When it comes to RPGs, I am an irredeemable savescummer. I admit it. I'll slam F9 at the drop of a hat (perhaps the hat was dropped as a result of a failed dexterity roll. Unacceptable. Reload).

So when I recently found myself reloading a Divinity 2 save for the umpteenth time in a single session, I started to wonder - in a genre that's supposedly about storytelling first and foremost, why am I viewing botched persuasion checks as something to be studiously avoided? And why is it that I feel totally different about making a horrible mess of things in tabletop roleplaying games?

After all, some of my fondest memories of real-life roleplaying are moments of extravagant failure: sometimes of the bathetic stepping-on-a-rake-instead-of-slaying-the-necromancer variety, and sometimes of the much more grounded, human, and affecting type.

It all got me thinking: how do RPG developers think about player failure? Would they recognise the distinction between digital and tabletop that I'm describing? And can they convince a savescummer like me to renounce my ways?

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If you've given The Blood of Dawnwalker a go, odds are you've got thoughts about the 30-day and 3-night timer it applies to Coen's quest to save his family from fate most vampy. Devs Rebel Wolves are very much aware of how divisive the feature's proven, and now the game's director's made clear that it's not guaranteed to return in future entries unless it can be made to mesh with the story being told.

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Each time you start a new campaign in Afterworld, Paradox's upcoming post-apocalyptic grand strategy game, a tiny virtual historian cracks their knuckles and gets to work writing a new 200-year history for what happened to North America in the dying days of the great war.

They will decide where the great powers fired their nuclear-tipped missiles, where they released their clouds of flesh-eating nanites, where they dropped their lung-bubbling chemical weapons, and they will decide who survived and who died. These procedural changes should mean that each time you start a new game of Afterworld, the map will be dramatically different from the last.

That flexibility to rewrite the surface of Afterworld is vital, game director Dan Lind tells me, "Otherwise it undermines a lot of the exploration".

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No siree. We are not trying to fight those big bosses. It's arguably a bit of a weird thing for a publisher with Diablo and World of Warcraft in their arsenal to say, but that's the stance Blizzard are sticking to with their storefront Battle.net, even though it now boasts two big CD Projekt Red RPGs. Instead of an unknowably girthy hoard of games, the publishers say Battle.net's still designed to feel like a handpicked basket of things to play.

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Today marks yet another day in reporting on layoffs that have occurred in the games industry over the past several years, with this occasion unfortunately being GNOG and Goodbye Volcano High developer KO_OP. The studio shared word that 13 staffers were being laid off less than two weeks after the launch of the studio's latest game, Young Suns, explaining the process by which this took place in a statement that provides an example of what should really be just the bare minimum in these situations.

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Terrible news, folks, it's time for another episode of "Edwin secretly watches a lot of anime and has bad anime opinions". Although I don't know how anybody could reasonably disagree with my affection for The Apothecary Diaries. It's kind of a Sherlock Holmes story, if Sherlock Holmes were a young female alchemist in a world broadly inspired by Tang Dynasty-era China.

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Being a vampire is a pretty raw deal... or so the vamps inform us when they are not having freaky gothic sex, shapeshifting into wolves, enjoying the slimming effects of a uniquely low-carb diet, or enduring through marvellous future epochs we foolish cattle can only dream of.

I find most stories about vampirism tend to do a poor job of convincing me that vampirism is to be avoided. "Immortality is no gift, but a curse," breathe the bloodsuckers, like parents telling kids that staying up late only makes you tired in the morning, and I think: OK, so you're definitely going to outlive everybody you've ever loved, but also, 1) you've got marble hard abs, and 2) you're going to be knocking around when generations to come finally put a stake through capitalism and roll out UBI.

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Look, I know it's way to early to be talking about sequels to The Blood of Dawnwalker, given Rebel Wolves' vampire RPG hasn't even been out a week as I write this. However, the game's devs are already putting pieces in place to get on with making such a game, so with help from strong spoiler tags, I'm doing it.

THIS IS A VERY STRONG SPOILER WARNING FOR THE BLOOD OF DAWNWALKER, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

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Uh oh. Steam achievement lists for a smorgasbord of unreleased and unannounced PC games appear to have leaked via trophy tracking site Exophase. Atlus RPG Persona 6, RGG brawler Stranger Than Heaven, and Thief: The Dark Project Remastered have all seemingly had their trophies blabbed by the leak, with more imminent releases like Control Resonant, Silent Hill: Townfall, and Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve also affected.

