Rebel Wolves has confirmed that Update 1.1 for The Blood of Dawnwalker arrives next week, a little later than the "early October" window the studio mentioned last month. There's no exact date yet. The biggest addition is the Draught of Mind Rebirth, an item that lets players reset their Swordmastery, Witchcraft, and Vampirism skills and get back the in-game time spent learning them, which matters a lot under the game's 30-day limit. There's also a new Story difficulty with extra combat assists, while the existing Story mode gets renamed to Forgiving. Combat targeting, lock-on, and disengaging have been improved, Shadowstep and Planeshift should feel more responsive, and the camera has been tweaked. Players can also pet dogs and cats now, using the directional combat system, of all things.

For PC players, frame generation is getting an update along with its own dedicated settings, though Rebel Wolves hasn't shared any specifics. The game already supports NVIDIA DLSS, and in a September interview, game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz said broader optimization work was still ongoing, so it's reasonable to hope some of the 1,100+ improvements and fixes target performance. The update also adds larger font sizes and subtitles for all dialogue, and it removes blood and gore censorship from the Japanese version. The Blood of Dawnwalker launched on September 3 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S, and sold a million copies within days, on a budget that is reportedly just $40 million.

Steam reportedly just had its best September on record. Alinea Analytics estimates that the platform generated a hefty $1.7 billion last month, up 13% from September 2025, which held the previous record. The third quarter was also Steam's best to date at $5.5 billion, a 12% increase year over year. That puts the 2026 total at $16.5 billion after nine months, compared to $14.5 billion in the same period last year, and well past the $11.1 billion it made in the first half. Valve doesn't publish these figures, so all of this is Alinea's estimate. Bulkhead's early access shooter Wardogs was the top premium game with $86.9 million after launching on September 10, followed by Onimusha: Way of the Sword at $30.4 million and The Blood of Dawnwalker at $26.9 million.

Free-to-play is still a big part of the picture, however. Counter-Strike 2, Apex Legends, PUBG, and Dota 2 brought in almost $168 million combined, nearly 10% of the month's total. Alinea also noted that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered, a free upgrade for existing owners, pushed the 11-year-old game to roughly 2.4 million daily active users across Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox on its September 30 launch day, over ten times its 2026 average. All of this spending comes at a time when PC hardware is anything but cheap. Valve's own Steam Machine starts at $1,049, and Micron expects memory supply to be much tighter in 2027 and 2028. The analytics suggest people are buying games regardless, and Alinea expects Steam to cross $20 billion in a year for the first time. With the Q4 release slate still to come, that looks to be a safe bet.

The Blood of Dawnwalker director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz seems unconvinced that a story-driven RPG needs to run at 120 FPS. Speaking to Eurogamer, the Rebel Wolves boss said the studio is still working on PC performance, but that he doesn't see high frame rates as especially important for a game like this. Discussing the many PC hardware configurations that make optimization difficult, he said:

"We're observing this, we're trying to ask people about the hardware, and we are trying to do the fixes. But yes, when you see that the game works well - over 60 FPS - but people still complain that it's not 120, but 90 or 70... It's like, I understand that but the game is about something else. It's not a shooter - it's not a game where it's so important. But people want to have good performance or performance above good: it's fine. We're working on it and we will still work on it."

The Blood of Dawnwalker launched at the start of September with a strong start, selling over a million copies within the first week of launch. Following that success, it was confirmed that a sequel was already in the works, however, apparently one sticking point for many players was that the game didn't launch with enough difficulty options—especially not ones that make the gameplay more approachable. According to Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, game director for The Blood of Dawnwalker, in a recent interview with Eurogamer, an October update is en route to add a new difficulty mode.

[Editor's note: Our in-depth handheld performance review of The Blood of Dawnwalker is now live]

We will introduce an additional difficulty level, but an easier one, because many people are asking for a more easy difficulty. The Story mode which we have right now will be a different difficulty—we will call it Demanding or something like this—and we will add a new Story mode which will be even easier for people who don't want to experience the combat, they just want to learn the story and go through the game without this gameplay challenge.

