The Blood of Dawnwalker's first major free update is out now, adds 4 new features

Rebel Wolves has released a new patch for The Blood of Dawnwalker, the game's first major content update.

The new patch includes four major new features, as well as refinements to existing mechanics and plenty of bug fixes.

Announced today, update 1.1 for The Blood of Dawnwalker is now available on PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PlayStation 5.

The most important addition here is the ability to pet cats and dogs, a feature we were very disappointed was left out of the game at launch. But we're happy to see it included here at long last.

Another of the new features is the long-awaited respec feature, called the Draught Of Mind Rebirth.

"Forget all your Swordmastery, Witchcraft, and Vampirism abilities, and use the time you spent learning them to master a different set of abilities," teases Rebel Wolves regarding this new feature.

Meanwhile, the patch also includes an update to the difficulty. Story difficulty is now called Forgiving, and the new Story Mode difficulty setting features some additional assists for those who are struggling with the game's combat.

Elsewhere, The Blood of Dawnwalker is also getting improvements to subtitles, with the ability for you to increase the font size and enable subtitles for all dialogue lines in the game.

• Read More: The Blood of Dawnwalker: Coen's visions explained and what they could mean for a sequel

Over 1,100 fixes are present in The Blood of Dawnwalker Update 1.1

Aside from this, there are actually quite a large number of changes made with this update though. Far too many to list in one article, but we'll highlight some of the biggest ones here.

Update 1.1 also includes some FrameGen improvements, including some dedicated settings to allow players to squeeze some extra juice out of their GPUs.

Animations and camera movement in combat have also seen some adjustments, along with better targeting on enemies. Overall traversal is also marginally better, too, with Shadowstep and Planeshift receiving better targeting and attaching to surfaces.

The full list of changes includes many more fixes, with a majority of the patch notes dedicated to bug fixes. Many bugs involving Coen falling through the map have been fixed, as well as other progression blockers and exploits which seem to have been fixed with this update.

The Blood of Dawnwalker was released back in September, so Rebel Wolves has had quite some time to build up a backlog of issues and requests to address with the latest patch, hence why the patch is so massive. Update 1.2 has not been confirmed, but there'll likely be more issues waiting to be ironed out so it's best to keep an eye on the game's social media channels to hear about the next update.

In our own The Blood of Dawnwalker review, we called the game a "GOTY contender" with "a brilliant sense of urgency".

As the weeks until awards season creep closer, we imagine the game will be in the running for a lot of these conversations about what the best game of the year has been.