"It's very experimental," creative director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz revealed, "because not many games do this."

Before we go any further, please be aware that you can hear the full version of this conversation on the Radio Times Gaming podcast feed or YouTube channel.

Tomaszkiewicz spoke to us at the Gamescom conference about The Blood of Dawnwalker, the upcoming vampire game that he — and many other former Witcher 3 developers — have started their own company to build.

He was explaining the game’s time system, which will force players to make tricky decisions. There are a limited number of hours in every in-game day, and you only have a set number of those days to save your character’s abducted wife.

Tomaszkiewicz told us: "First of all, we wanted it to feel like the time matters. You know, there is this feeling of urgency to objectives. And we wanted you to actually think, ‘Do I want to do this? Or do I want to do that? How do I want to spend this resource?’

"At the same time, we don't want this artificial pressure that will stop you from exploring the world, for example, right? You do get clear communication from the game at every point."

Indeed, we did see this mechanic at play in a hands-off Gamescom demo. We saw that certain actions, like committing to a side quest, will spend a certain amount of your time, which the game flags to you nice and clearly.

Tomaszkiewicz said, "As you could have seen in the build, for example, the quest objectives tell you like how many time segments are you gonna spend if you're gonna finish these objectives. Sometimes, specific dialogue options can lead to spending time segments."

"We call it ‘time as a resource,’" Tomaszkiewicz added. He also clarified that, "Just standing in one place is not gonna cost you any time. So, the time is kind of waiting for you to perform these actions."

If you’re looking for a comparison point to make this system make sense in your mind, Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz mentions Persona, and his colleague/brother Konrad Tomaszkiewicz points to the first two Fallout games from the nineties.

Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, the game director and CEO of developer Rebel Wolves, chimed in and said, "Spoiler alert, but we're speaking about it in the interviews; your main goal in the game is to help your abducted family.

"And you know that, in some time, something can happen to them. And you cannot build the proper tension, and emotions, if you know that they'll be there forever. You cannot do, story-wise, this thing. That's why we added the system to show you that the clock ticks, and stuff will happen."

"Our game structure is totally different than the games you know," Konrad Tomaszkiewicz added.

But we couldn’t help but wonder, what happens if you don’t save your family in time? Is it a full ‘game over’ situation?

Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz teased, "We don't wanna spoil it for the players. I would say, we treat it more as a choice and consequence thing, than a game over thing. This much I can tell you."

We got to see a lengthy hands-off demo of the game, and the time-spending system did look pretty cool, although we're sure it will take some getting used to.

The game’s day-night cycle also impacts your gameplay options. By day, the player-character (a 14th century chap by the name of Coen) can walk around like an ordinary person and try to talk or punch his way through situations.

By night, he becomes a form of vampire with added stealth, traversal and combat options. But if you wait until nighttime to do everything, you’ll be wasting valuable time and your family will inch closer to peril.

It looks like a fun game, and we very much look forward to getting our hands on it. Watch this space, and we’ll be sure to bring you more coverage as the release nears.

The Blood of Dawnwalker will release in 2026 for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. You can wishlist the game now.

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Walton Goggins has arrived in Fallout 76. Yep, you read that right! Prime Video's Fallout TV show is crossing over with the video game franchise that birthed it in a pretty major way.

Goggins's iconic TV character The Ghoul is hosting a new bounty hunting feature, which is available in the game now (ahead of Fallout season 2).

That bounty hunting feature dropped in a big new update, Burning Springs, which also adds a new region to the north-west area of the map.

This new region, Ohio, has been inspired by Fallout 3 and New Vegas, to make sure it thematically resonates with the vibe of Fallout season 2.

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One of the key points of interest in this new region is Highway Town, where you’ll find The Ghoul doing some shady business in a bar called The Last Resort. He has a huge stack of bounties to hunt, and you’re gonna help him do exactly that.

To get ahead of the game on this one, Radio Times Gaming travelled to New York City to chat with two of the key developers of Fallout 76 about this exciting new development. So, how did they end up getting The Ghoul himself?

Fallout 76 creative director Jonathan Rush told us: “So, it kind of happened organically. You know, with the new region, we wanted to figure out what the tentpole feature of the new update would be, and something that captured the spirit of that region and also the broader strokes of player feedback came to be bounty hunting, right?”

Rush continued: “And so, who better to host a bounty hunting feature than Walton Goggins? As The Ghoul. I mean, there's nothing better. So yeah, Walton Goggins, of course, being a big fan of Fallout, being a big fan of the games, this was a very, very easy fit to have this character be in this update.

