A month and a half after the release of The Blood of Dawnwalker, developer Rebel Wolves is cooking up a major selection of improvements to its vampire RPG. Update 1.1 will soon arrive with a long-awaited respec option, alongside animal petting, an easier difficulty mode, and well over a thousand additional upgrades.
The respecs certainly seem like the biggest addition. “Free your mind with the Draught of Mind Rebirth,” the devs explain in truncated patch notes shared on Reddit. “Forget all your Swordmastery, Witchcraft, and Vampirism abilities, and use the time you spent learning them to master a different set of abilities.”
In its original form, The Blood of Dawnwalker offered no respec option at all – a pretty harsh limitation in a game where your resources are already tightly constrained thanks to the time mechanic. Unofficial mods quickly appeared to offer respecs, but they were only useful to players on PC.
Rebel Wolves is also finally committing to the Can You Pet the Dog? crowd, and they’re apparently doing it in style with a whole minigame built on the RPG’s combat mechanics. “What happens when you merge a directional combat system with an ability to pet dogs and cats? Directional. Animal. Petting.” I don’t know exactly how that’ll work, but it sounds adorable.
The other major new gameplay feature is an additional difficulty mode. The current “story” mode will be renamed “forgiving,” and “story” will now get you into an even easier mode with an “additional combat assist.”
All this launches as part of update 1.1, which is set to land sometime “next week.” The rest of the updates come in the form of more general “improvements” to combat, traversal, and the camera, as well as new subtitle and frame-generation options. The patch also includes “over 1,100 other improvements and fixes,” so if you’re still exploring Vale Sangora, the experience is about to get much smoother.