Blood of Dawnwalker's first patch offers relief from buggy tutorials and tight-lipped NPCs, but Rebel Wolves are still working on fixes for the stuttering and shader crash problems

Also, some blacksmith now knows how to craft a holy sword

Witcher-flavoured vampire RPG The Blood of Dawnwalker has received its first post-launch patch, with developers Rebel Wolves dipping their fangs into a modest neckful of problems with blocked quest progression and general controller behaviour on PC. They've also taught a blacksmith a new recipe. Alas, the devs are still working on fixes for those problems with stuttering, PlayStation button-mapping, and shader compilation we covered last night. Still, at least your brother Lunka will no longer get hopelessly lost while walking you through the tutorial.

Out now on PC, the patch also has a fix for Farkas (pictured above), the resentful jester you'll need to talk to for a certain major quest. Hitherto, Farkas might refuse to speak to you if you murdered all the NPCs around him. Rebel Wolves have wheeled him backstage and ordered him to stop being so picky. Which is to say, you can kill everybody now without making it impossible to proceed with the quest.

The most enigmatic of the patch highlights concerns the Uriashi blacksmith, who appears in a more elusive quest I won't spoil. He's "learned how to craft a certain holy sword", it seems. I'm not sure if that's a bugfix or a new feature, but I'm happy for the guy. Finally, there are some PC-specific "adjustments to controller dead zone and input issues while sprinting". Can't think of anything funny to write about those. Maybe "undead zone, amirite?"

A few technical whoopsy-doodles notwithstanding, Blood of Dawnwalker appears to be a very good RPG, though people are already modding its main quest timer to save themselves a bit of deadline stress. I've also read a lot of carping about the cutscenes being capped at 30fps. You young people don't know you're born. Back when I were a lad, we'd be lucky to get 30 frames a year. Each frame had to be hand-excavated from freezing mountain soil and delivered to your home by a team of mules. It took my family six generations to get past the opening arrow wall in Tomb Raider.