Who gets to write the morning after? — The Blood of Dawnwalker, Anca, and why romance in games needs more than one kind of writer
The Blood of Dawnwalker is the debut of Rebel Wolves, a studio built around veterans of The Witcher 3, published by Bandai Namco. It sold more than a million copies in its opening weekend, and the studio was already hiring a lead writer for the next chapter within a week of launch. Whatever this game does with romance, a lot of people are going to see it, and it will shape what the sequel thinks players want.
Of its three romance options (the ex-nun herbalist Anca, the rebel leader Crake, and the vrakhiri Lacra), Anca is the one the game treats as central. She gets the most screen time, she appears in the epilogue no matter what, and guides are already calling her the “canon” romance. Crake and Lacra are written closer to one-night stands. So when we look at how The Blood of Dawnwalker imagines love and desire, Anca is the romance that answers the question.
I want to be clear about where I am coming from. I write and read romantasy, and I spend my working life studying how players experience games. I went into Anca’s questline rooting for her and for Coen. For most of it, the game earned that. Then, in the final act, it threw away almost everything it had built. That gap between the setup and the payoff is what makes this a good case study.
Credit first, because it is deserved. Coen is not Geralt. He is not written as the charming womanizer who collects partners across a map. He is gentle, curious, and treats the women around him as intelligent people with their own lives. He yearns. For a protagonist from a studio with this lineage, that is a real and welcome shift, and it is exactly why the ending of Anca’s romance stings: the game had already shown us a man who would not behave the way the final scenes make him behave.
Anca’s romance, quest by quest
We meet Anca within the first minutes, when Coen is sent to fetch medicine for his mother. The village calls her a witch. What we actually meet is a young woman by the river, scarred, sharp, and a little lonely. In her cottage it comes out that she and Coen have been studying Latin together, so the relationship already has history before we touch it. Choosing to tell her you have missed those lessons, and that you “enjoy the company more than the books”, frames the bond as intellectual and personal at once.
This is good romance writing. It does not announce attraction but it lets two people already be in each other’s lives and lets the player notice what is there.
The Spark: Echoes of Silenced Bells
Then the village falls, Anca is the only one left, and she introduces Coen to witchcraft. As she paints runes onto his skin, the scene slows down: touches that last a beat too long, breathing that is a little too heavy, eye contact neither of them breaks. And then it is gone, and they go back to work.
As narrative craft this is the strongest moment in the arc. It is a scene about tension rather than release, and it trusts the player to feel the charge without being told what it means.
Slow burn: Between the Words
Back with Anca for her own questline, the flirting options open up. She is married to her magic and her past as a nun, and physical closeness is clearly not where her mind usually goes. Then Coen can spend time brewing her tea, and the conversation that follows is one of the best in the game: he teases her that “there are better sources of joy than herbal brews”, and later, over a book with nothing in it, suggests that her feelings towards him are “more than just faith”. She gets flustered. It is warm, a little funny, and it tells us what is at stake for her.
The writing here presents Anca as someone who wants closeness but has either never had it, or never had it in the way she deserves. That is a rich premise. It is also a responsibility, because it sets up exactly what the payoff has to honor.
Where it starts to wobble: Where Old Devils Lie & Stronger Than Achilles
The search for the hidden place in the mountains and the trials that come with it are where the romance starts to feel pushed rather than grown. The dialogue shifts from discovery to declaration. Coen asks whether she really sees him only as a friend, by the water he tells her he cares about her. These are fine beats on their own, but they arrive in a quest that is mechanically about something else, and the relationship begins to move on rails.
In the final chamber, the romance path narrows to one option: Coen says “I love you.”
I was rooting for these two, and it still felt too early. More importantly, it was the only choice that keeps the romance alive. A slow burn works because the player chooses the pace. Here, the game chooses for us.
Then comes the most meaningful decision in the arc: the Font of Life. Coen can drink from it himself, destroy it, or step aside and let Anca use it. Giving it to her lets her restart her life without the weight of her magic and her past. That is a genuinely moving choice, and it fits everything the arc has told us about her.
The fire! at the inn
Back at the inn, the conversation picks up where the confession left off. Coen says he meant what he said, tells her “screw decency, I want you, too”, they kiss, and the intimate scene plays.
