Overview
"Narrative sandbox" is the term Rebel Wolves uses to describe The Blood of Dawnwalker's approach to storytelling and player freedom. Creative Director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz explained it directly: "Narrative sandbox refers to the way we craft our content. It's how we allow you, the player, to interact with it. So the core of it is maximising players' agency and freedom of choice, while, at the same time delivering the high-quality narratives that we are known for crafting in the past."
What it means in practice
The narrative sandbox has several concrete implications for how the game plays:
Quests can be completed in any order, skipped entirely, or never discovered at all
Many characters can be killed, with their absence reshaping events and relationships
There are often multiple paths to achieve the same goal
Inaction is treated as a choice: the world recognizes and responds to things the player does not do
There is no distinction between "main quests" and "side quests," only different stories the player weaves together
Not a pure sandbox
The developers were careful to distinguish their approach from open-ended sandbox games. Tomaszkiewicz clarified: "Dawnwalker is not going to be a game where it's a pure sandbox, where you're just focusing on the gameplay. We do want you to experience these moments with the world of the characters and the emotions that these situations can evoke." The game has a clear central objective (save Coen's family from Greifberg), but the path to that objective is almost entirely up to the player.
Integration across content types
Tomaszkiewicz also explained how the philosophy extends beyond large quests: "Narrative sandbox informs not only the main quest, it also informs all the other types of content that we have... you might encounter seemingly inconsequential, smaller activities of the world, but we are trying to make them tie into this main narrative."
This approach works in concert with the time-as-a-resource mechanic. Because players have only 30 days and 30 nights, they cannot do everything in a single playthrough. Every quest they pursue means another they must skip. The Notoriety System adds another layer: aggressive actions against Brencis bring consequences that ripple through other quest lines.
Developer pedigree
The narrative sandbox builds on the team's prior work. Konrad Tomaszkiewicz directed The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz was its lead quest designer. Narrative Director Jakub Szamalek also worked on the Witcher series. The team frames the narrative sandbox as an evolution of what they built at CD Projekt Red, taking the branching quest design further by removing the main/side quest hierarchy entirely.