“It was great getting the script written out. There were some writers on our side and a writer on the show side, and they were collaborating there and getting the script into a good place. And, of course, that all comes together once Walton Goggins has that, as like a starting point, and he then really crafts that into his own character, which is The Ghoul.”

What was it like, then, actually seeing Goggins in the booth delivering lines as The Ghoul? “It's amazing,” Rush admitted. “It was amazing watching him record these lines. I found it just astonishing, seeing how quickly he could just transform into The Ghoul, and you're not hearing Walton Goggins anymore. You're hearing The Ghoul. To me, that was just magical.”

Jumping into the game ourselves, we tried to exhaust the dialogue options with The Ghoul to see what has brought him to Appalachia. After some probing, he did obliquely refer to a bounty that he followed out here, but he doesn’t get into details.

“We don't really explain why he's there,” Rush told us. “He's simply there being The Ghoul. He's The Ghoul, as we would expect. He's The Ghoul, doing something that The Ghoul would do, with bounty hunting.

“And so, taking it even further than that for this patch, for this update, didn't really seem wholly necessary. That's not to say that, perhaps, down the road, we learn more, or maybe we don't. But that's part of, I think, the allure, it's the mystery of The Ghoul.

During our couple of hours of playtime with the new update, the bounty system revolving around The Ghoul proved to be very playable and enjoyable indeed.

There are two different types of bounties you can pick up from The Ghoul — there are smaller ‘grunt hunts’ that you could happily handle on your own, and there are larger ‘head hunts’ that function more like raid battles, with other online players joining you to take on a more powerful enemy as a group.

In both of these bounty types, there was a lot of humour to be found in the gameplay. The first grunt hunt we took on was just a scientist wandering around (very Fallout season 1 vibes), who didn’t put up much of a fight. This, in itself, was quite comical as we turned our very well-armed level 300 characters against him.

One of the most memorable head hunts that we faced featured a very powerful old lady in a suit of souped up power armour. This was much trickier, even with a whole group of level 300 players. It’s a very good sign that, every time someone started a head hunt, I immediately wanted to drop what I was doing and join in with the fun.

Certainly, The Ghoul feels right at home in Fallout 76, and it makes sense in the Fallout timeline that he would be alive and active at this point in the overarching story. Bring it on!

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Fallout 76: Burning Springs is out now.

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Pathea Games, the studio behind the 'My Time At' titles, just unveiled their most ambitious game yet, an open world steampunk fantasy action RPG titled The God Slayer. It's only the latest Chinese developer to go full triple-A action RPG after Game Science (Black Myth: Wukong), Leenzee Games (Wuchang: Fallen Feathers), Ultizero Games (Lost Soul Aside, although that one didn't turn out so well), and S-GAME for the upcoming Phantom Blade Zero. You can read an overview of The God Slayer in our dedicated article. Here, we're publishing an exclusive interview with Pathea's Business Development Director, Yongjin (Aaron) Deng, who […]

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Nearly ten years ago, I wrote an opinion piece about HDR gaming being the most groundbreaking feature of the upcoming PlayStation 4 console refresh, then known as 'PS4K' and later released on November 10, 2016, as the PlayStation 4 Pro. Initial information suggested that it would deliver HDR support, unlike the base PS4 model; however, Sony later rolled it out for regular PlayStation 4 consoles as well. These specifics aside, the article's core foundation was the belief that HDR gaming was poised to be the next big thing in computer graphics, even more so than 4K (Ultra HD) resolution. There […]

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From Embark Studios, the developer who brought us another boundary-pushing shooter in The Finals, ARC Raiders has burrowed its way up from obscurity and firmly into the limelight, much like the titular Raiders of subterranean Speranza.

Ahead of its launch, we spoke with design director Virgil Watkins about the response to the game, which has been beyond what he or anyone else at Embark expected.

"Exciting, terrifying, gratifying," he remarks. "I think this really kicked off with Tech Test 2, and the response we got from that, we did not expect whatsoever. We were happy with what we had, but I don't think [we] expected the reach that it obtained.

"And then, obviously, that got very dialled up very fast, and then we had Server Slam, which I think helped cement a lot of that for people."

Naturally, that exponentially higher attention led to increased pressure, but also buoyed the developers.

"The vacuum fills with expectations and hopes and dreams. So, I hope we meet most of them. I hope people continue to trust in what we've said we're going to do, and what we've tried to bring to the game and what we intend to do. So, I think that's the part I'm most keen to see resolved, is that they resonate with what we've done."

I question Virgil about the game's setting, a unique post-apocalypse in which survivors are forced underground by the sky-borne ARC, rather than dropping in from above as in many others.