The Blood of Dawnwalker reportedly cost around $40 million to make, according to a new Bloomberg report. Rebel Wolves director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz self-funded the first year in 2022 to build a prototype, and NetEase stepped in by the end of that year. The Chinese company took a 26% stake in the studio and supplied the $40 million budget. Hiring took most of 2023, and full production started toward the end of that year, with Bandai Namco publishing the game. Apparently, the team originally planned to cap headcount at 90, but the studio has since grown to around 160 people.

Rebel Wolves also seems to have picked a September release over June to avoid overtime, and it kept the game's foundations the same as its original pitch deck. That puts the game in AA territory, close to the roughly $41 million reported for Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. It looks like the figure covers development funding only, so it probably doesn't include marketing and publishing costs. Still, to make a game as well-received as The Blood of Dawnwalker on this budget is a great achievement. The game sold over 1 million copies within days of launch, and Rebel Wolves has already started hiring for a sequel. It's safe to assume that plenty of larger publishers will be looking at that ratio.

The Blood of Dawnwalker has been a notable success for Rebel Wolves, with the game crossing 1 million sales mere days after launch, and it seems as though the studio is looking to double-down on that success with Blood of Dawnwalker 2, which is seemingly already in development. This is confirmed in a recent LinkedIn post by Rebel Wolves Narrative Director, Jakub Szamalek, who says the studio is hiring a lead writer for "the next chapter in the Dawnwalker saga."

Obviously, if Rebel Wolves is still hiring the lead writer for the role, it means not much has been set in stone regarding the sequel, although the listing on the Polish job board, Skillshot, specifies that the writer should have the "ability to create interactive, non-linear stories and dialogues," and "familiarity with the history and folklore of Central and Eastern Europe." This suggests that the game will once again take a non-linear approach to story-telling and return to the Carpathean Mountains and perhaps further into the center of Europe.

If you were around during what many consider the golden age of PC gaming, back when SLI was still possible, and, going back even further, when gamers put dedicated PhysX cards into their PCs, the latest trick shown off by modder, Marcelo Guibout, on YouTube. Guibot showed off a gaming setup using two NVIDIA RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB GPUs in tandem to split the rendering and Neural Rendering workloads.

[Editor's note: Our in-depth analysis of the DLSS 5 model leaked in the NBA2K27 and in use here is now live]

Similarly to the example of PhysX cards, the idea is to split the workloads between two GPUs, theoretically allowing for improved performance on the GPU doing the primary rendering, since it will be able to use resources on raster or ray tracing rendering that might otherwise be used for DLSS 5 Neural Rendering. With the Neural Coprocessor enabled using the multi-GPU processing setup, frame rates improved anywhere from 59% to 125% compared to running DLSS 5 on the same GPU—performance was still down compared to DLSS 5 off, however.

Rebel Wolves' debut game is certainly off to a strong start. The Blood of Dawnwalker has sold more than 1 million copies worldwide, the studio confirmed on social media, just two days after its September 3 launch on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. The game hit 1 million sales fast enough that most of it likely came from day-one momentum, though Rebel Wolves hasn't broken down sales by platform. The Blood of Dawnwalker is an open-world dark fantasy RPG set in 14th-century Europe, built in Unreal Engine 5. Players control Coen, who's human by day and a vampire by night, as he tries to save his family within a strict 30-day in-game clock.

Rebel Wolves is led by Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, former director on The Witcher 3, and this is the studio's first release since it was founded in 2022. As expected with a first release, the launch also comes with some rough edges. Performance on Steam Deck and other Windows handhelds has required real compromises to remain playable, and the game's most popular Nexus Mods download reportedly conflicts with its core survival mechanics. However, none of that seems to have slowed sales much so far. It's still early days for the game, but crossing a million copies in under 48 hours is quite rare for a completely new IP.