Promising new medieval vampire role-playing game The Blood of Dawnwalker will be, hallelujah, released on a good old fashioned disc.
The game’s director, Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, told me this in an interview recently, smiling and stat ing simply that: “Yes, it is coming to the disc.”
But not all game-discs are made equally. By that I mean that some game discs behave more as glorified passcodes for the game, as a way of proving ownership before you’re made to download the full game from the store of whichever console you’re playing on. These discs would serve little worth years from now if such a game was made unavailable to download.
The Blood of Dawnwalker disc, however, will contain the full game. “The full game data is on disc,” publisher Bandai Namco clarified for me today, “with a day-one patch recommended.”
It’s a bizarre topic to raise with a game-maker in an interview, and yet, following Sony’s revelation that it will stop producing PlayStation game discs by 2028, and Rockstar’s revelation that Grand Theft Auto 6 will come with a code inside a game box, it’s become suddenly very topical. And it’s a decision of Sony’s that’s clearly hit a nerve, as people continue to decry it even in comments for games like Marvel’s Wolverine that will come on a disc.
The Blood of Dawnwalker is due 3rd September, and I played four hours of it recently and was enormously encouraged by it. I thought the combat had depth and that the game’s big ideas around sandbox freedom and time being limited worked really well. It’s already one of the more interesting RPGs of recent years; potentially it’s another breakout success.