The Blood of Dawnwalker's controversial time mechanic won't necessarily be in a sequel, the game director says

"There are a lot of complaints."

The Blood of Dawnwalker director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz has told me the game's divisive time mechanic - which gives you a limited amount of time to save your family, and attaches a time-cost to every quest and notable action you do in the game - won't necessarily feature in a sequel.

In an interview this afternoon, I asked Tomaszkiewicz whether the time mechanic was central to Dawnwalker's identity, as a series. Developer Rebel Wolves has talked openly about wanting to make more games, but Tomaszkiewicz is unsure if the time mechanic will return.

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"We didn't decide it, to be honest," Tomaszkiewicz said. "We will play with it. If we will have parts of the story, or the whole story, to which it fits, then we will use it. If we will have stories where it does not fit, we will not force it. We will play with this system and we will try to use it to boost the urgency of some events in the game. But I'm not saying that in every game we will have the same scheme or loop - it's not like this.

"We are also considering and researching some other crazy ideas which can make the RPG genre different to surprise people in the future," he added.

The time mechanic in The Blood of Dawnwalker gives you 30 days and 30 nights to rescue your family from the clutches of the vampire antagonist in the game, Brencis. A time gauge, broken into segments, advances when you complete quests or move to their next stage, but also when you spend points in some skills. But time doesn't just dribble away when exploring the world and tussling with miscellaneous enemies like wolves - you have to more deliberately move time on.

Nevertheless, it's a mechanic that's proved divisive ever since it was first announced, with many RPG players saying they don't want to feel hurried in a game, or that they don't want to have to play a game more than once to see everything it has to offer - the completionist mindset. The most popular mod, pre-launch, took the mechanic out entirely.

"There are a lot of complaints about the time mechanics," Tomaszkiewicz acknowledged, "and there are two groups of people fighting with each other and so on. This is our [unique selling point], and I know that there are the mods [that remove the time mechanic]. If someone wants to play on the mod, it's fine, but I want to encourage people to try this implementation we have, because first of all we balanced it in a way that it's possible to do around 80 percent of the content with the time mechanic so it's not so bad.

"The arguments of 'I want to see everything in one playthrough' I understand, but it's false to begin with, because even in games like The Witcher, you cannot see everything in one playthrough because you have choices and consequences, and different things happen when you choose different things [excluding other outcomes]. The time mechanic somehow adds to that, but if it's so much, I don't think so." So even if you turn the time mechanic off, you won't necessarily see everything.

But Tomaszkiewicz reiterated that he understands people have "really strong feelings" about it. "I'm getting these messages even privately," he said, smiling. "I knew that it would be a problem. But what is funny is that in the beginning, after the release of the game, there were a lot of those voices, but right now it's a lot less because a lot of people finish the game already.

"They think that they have more time than they need, actually," he added, "and they can do more than they thought they could. And I believe that as more and more people finish the game, these proportions will be different. There will always be people who will have a problem with that because they don't like time mechanics at all, but I think that is fine. They can download the mod or and you know and play without it if they want."

I reviewed The Blood of Dawnwalker for Eurogamer and came away liking the time mechanic, believing it added a time-presence so many other RPGs lack, though I had some issues with it as well. I put these issues to Tomaszkiewicz in our interview - and many more besides - to Tomaszkiewicz in our fuller interview, which I'll publish on Eurogamer early next week.