🎮 Blood of Dawnwalker Gameplay, Death Stranding 2 and First Single-Player Game From NetEase...
Blood of Dawnwalker Gameplay, First Hour of Death Stranding 2 Was Leaked, NetEase Makes Its First Single-Player, Persona 4 Won’t Happen Until 2027 and more!
Hello friends,
Today is July 1st 2025 and I hope you’ve had a great week 🙌
In today’s news:
🎮 Blood of Dawnwalker Gameplay
🎮 First Hour of Death Stranding 2 Was Leaked
🎮 NetEase Makes Its First Single-Player
🎮 Persona 4 Won’t Happen Until 2026
⚡ Lightning Round!
🫡 True Tribute!
😄 Personal Update
All of this is brought to you in a 5 min format ⏲️
Let’s dig in!
🎮 Blood of Dawnwalker Gameplay
After a very exciting announcement a while ago, Rebel Wolves has finally revealed the first 20 minutes of footage of Blood of Dawnwalker Gameplay. And it looks amazing!
As video highlights from the start, we are talking about the actual gameplay from a work-in-progress pre-beta build, so, essentially, what you see is what you will get (mostly). And right from the start, you see those CDPR vibes jumping right out at you. From the beautiful forest, mountains and castles, to the combat, abilities and UI. Also, those cinematic pieces of you using the abilities look very cool!
The Blood of Dawnwalker is the first chapter of Rebel Wolves’ brand new role-playing saga — a single-player open-world dark fantasy action-RPG with a strong focus on story and narrative. Developed on Unreal Engine 5 for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox X/S. Coming in 2026.
14th-century Europe. Bloody conflicts sweep the lands, and the Black Death comes for the survivors. Vampires seize their opportunity to walk out of the shadows and claim what they've been denied for centuries: freedom, and the power that comes with it.
You play as Coen, a young man turned into a Dawnwalker, forever treading the line between the world of day and the realm of night. Fight for your humanity or embrace the cursed powers to save your family. Whatever your choice, the question stands: is your soul worth the lives of those you love?
Personally, I liked almost everything. I’m not sure how I feel about the combat yet. I’m not a huge fan of those directional attacks/parries, but that’s the only thing that I don’t love. The transitions between your vampire side and human side, the world, the quests, everything else looks like a game that I would love to play! I’m looking forward to seeing more stuff in the future!
What do you think about this new piece of gameplay?
🎮 First Hour of Death Stranding 2 Was Leaked
Speaking of the gameplay footage, Kojima Productions recently suffered a leak and footage of Death Stranding 2 found its way to the internet ahead of the game’s release.
Of course, at the time of writing this, this video has already been taken down, and the studio was monitoring as much YouTube as they could to quash everything that slipped through the cracks, but by the looks of it, the user by the name “ariel navarro rg” got their hands on the copy of the game and couldn’t wait for a few days for the media embargo to be lifted to post the footage.
At any rate, this is no more than a funny story now since the game released on June 26, and now everybody will be posting it all over the place 😅
For those of you who have a PlayStation, have you played it so far? What do you think? Is Kojima a genius or not?
🎮 NetEase Makes Its First Single-Player
After a lot of success in the world of multiplayer, NetEase recently announced their first “completely single-player focused experience” named Blood Message and shared an official reveal trailer.
The game appears to be quite big, a narrative-driven action adventure with a complex story depicting a part of Chinese history and according to NetEase, here’s what we should expect:
Blood Message introduces a forgotten odyssey of loyalty and survival where players join Dunhuang’s uprising, taking control of a nameless messenger and his young son in this immersive third-person action-adventure. Caught in the crossfire of a righteous uprising and driven by loyalty to both family and country, players will embark on a perilous eastward journey to deliver a message that holds the fate of their war-torn homeland. Amidst the shifting sands of history, they will etch a final tale of loyalty.
Among other things, the Thunder Fire Studio (the devs in charge), the game will be a more focused linear adventure, with “expansive landscapes”.
The game looks and feels almost like a mix between Assassin’s Creed and God of War, but in a good way. Again, it looks like this one will also feature some form of directional combat, which I’m not sure I like all that much, but the trailer looks good enough to get me excited and start reading about Chinese history 😅
What do you think about this game?
