Rebel Wolves has a first major update lined up for The Blood of Dawnwalker in early October, and it targets the complaints that dominated the game’s first month on sale. Game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz has outlined a new easiest difficulty (via Eurogamer), a rework of how combat picks your target, smoother escapes from fights, and continued PC performance work.
Quick answer: The patch lands in early October and brings a new easiest Story mode, removes automatic target switching after stuns, makes fleeing combat less clunky, and continues PC optimization. No exact release date has been confirmed.
Five difficulty levels, with a new easiest Story mode
The headline change is a fifth difficulty tier that sits below everything currently in the game. Rather than bolting a new name onto the bottom of the list, Rebel Wolves is reassigning the existing one: the current Story mode moves up a step and gets a new name, and the brand-new, easier setting takes over the Story mode label.
| Difficulty | Status after the patch |
|---|---|
| Story | New, easiest tier |
| Renamed current Story mode | Existing tier, new name |
| Fair | Unchanged |
| Challenging | Unchanged |
| Duelist | Unchanged |
The replacement name for today’s Story mode is not locked in. Tomaszkiewicz floated “Demanding” as a working idea, so the label shown in the menu could differ when the update ships.
Because many players want a gentler option, we plan to add another, easier difficulty. The existing Story setting will move to a new tier, tentatively called Demanding, while a replacement Story mode will offer an even softer experience for anyone who wants to follow the narrative and finish the game without facing its combat challenges.
Combat targeting: no more switching away from a stunned enemy
As the game ships today, landing a crowd-control or stun attack makes Coen swap his lock to a different enemy. That behavior was deliberate. Tomaszkiewicz asked for it during internal playtests because he wanted to stun one opponent and immediately move to the next target. Player feedback ran the other way, and the automatic switch is being taken out in the October patch
Stuns themselves are also getting more reliable. Instead of an enemy waking up the moment you connect with a single hit, it will take three hits to break a stun, so the window you created actually pays off.
Escaping fights and animal pursuits
Running away is being loosened up in two ways. Movement while sprinting or fleeing combat will ignore the navigation mesh, which is what currently makes Coen snag on geometry and feel stiff when you try to break off an encounter in tight streets.
Aggressive wildlife gets the same treatment. Animals will still take a swing as you pass, but they will no longer hard-lock onto you and give chase while you are sprinting in wolf form or using witch-sprint. Miss once, and you keep moving.
PC performance work and framerate expectations
PC performance has been the loudest thread in Steam reviews, and optimization is still in progress. Tomaszkiewicz has pointed to the sheer number of hardware combinations the team has to validate against as the reason fixes arrive in waves rather than all at once. He has also pushed back on expectations of well above 60 fps in a story-driven RPG, framing that target as something shooters chase rather than a game of this type.
Shader-compilation stutter has already been addressed separately in Hotfix 1.0.5, which reworked that pipeline. If you are still seeing stutter in windowed or borderless mode, exclusive full screen remains the recommended workaround.
Why enemy health pools are not being cut
Complaints about spongy enemies are not getting a blanket nerf. Raw enemy health is tuned against what a fully built character can do late in the game, not against a mid-game loadout. Tomaszkiewicz has described his own sword and area-of-effect crow build erasing high-level enemies instantly back when health values were lower, which is why the numbers went up rather than down.
In practice, that means the answer to sponginess is your build and your difficulty setting, not a patch note. Players who want fights resolved faster without engaging with ability scaling now have the lower difficulty tier as the intended route.
New Game Plus and new enemy types are separate from this patch
Rebel Wolves is exploring a New Game Plus mode, and additional enemy variety has been raised as a possibility alongside it. Neither has been tied to the October update. Treat both as work under consideration for later releases rather than confirmed contents of the first major patch.
Where the game stands before the update
The Blood of Dawnwalker launched on September 3, 2026 for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC with a same-day patch that added console performance modes and PS5 Pro enhancements. A run of hotfixes followed through the first two weeks.
- 1.0.2 and 1.0.3 — Farkas conversation fix, tutorial pathing for Lunka, the Uriashi blacksmith’s holy sword, controller dead zone tuning, and DualSense support on Steam.
- 1.0.4 — nine quest blockers including Hive and Seek, Deep Down, On the Run, and Smoke and Ashes, plus a save-game blocker and Steam GameInput fps drops.
- 1.0.5 — shader compilation pipeline rework aimed at stutter.
To confirm you are current before testing any of the above, check your build in the launcher or on your console dashboard. Console version strings and PC version numbers do not match, so a dashboard reading of 1.004.000 corresponds to the 1.0.2 build on PC.
Everything described for October is described by its director rather than published patch notes, so the final changelog is what will settle the specifics, including the renamed difficulty label. Until that goes live, the game’s current behavior around stuns, target locking, and fleeing is unchanged.
