Revision 4

Background

Bakir (voiced by Dai Tabuchi) is one of Brencis's most powerful lieutenants among the Vrakhiri. Before he was turned, Bakir spent decades galloping across the dry steppes of Central Asia, burning villages, trampling settlements, and pillaging whatever he found. He thirsted for blood long before he became a vampire. The transformation just made him better at it.

Personality

Bakir is the simplest of the Vrakhiri to understand and the hardest to deal with. He is a warmonger. He was cruel and bloodthirsty as a human, and becoming a vampire only amplified those traits. For centuries he hid in the shadows alongside the other vampires, and he resented every moment of it.

Now that the Vrakhiri rule openly, Bakir finally has what he always wanted: recognition. He craves it. He wants people to know his name and tremble when they hear it. Unlike Brencis, who uses politics and pragmatism, Bakir rules through fear and force.

Role in the Game

Bakir controls his own territory within Vale Sangora. Given his personality, his territory is likely the most dangerous for Coen to operate in. Where Brencis might negotiate and Ambrus might manipulate, Bakir's default response to problems is violence. Any faction or player action that threatens his control will be met with direct, brutal retaliation.

Motion Capture and Performance

Bakir's combat moves were performed by Jan Błachowicz, a Polish mixed martial artist and former UFC Light Heavyweight Champion. The development team cast him because they wanted a performer who could embody the contradiction at the heart of the character: a vampire lieutenant who is enormous and intimidating yet still moves with surprising agility and speed. Błachowicz, a self-described gamer, treated the role as a new kind of challenge after his fighting career, and his MMA background gave Bakir's strikes the directness and weight that the team wanted on screen.

Błachowicz has spoken about how naturally Bakir's approach matched his own. He described the character's fighting style as simple but very effective in a real fight, the same philosophy he built his MMA career around, and joked that Bakir does not borrow any of his moves because Bakir uses them all. He also set expectations for the encounter directly, saying he hopes to kill every player at least five times before they bring the fight back to him. The combination of physical scale, MMA-trained takedowns, and a performer who openly wants to humble the player gives Bakir's boss fight a tone that is meant to feel more like a brawl than a duel.

Fight Choreography

Fight choreography across the game, including Bakir's encounters, was led by Maciej Kwiatkowski, an action designer, motion-capture performer, and stunt coordinator with more than twenty years of experience. Kwiatkowski's approach starts with the rules of the combat system: the team first studies how the moveset, hit reactions, and directional combat inputs behave, then designs choreography that fits those rules, and only then layers on the visual flourish. The constant challenge is balancing readable, fair gameplay against the cinematic spectacle of a vampire boss fight.

That balance shapes a clear split between the game's two combat registers. Human-form swordplay is grounded and weighty: Coen relies on a real blade, footwork, and conventional reach during the day. When night falls and his vampiric powers come online, the choreography pushes into vampire combat that is faster, stronger, and deliberately over the top. Bakir sits on the same supernatural side of that line. His fighting embodies the over-the-top vampire register, but Błachowicz's MMA-trained performance keeps each strike grounded in real body mechanics, so the encounter reads as an unfair physical contest rather than a stylized dance.