"It's a bit of a mix, right? Because, you know, we had the original version of the game, I suppose, when it was PvE, which carried a lot of these premises. Like the machines come from the sky, so we're forced to hide, which, because we stuck with the enemy designs and that fiction, it forced us to make some interesting changes."

He goes on to explain how the game's setting has influenced its gameplay: "So, a lot of extraction games, you either go stand in a mysterious spot and disappear, or in some, you get on a helicopter and fly away.

But since humans are no longer capable of flying in our fiction, we're like, "Well, where do they go?" That's underground. So, we had to invent a suite of extractions that made sense to go down rather than up and out, so that's been quite fun to actually work around as a design challenge."

ARC Raiders' unique setting lends itself further to another unique aspect among extraction shooters, which is that it has a story element to it.

Quests require players to find certain items and locations in one map that allow for progression in another map, bringing the lore front and centre.

"It's one thing to have a quest that just delivers dialogue and exposition and things to you," Virgil explains, "but I think it's also super nice to have the player discover it themselves to some degree, and that it lends to that sense of discovery, and you yourself are the one stitching together elements of the world or pieces of a story.

"And I think that can become very compelling to players, to find things on their own rather than being fed."

This core premise has been a part of the game from very early on, transferring over from its aforementioned PvE era, which Virgil looks back on with mixed feelings.

"There were moments in the game that were outstanding, and it's like nothing you would have ever experienced before. The problem was how repeatable it was. You might have one session that's amazing, and then you have nine sessions that sucked.

"You would run through an open desert for 45 minutes and not see a single thing to fight or a single thing to pick up or anything. And then someone else would have killed the giant robot.

"A lot of people suspect that it was like a looter shooter or something, but it never even got that far. There was never an inventory. There were never drops. We took every element that was good from that game and put it into this game, which was the AI and the environments, the movement, style and some of the initial systems, but it was just that.

"We could not figure out a way to turn that format into a free-to-play title that people would feel invested in playing or would keep coming back to play."

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ARC Raiders is far from the only extraction shooter on the market, though it has managed to succeed in a genre where many have tried and failed. On that genre shift, Virgil recalls a level of trepidation among the Embark team.

"When we made the call to switch [from PvE], there really weren't many games on the horizon. So, we're like, "Okay, maybe we'll sneak in there." But then, of course, over time tons of games tried and had varying degrees of success, or established titles maybe tried their own hand at it as a side mode.

"So, we got a lot of good contact with what was attempted, what maybe did or didn't work. So, of course, there's always a measure of nervousness around that.

"But I think because we haven't seen anything get latched onto by the public, and the fact that I think we feel very strongly about the approaches we've taken, the aesthetics we've gone for, the way the game feels to play – I think adds up to enough that it stands out, and it seems like we're having a decent amount of people respond to that in the way we hope."

I briefly ask Virgil about where ARC Raiders sits in relation to The Finals, Embark's other live service title. He confirms that fans of The Finals have nothing to worry about when it comes to development focus.

"They should not be concerned. It's two separate teams. We have shared teams, but they're already divided in duties between the two, so I would not be able to say that there's an impact I'd be aware of.

"We've purposefully kept it separate such that both projects are staffed and we share resources or people on a small scale, like 'Hey, come help us finish this asset' or something."

In fact, ARC Raiders has plenty to thank The Finals for on the tech side – "we're both on the same branch of Unreal 5 that we maintain, so we can share a lot of tools and techniques for things," Virgil confirms.

He goes on to explain that a shared rendering team is one of the secrets behind how fantastically optimised ARC Raiders is.

"On the rendering side, full credit to our game performance team. They do a lot of fantastic work, but also, we have, thankfully, a lot of pretty seasoned and talented developers who – while we build the game – do things in very forward thinking ways about how it impacts performance, how it leads to CPU and GPU hits."

At this point, word of mouth has probably done enough to sell prospective players on the ARC Raiders experience, but Virgil provides one last pitch to the unconvinced.

"One of the core parts of the game we wanted to strive for is approachability. We've put a lot of systems and a lot of work into the game to make sure that people who are maybe nervous about extraction games or are nervous about PvP games can try it and have enough in the game to fall back on or support them to keep trying it.

"So, all I would really say is be encouraged to give it a go, and if it's not for you, it's not for you – that's fine. But I would love it if people could give it a try and just see if we've done enough to welcome them into the types of stories and gameplay and wild moments that can unfold in this style of game and hopefully maybe change their mind about what that could mean for them in this genre or this type of game mode."

ARC Raiders is out now on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.

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