With two weeks left before launch, Rebel Wolves has finally answered the question console players have been asking about The Blood of Dawnwalker: what does it actually look like running on hardware you own? Publisher Bandai Namco has released a five-minute Console Footage trailer captured on PS5, PS5 Pro and Xbox Series X, and paired it with a straight answer on performance modes that some players will not love.
The footage is unusually plain by trailer standards. There is no cinematic edit hiding behind cut rates: it is extended, largely uncut traversal and combat with the platform labelled on screen, which is the closest thing to a capture-card comparison a publisher will hand out before review code goes live.
Two modes, and no 60fps at launch
Rebel Wolves confirmed the console versions ship with two display modes. Quality targets dynamic 4K at 30fps. Balanced targets dynamic 4K at 40fps, which requires a 120Hz display to engage. There is no 60fps option on PS5, PS5 Pro or Xbox Series X when the game launches. PS5 Pro does get better image quality than the other two, but it does not unlock a higher frame rate target.
That is a firm stance from a studio staffed largely by former CD Projekt Red developers, and it will read as a trade-off rather than a compromise depending on where you sit. The 40fps Balanced mode is the pragmatic middle ground here — on a 120Hz panel it is a genuinely noticeable step up from 30 without the visual concessions a performance mode would demand — but it does mean a chunk of the console audience is locked to 30fps by their display alone.
What the footage shows
The trailer spends its runtime on the pillars Rebel Wolves has been pitching since the reveal: Coen's dual existence as a human by day and a dawnwalker by night, the 14th-century Carpathian setting rendered as a dense open world rather than a corridor, and combat that swings between grounded melee and vampiric ability use. Village and town spaces get a long look, with crowd density and shadow work doing much of the heavy lifting for the period feel.
The quieter dialogue scenes are arguably the more telling material. Facial animation and lighting in the torch-lit interiors hold up well at 30fps, which is where a 30fps target tends to be least damaging, and the trailer is clearly sequenced to show that off before it moves to the wide-open traversal where the frame rate ceiling is more obvious.
Two weeks out
The Blood of Dawnwalker launches September 3 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC via Steam and the Microsoft Store. Rebel Wolves has been running a steady drip of pre-launch material through August — an overview trailer earlier in the month, now the console capture — and releasing hard performance numbers this far ahead of launch rather than at the review embargo is the kind of transparency that tends to buy a studio goodwill even when the numbers themselves are modest.