And it is badly staged. After an arc built on faces, eye contact, and slow, close touch, the scene puts Anca with her back to him. Everything the game has told us about her (that this is new, that she has never had closeness the way she deserves it, that she has just been given her life back) calls for intimacy that is face to face and about her. Everything it told us about him (a man who yearns, who is gentle, who pays attention) says he would want that too. Instead we get a framing that centres the camera and his body, not the two of them. It doesn’t serve Anca and it doesn’t serve Coen. The organic, beautiful moments from the first half of the arc are simply gone.
And then, in my playthrough, Anca tells Coen that this cannot work because she is older than him, by something like a decade or two. There is no option to push back. A relationship the game spent hours building ends on a reason it never treated as a problem before, and the player is given no voice in it.
The setup felt written by someone who understood longing, yet the payoff reads like it was written by someone who only understood the destination.
Why this reads as “written by men”
I want to make this argument carefully, because the lazy version of it (“men can’t write romance”) is wrong and unhelpful. Plenty of men write desire beautifully, and Coen himself shows this team is capable of it. The problem is not that a man wrote a scene. The problem is what happens when one perspective is the only one in the room at the moments that matter most.
The top of the narrative credits on this game (narrative director and lead writer Jakub Szamałek, narrative writer Piotr Kucharski, game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, and creative director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz) are all men. That does not make every line theirs, and many people contributed to Anca. But the people who sign off on what an intimate scene is for, and whose framing wins in a disagreement, shape the result. You can see that shape in three places:
Whose experience the scene is about
The arc is built around Anca’s interior life, but the climax is framed around Coen’s view of her body. The female gaze asks what the moment means to her; this scene only asks what it looks like.
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The innocent nun as a trope
“Pious woman awakened by the hero” is an old fantasy, and it tends to treat a woman’s inexperience as something to be unlocked rather than something to be met with care. The first half of the arc resists that trope. The inn scene falls right back into it.
How endings are handled
Romance as a genre has rules for a reason. Readers invest because the payoff honors what was promised. Ending a relationship on an age gap the story never developed, with no player agency, breaks that contract. It feels less like a choice about Anca and more like a convenient way to clear the board for a sequel.
I need to make clear, though, that none of these are failures of talent. If anything, they are blind spots, and blind spots are exactly what a varied writing room is for.
“Writer” is too general a job title
There is a second problem hiding behind the first, and it is structural. Games already accept that writing is not one job. A narrative director owns the shape of the whole story. A lead writer owns voice and consistency. Quest writers, barks writers, and localization teams each have their own craft. Nobody expects the person who plots the main quest to also write every line a merchant shouts.
Romance, though, is usually treated as something any good writer can pick up along the way but it isn’t. Romance is a genre with its own craft, history, and readership, just as horror or mystery are. It has its own rules about pacing (the slow burn, the push and pull, the enemies to lovers), about stakes (what each person risks by wanting the other), and about payoff (a resolution that honors both people). Writing intimacy well is a separate skill again, and in other media it now comes with its own specialist: the intimacy coordinator.
A studio that would never ship combat without a combat designer will happily ship a romance without a romance writer. The narrative lead, however talented, is then asked to do a specialist’s job in the gaps between their actual one. Anca’s arc shows the result. The parts that are general narrative craft (setting up history, building tension in a shared task) are strong. The parts that need romance craft (pacing the confession, staging the intimate scene, ending or continuing the relationship) are where it breaks.
So the fix is not only a more varied writing room. It is also naming the role: a romance writer or romance narrative designer who owns these arcs end to end, working with an intimacy coordinator on the scenes that need one, with sensitivity readers where the characters’ experiences call for them.
What romantasy already knows
If studios want to know what romance players are looking for, they don’t have to guess. A huge, very public reading culture is telling them. Romantasy, fantasy built around a central romance, has become one of the biggest forces in publishing. Romance and romantasy are leading US adult fiction sales, and Rebecca Yarros’ Onyx Storm sold more than a million copies in its first week, the fastest-selling adult title in BookScan’s history. That is the same order of magnitude as The Blood of Dawnwalker’s opening weekend. These are not two separate audiences.
