly the last game in the world I expected to hear have any relation to Blood of Dawnwalker is Guitar Hero, but according to Tomaszkiweicz himself, there's a distinct parallel between your finger movements on a guitar peripheral and Dawnwalker's optional directional combat.
"[The parry system is a bit like Guitar Hero] where at first you cannot hit the right button and later you're playing these really difficult songs," Tomaszkiweicz tells Edge Magazine for issue #427.
Guitar Hero actually does sound like a weirdly accurate analog for Blood of Dawnwalker's direction-based combat, which flashes on-screen markers on screen that you have to match with correlated thumbstick movements at the right time. That'll ensure you block attacks without spending stamina, and if you time it perfectly, you'll parry the attack too. This is totally optional, and if you want you can turn off the system's UI and just observe your enemy's movements to know how to counter attacks, but Tomaszkiweicz is confident that you'll love how it works.
"When you start to get used to the directional combat, it's so cool that we believe most people will play this way," he says.
Keeping 'em honest, this parrying system doesn't sound terribly unique from directional inputs required in games like Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Chivalry, and For Honor. It sounds like the key difference here is that the game explicitly signals the exact direction you're supposed to flick the thumbstick, provided you have that option toggled on. That said, Blood of Dawnwalker's combat seems a lost more fast-paced and chaotic than those games, which could make the on-screen markers crucial for people like me without super quick virtual reflexes. We'll find out on September 3 when Blood of Dawnwalker releases.