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🎮 Persona 4 Won’t Happen Until 2026
Unfortunately for all the fans that got very excited after the Persona 4 Announcement, according to a recent report from SEGA, we shouldn’t expect the game to be released at least until Fiscal Year 2027 (which technically overlaps with 2026 calendar, but we probably shouldn’t hold our breath).
The information recently surfaced on SEGA’s website, but it seems to be taken down at the point of writing, with only a Reddit post remaining that showcases some of the mid-term plans for the upcoming projects.
And according to the document, Persona 4, along with other projects, is set to be released in or after FY2027 (from 1 April 2026 to 31 March 2027).
Which is quite fair, considering that this game was just announced, and I bet that both Atlus and SEGA will be going for some big and splashy updates (or at least that’s what I’m hoping for). Still, this is a long way to go and I’m not great at patience 😅
⚡ Lightning Round!
1…2…3…Go!
🎮 Microsoft Cuts Even More Jobs
And yet another wave of layoffs is about to hit Microsoft again, according to a report from Bloomberg, with thousands of people who work in Sales getting axed.
After all this time, it looks like Microsoft is not ready to let go of its leadership in layoff contributions for the past few years and even though these layoffs are not directly related to their gaming department, it is said that they are going to happen across the entire technology division.
According to the article, the redundancies are expected to be announced in the next few weeks as Microsoft’s fiscal year comes to an end.
🎮 Switch 2 Struggles with 3rd Party Games
With Switch 2 is out in the world, it looks like Nintendo might not be in great shape when it comes to ported games as opposed to exclusives.
According to The Game Business and data from NielsenIQ, 86% of the physical Switch 2 game sales were first-party, when including the Mario Kart World bundle. But if we exclude this bundle, the number drops drastically to 48%. In fact, at least some publishers mentioned that sales were “below our lowest estimates,” despite how successful the Switch 2 has been.
To be fair, this information is related mostly to physical games, so the digital area might be doing a little better. And since Switch 1 and 2 are compatible, gamers might’ve already gotten all the games they wanted and might be focused on the big ticket items, like Mario Kart World.
Have you bought any 3rd party titles on Switch 2 so far?
🎮 CDPR Speaks Up About Ciri (Again)
And yet another cry from the CDPR team who’s trying as hard as they can to ask fans not to judge their decision to go with Ciri as the main protagonist.
In a recent interview with GamesRadar, Jan Hermanowicz, Engineering Production Manager on The Witcher 4, said that “when the game is out, you'll be able to see for yourself and fully embrace her character, her story. And I think that will be the moment to make opinions and make the calls”
We showed her in various situations, two emotional states that were very distinct from one another.And there are many, many more parts of her that we will show in the future.
For me, personally, reading the books, it's very clear that the story slowly transitions from being Geralt's story to really being Ciri's story, sometimes narrated through the eyes of Geralt.
And I honestly can’t agree more. Now that the game is set to be released soon, I can’t wait to see Ciri as a main protagonist and opening up so many potential doors for us to explore!
🫡 True Tribute!
Today I wanted to salute
and !
First of all, I wanted to thank
for being a part of this amazing Substack community of video game writers and second of all, I wanted to congratulate him for writing a whole book! That is something that I personally has been struggling with for a while, and it’s great to see someone actually succeeding with it! If you love Nintendo, this is definitely something to look into😄 Personal Update
With most of the work on the project getting dealt with, I find myself with a bit of time to tackle some side projects.
As if I don’t have enough of them already, I actually started working on a game of my own. It’s very early stages now, but a lot of professionals in the industry suggested to me that nothing boosts your knowledge and skills across the board as making your own pet project. So, with only a very basic understanding of coding, I’m off to the races.
Wish me luck 😅
This is all the news I have for you folks today.
Thanks for making it this far! 🙌
If you feel like supporting me and my work, consider Powering-Up GameDev Relay 🎮
Have a great week!
Alex from Gamedev Relay.
Thanks so much for the shoutout, Alex! Substack far and away has the best online gaming/writing community I've seen in 15 years of blogging.
All the best on starting your own game project!
Also, as for the Switch 2 third party sales... they'll probably pick up, but people probably only bought 1 or 2 games due to the expense of the system and extra controllers, Mario Kart, etc. We can only spend so much at a time!
Blood Message looks incredible!