And yet, romantasy keeps being dismissed in the media as “porn for teenagers”, as smut, as a guilty pleasure that doesn’t deserve serious attention. That framing misses what readers, overwhelmingly women, are actually going to these books for. At the core, it’s how the male main character treats the female main character:
She is a full human being to him
Her mind, her history, her ambitions, and her fears matter to him as much as her body does.
Pleasure is mutual with a desire that lasts
Intimacy is about both of them, and often centers her experience. It is not something done to her or staged for an audience. The relationship doesn’t end the moment it is consummated. The intimacy is the start of something, not the finish line.
Respect runs through everything
Consent, care, and attention aren’t a box to tick before the scene but they are what makes the scene work.
Read that list again and then look at the inn. Anca’s arc sets up every one of those promises, and the last act breaks every one of them: her experience is decentered, the staging serves the camera, and the relationship is closed off almost as soon as it is consummated. A romantasy reader would have spotted every one of those problems in a first draft. That is exactly the knowledge the game was missing.
This matters well beyond one article and well beyond games. How a story treats a woman’s desire teaches its audience what to expect, from partners, from themselves, and from the world. Romantasy’s success is partly a response to decades of stories that didn’t treat women that way. Games now have the same reach and the same responsibility.
Why diversity in writing matters (and why it isn’t a nice-to-have)
Romance is not a niche. Women make up a large share of romance readers and of players who seek out romance in RPGs, and those players will notice when a scene is framed for someone else. A writing room that includes people who read, write, and want romance, including women and queer writers, brings craft knowledge that a homogeneous room has to guess at: pacing a slow burn, writing consent that feels like desire rather than a checkbox, staging intimacy so both characters stay people.
It also matters because games are now a mass medium for how people imagine love and sex. A game that sells a million copies in a weekend is teaching a lot of players what a romantic climax looks like. When the only template is one perspective’s, everyone gets a narrower picture, men included.
And it matters for the business. Rebel Wolves is hiring a new lead writer for the next chapter right now. That is the exact moment when a studio decides whose sensibility shapes its stories for the next five years.
What would have fixed it
As a user researcher I tend to look for fixes that are cheap and early. Most of what went wrong with Anca could have been caught before ship:
Hire a romance writer, not just a writer
Give romance arcs a dedicated owner with genre expertise, ideally someone who reads and writes romance and romantasy, and make sure women are among the people with sign-off on them.
Bring in an intimacy coordinator
Involve them in the scene’s blocking and camera, not just its motion capture.
Let the player set the pace
Keep “I love you” as one option among several in Stronger Than Achilles, and let a slower route still lead to the inn.
Stage the scene from what the arc set up
Face to face, focused on her experience, and consistent with who Coen is.
Give the ending a voice
If the relationship must end, let it end for reasons the story built, and let the player respond.
Playtest romance like any other system
Run romance arcs with a range of players and ask specifically about the moments that matter. Where did you feel closest to her? Where did it feel off? Did this feel like the same Coen? The drop-off at the inn would have shown up immediately.
Conclusion
The Blood of Dawnwalker proves that its team can write a gentle, yearning hero and a woman with an inner life worth caring about. That is why Anca’s arc is such a useful case. The problem is not the material, it is what happens to it at the end. The first half is a romance written from inside two people. The last act is a romance written from one side of the camera.
Diverse writing rooms and dedicated romance writers do not guarantee better romance. But they make it much harder for one perspective’s blind spots to go unchallenged, and that is exactly what was missing here.
This is why I care so much, and honestly, why I am so angry. As writers, we hold real power. We decide who gets to be seen, who gets to want, who gets to be loved well, and who gets to play. We shape how a world feels to the people who step into it, and through that, a little of how they see the world they live in. The Blood of Dawnwalker had everything it needed to show millions of players a romance where a woman is cherished, where desire is mutual, and where the hero’s gentleness lasts past the cutscene. It came so close. Then it handed the most important moment to the oldest script there is.
That is the failed potential, and that is what stings. With a sequel in development and a lead writer chair open, Rebel Wolves has a second chance. I hope they use it to let Anca, and every player who loved her, have the morning after they were promised.
