The use of artificial intelligence in video game development has become a thorny and divisive topic over the past couple of years, and so naturally it was a topic of conversation during a recent press Q&A session with The Blood of Dawnwalker’s game director, Konrad Tomaszkiewicz. The former Witcher 3 director revealed that generative AI technology is used at the studio as part of the development process, used with the intention of preventing stress and overtime rather than creating final assets.
Tomaszkiewicz revealed that generative AI voices were used during the early stages of The Blood of Dawnwalker’s development, with the intention of testing and locking in the script before it was handed over to actors.
“In our genre, when you work on an RPG game – which is recorded in [six] languages, right? – the VO (voice over) is really hard and really costly stuff to do. You need to be sure that what you’re recording is what you want to record. Because, first of all, changes are really expensive. But the second thing is that, the moment when you start to hear the game, hear the NPCs and so on, is the moment when you figure out that something in the story works or does not work. And when you record all of this, and that moment you figure it out and you want to change the story, you [have to] record again a whole [section] of story, and it’s really expensive.”
“It’s a really bad process,” he continued, “because when you start to change stuff in the middle of production of the game, it makes pressure for the team. It makes problems and overtime and other stuff, and we wanted to avoid that.
“That’s why we use these kind of tools in the beginning, to do iteration of the story. And when we’re sure that we are where we want to [be], we remove all those [AI] voices and record everything with the actors.”
While generative AI has been used for what could be considered “draft” passes of the script for testing purposes, Tomaszkiewicz has other ideas on how artificial intelligence could be used in development.
“We have our own QA team, right. They sometimes have the task that they need to, for example, go through the terrain and check if there are no holes in the terrain and that the collisions are good. At the same time, they could play the quest and tell me if they like the characters or if the gameplay loops are fun enough, or if the timings in the combat can be better or whatever, right? And my approach is that I feel that we should use AI to help our people to work and take from them these tasks which are annoying and frustrating and allow them to do this more fun work, which is needed, actually.”
“I think that companies should use AI, but in the way which helps people to work, not replace the people,” he explained.
Before the Q&A concluded, a spokesperson from Rebel Wolves went on to clarify the studio’s stance on AI when it comes to the final product: “I want to make one thing absolutely clear: nothing that’s in The Blood of Dawnwalker was created using generative AI. Nothing. People with blood and flesh made this game from the beginning to the end.”
Rebel Wolves’ stance on AI wasn’t the only thing we learned about while visiting the studio – we also discussed The Blood of Dawnwalker’s romance options and the developer’s plans for a second IP. We also got to watch a playthrough of the vampire RPG’s consequence-filled prologue, as well as talk at length about RPGs with game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz. The Blood of Dawnwalker will launch on September 3, 2026.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s Executive Editor of Features.
