Revision 18

Overview

The Blood of Dawnwalker's quest system has no formal distinction between main quests and side quests. Instead, players encounter stories of varying scale and significance, all feeding into the Narrative Sandbox framework. The player's objective throughout the game, saving Coen's family from Greifberg, can be approached through countless combinations of quests, alliances, and actions.

Dual Day and Night Paths

Many quests offer two distinct approaches depending on the time of day. Human/day approaches tend to involve diplomacy, favors, and combat using the directional sword system. Vampire/night approaches let players use supernatural abilities and stealth, but they face different enemies and greater resistance from Brencis's nocturnal forces.

Cathedral Quest Example

Rebel Wolves demonstrated this duality at Gamescom 2025 with a cathedral quest in the Silberkreis district:

• Night version (Day 8): Coen infiltrates the cathedral and encounters the ancient vampire Xanthe, who uses Shadowstep abilities to move through the building. The encounter focuses on vampire-on-vampire combat

• Day version: Coen searches for Saint Mihai's legendary sword. He fights Murohni, a creature born from a failed vampire transformation, and eventually encounters the corrupted Saint Mihai himself. Mihai was entombed alive centuries ago by villagers who discovered what he was, and coverage of the game describes him as a second Dawnwalker, though no studio material says so. Centuries of starving during the day while regenerating at night drove him insane

These are not slight variations. The two paths feature entirely different enemies, narratives, and rewards.

NPC Interactions

NPCs have their own lives and react to the player's actions and to the changing state of the world. Side characters can become allies, enemies, or casualties depending on the player's choices. The blood craving system adds another dimension: feeding on an important NPC during a nighttime interaction can permanently lock the player out of that character's quest lines.

Time Constraints

The time-as-a-resource mechanic means quests have real stakes. Helping one village might mean another falls while the player is away. Some quests have implied countdowns where events progress whether the player is present or not. Because only 30 days and 30 nights are available, completing every quest in one playthrough is impossible by design.

The absence of a gating main quest cuts the other way too. Once the prologue's walled area opens up, nothing stops a player from walking straight across the map to Brencis in his castle at the centre of the city and starting the final confrontation immediately. Doing it that early means going in badly under-levelled, without the abilities unlocked by draining his lieutenants, but the route is open from the moment the world is.

Prologue Quest Example: Deep Down

In early July 2026, roughly eight minutes of gameplay from an early quest called Deep Down were shown. A still-human Coen ventures into an underground tomb in search of Lazar, a villager who has gone missing. The quest layers three of the game’s core systems together: investigation, exploration, and combat.

Using Focus Mode, Coen studies ancient clay tablets and wall murals scattered through the ruin. Reading them rewards the player with hidden lore and special loot, and it pieces together the tomb’s history: it holds a warrior who once fought the vrakhiri and chose to burn alive rather than be turned into a vampire. The trail of murals leads to her sarcophagus. The sequence ends with a boss fight against The Forgotten Guardian, a sword-wielding sentinel that protects the tomb.

Romance

Former Witcher 3 lead quest designer Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz confirmed that romance is part of the quest system: "Of course there is romance... You can expect to build relationships with characters." These relationships are woven into the narrative sandbox rather than being separate romance questlines.

Reading the Journal

Journal entries carry their time cost before the player accepts them, and two icons flag conditional quests. A blue clock marks a quest that will expire if it is left too long. A sun or a moon marks one that can only be started during that half of the cycle, which is the game’s way of saying that a lead is not lost, only out of reach until the phase turns.

A point of no return is signposted before the finale, and the pressure of the clock eases once the story passes it. Play also continues after the main quest is finished rather than ending there.

A day holds eight time segments and a night holds another eight, which is the unit the hourglass counts in. Because the cost is printed before the quest is accepted, the journal works as a planning screen rather than a log: the player can read the price of an afternoon before committing to it. Careless play still leaks segments outside the journal, though. Being caught stealing costs time arguing with a guard, and several perks spend segments on the training itself.

Where Quests Come From

Quests reach the journal through several routes, and not all of them are a conversation. Villagers hand out errands in settlements. Scouting towers, climbed at night, drop the points of interest of a whole region onto the map as question marks, several of which resolve into quests once Coen reaches them. Investigating a body, a grave or a scene with Focus Mode can open a thread that was not on the map at all.

One line of quests is earned rather than found. Dismantling enough of a Vrakhir boyar’s operation in a region angers its owner and opens a confrontation with that boyar, which is also how Coen gets the chance to drink Vrakhir blood and take an ability from them outright. Launch coverage rates these among the strongest quests in the game.

Regions do not stay finished, either. New markers occasionally appear in an area Coen has already cleared, so a region that looked exhausted can be worth a second pass late in the run.

Named Quests

The table below collects the quest names this page has occasion to mention. Six of them appear in the game’s own patch notes and are confirmed on that basis; the rest are names carried by launch coverage and should be read as reported rather than confirmed. Ordering is alphabetical, since the game does not enforce a sequence.

This is not the full catalogue. Roughly sixty distinct quest names have been collected from launch coverage, far more than a mechanics page can usefully carry, and they are gathered on Quest List instead.

The Manumits, a rebel group opposed to vrakhir rule, can be joined during play. Launch coverage names three characters Coen can become involved with and reports that he is not limited to one of them, but no first-party roster has been published, so the set should not be read as closed at that number.