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Look, before you say it, I know. Persona 4 Golden is held up by some as one of the best and most important RPGs ever. After all, it was the series' Final Fantasy 7 moment, where many of the mechanical and thematic threads of the earlier games finally knitted together and became something greater than their parts. You step into the shoes of Yu Narukami, a Japanese transfer student freshly arrived in Inaba. There, you use your limited time to make friends, study for your exams, and dive into a metaphysical dimension to turn-based battle the literal manifestations of your friends and rivals' twisted perceptions of themselves. Its story and characters particularly celebrated for their honest and painful looks inward at the parts of ourselves best left unseen. I’m a fraud for not having played it yet, with that sin only compounded by having had it in my Steam family sharing library for years. I have no excuse. I’ll face the shame-filled shadow version of myself, eventually.

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Coen, the half-man and half-vampire protagonist of The Blood of Dawnwalker, doesn’t like chomping down on rats.

I know this because he’s told me multiple times, after I’ve made him slurpily drain a rodent like it’s a furry Frube (other brands of tubed yoghurt are available). Sometimes he shudders a bit and makes noises of disgust. Other times he straight up says things like "This is not a nice thing to do". I know it’s not, farmboy whose family needs saving, but what’s the alternative?

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Witcher-flavoured vampire RPG The Blood of Dawnwalker has received its first post-launch patch, with developers Rebel Wolves dipping their fangs into a modest neckful of problems with blocked quest progression and general controller behaviour on PC. They've also taught a blacksmith a new recipe. Alas, the devs are still working on fixes for those problems with stuttering, PlayStation button-mapping, and shader compilation we covered last night. Still, at least little Lunka will no longer get hopelessly lost while walking you through the tutorial.

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It's The Blood of Dawnwalker release day! The debut game of Rebel Wolves and the first new game from director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz since The Witcher 3. A day of what should be celebrations for many, I'm sure, instead a day of "oh, huh, this isn't running so well on PC, is it?" This is fairly common for big releases these days, but the devs do come with some temporary suggestions for the variety of issues they're aware of.

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CD Projekt Red and Fool's Theory might have used Gamescom to make clear that they've got a Witcher thing in the pipeline for this year and the next two, but they've also had to put one of their previously cat-eyed projects on hold for the time being. The remake of the first Witcher game is on the back burner right now, since the next stage of work on it requires more progress to be made on The Witcher 4.

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Why the rush, The Blood of Dawnwalker? Your protagonist Coen's family have only been kidnapped by a vampiric dictator who's slowly draining them of blood. Let the kid take his sweet time in finding a way to deliver them from the castle dungeon. After all, he's got a tonne of bandits he could be killing and other fun little adventures he could be stumbling across as he explores Vale Sangora. The good news for folks who don't like even the vague idea that they need to get a move on in their hero duties is that Dawnwalker's taken less than a day to get a mod which substantially lengthens its 30-day family saving timer.

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Not content with just adding to the questlines and interactivity of Baldur's Gate 3's established gang of companions or working on their own for custom campaigns, modders have even started turning other characters from the game into recruitable buddies. The latest to get this treatment is Mizora, bane of regular party member Wyll's life and with a new mod, friendly force by your side in the RPG's third act.

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The Blood of Dawnwalker, Rebel Wolves' vampire RPG with more than a touch of Witcher 3 running through its veins, is about to claw-slide down a wall into release street. Depending on where in the world you live, it'll either arrive late on September 2nd or first thing on September 3rd. Ahead of that, in a bid to accelerate modders' early attempts to put their own spin on the game, Nexus Mods have released some of their own open-source tools designed to cut some of the faff out of Unreal Engine modding.

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Look, I know I don't need to tell you how much of a mess Cyberpunk 2077's launch was. There were tons of bugs, it didn't play smoothly, and your saves could even get corrupted fairly easily, so it wasn't an ideal experience at the time. The game has had something of a redemption arc in the almost six years since launch (one that CD Projekt Red thinks still needs to be finished), but despite whispers of investors pushing to get the game out the door at the time, joint CEO Michał Nowakowski says that wasn't the case.

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Well, I say behind-closed-doors. It turns out that if I wanted to watch a prerecorded saunter through a chunk of The Witcher III: Wild Hunt’s Songs of the Past expansion, I could have just tuned into the Gamescom livestream, rather than travelling to Germany before parking myself in an almost pitch-black miniature theatre for 45 minutes. Now my by-touch handwritten notes are completely illegible, and I don’t even get to feel smug about attending a super secret preview.

Still, the preview – which like Songs of the Past itself, was a joint operation between CD Projekt Red and co-devs Fool’s Theory – didn’t show off the expansion alone. It also focused repeatedly on the combat, movement, UI and role-playing reworks being introduced in the base game’s Remastered upgrade, which is coming months ahead of Songs of the Past on September 29th. And, usual hands-off disclaimers applying, looks like it could be the more appealing package for lapsed Witchers – especially as it’s free to owners of the original.

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