Things have not gone well with The Duskbloods network test, as the whole beta is shut down on its first day and it’s unclear if it will continue.
FromSoftware has built its name on predominantly single-player games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne, but its recent titles have been geared towards multiplayer.
Both Elden Ring: Nightreign and its next game, The Duskbloods, require you to play with others online. In the case of the latter, it combines player versus player (PvP) and player versus environment (PvE) elements in matches for up to eight players.
For anyone adverse to multiplayer, it’s perhaps not an enticing prospect – but it sounds like the studio is looking to get back to single-player games for its future projects.
Speaking to IGN, FromSoftware president Hidetaka Miyazaki said there was never a plan to release two multiplayer games back-to-back, it just happened that way because ‘both of those ideas just coincided’.
‘It’s funny because there was never really any big plan that these two games [Nightreign and The Duskbloods] would both release next to each other,’ Miyazaki said. ‘I mean, that’s a different director, but both of those ideas just coincided with being multiplayer games.
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‘It’s not necessarily some big reveal saying that this is the direction we plan to go moving forward. We still have a heavy focus on single-player content as well. This is just something that happened to work out the way it did.’
Miyazaki went on to indicate that the studio is looking to go the other way for its next project, adding: ‘But, it’s like, the more you work on something multiplayer for a long time, if anything, it scratches that itch only to want to make something single-player again.’
Elsewhere in the same interview, Miyazaki described The Duskbloods as an outlet for ideas that ‘didn’t really fit in the context of a single-player game’.
As for why it’s a Switch 2 exclusive, FromSoftware’s president said Nintendo ‘seemed very excited and very receptive’ to the pitch of The Duskbloods, which gave Miyazaki ‘a lot more reassurance for moving forward’ with the idea.
He went on to explain that FromSoftware’s shortcomings when it comes to tutorialisation also played a factor in collaborating with Nintendo. ‘The onboarding tutorials and making sure players understand how the game works and how to succeed in the game is something we’ve historically not been super great at conveying instantly,’ he added.
‘We’ve definitely just dropped players in and hoped they would figure it out. Nintendo is definitely the right partner for better conveying that information in a way that is understandable to the player; it definitely suits their strengths.’
The Duskbloods is a PvPvE game with battle royale elements. Each match pits eight players against each other across four timed phases, where players are eliminated as the match progresses until there’s one last person left standing.
The overall goal is to gather Virtue, which you can earn by defeating other players, wiping out bosses and other smaller threats in the open world, or by exploring and discovering Virtue-infused corpses. By the fourth phase, the top three players with the most Virtue advance to an arena battle to decide the overall winner in a final confrontation.
