As someone who didn’t expect Miyazaki’s next game to lean into PvPvE multiplayer—on Nintendo hardware, no less—I found this interview packed with unexpected details. Here’s a full breakdown of what we learned.
Blood by Dusk
The Duskbloods began as little more than a loose pitch from FromSoftware to Nintendo—just a rough collection of ideas. But something in that early concept clicked. Nintendo saw potential and encouraged the team to pursue it. Not long after, development shifted from the original Switch to Switch 2, where stronger online support helped realize the game’s vision.
According to Hidetaka Miyazaki, the game stands apart from past FromSoft titles in structure and focus. The Duskbloods is a PvPvE experience—players face off against both enemies and each other in online matches. Despite the focus on multiplayer, Miyazaki clarified this doesn’t mean a shift away from single-player development. Elden Ring for Switch 2 is still on the way, and FromSoftware will continue supporting traditional experiences.
In The Duskbloods, you take on the role of a “Bloodsworn”—a superhuman being empowered by special blood. While their abilities draw on vampire lore, these characters aren’t monsters. Instead, they reflect a more romanticized interpretation of blood as a source of history, fate, and power.
There’s no single setting or era. The Bloodsworn are summoned to compete for “First Blood” during an event called the Twilight of Humanity. The game spans multiple times and places, including Gothic and Victorian maps, plus more modern areas like the train sequence from the reveal trailer.
As the name suggests, “Duskbloods” is the collective term for the Bloodsworn. The word ties into both the twilight setting and the game’s central themes. And while blood plays a key conceptual role, it’s used more symbolically than literally—it represents lineage, transformation, and the cost of surpassing human limits.
Superhuman Abilities and Opportunistic Behaviour
The Bloodsworn aren’t just narratively powerful—they’re built for speed, agility, and adaptability. Basic movement like sprinting and double jumps are faster and more dynamic than anything in past FromSoftware games. Each character also brings unique weapons and ranged attacks, including firearms, which are a first for the studio’s action games on Nintendo platforms.
You can choose from over a dozen characters, each with distinct looks, personalities, and tools. These aren’t blank slates—though there’s still room to customize appearance and abilities. The idea is to blend FromSoft’s tradition of player expression with more defined archetypes, creating a cast that feels both personal and designed.
Matches start and end in a hub where you select your Bloodsworn, tweak loadouts, and jump into multiplayer. Every match earns you rewards, win or lose, which you can spend on further upgrades. Up to eight players are supported online, with standard modes revolving around last-person-standing objectives.
But The Duskbloods shakes things up with alternate win conditions. Some matches focus on defeating powerful boss enemies. Others involve event-based surprises that change your goals mid-match. That massive stone face from the trailer? It’s part of a dynamic system that alters rewards, reshapes the battlefield, and encourages different strategies.
Victory Points decide the outcome, but how you earn them is up to you. While direct combat is important, stealthy, opportunistic approaches can work just as well. You can even summon creatures to fight by your side, adding more layers to each round.
According to Miyazaki, this design was intentional. Not everyone enjoys PvP—and The Duskbloods is built to welcome players who prefer exploration, trickery, or teamwork. There are even personal goals within each match that grant rewards, whether you dominate or simply survive.
Playing Roles and Altering Fates
Customization in The Duskbloods goes beyond appearances and stats. Each Bloodsworn carries a “blood history and fate,” which you can analyze and alter to reshape their abilities, personality, and even narrative role. Miyazaki described it as a way to embed lore directly into customization—each tweak reveals small fragments of world building and character backstory.
It’s an unusual system, but it ties directly into the game’s larger themes. Blood isn’t just a visual motif—it represents power, memory, and transformation. By changing a Bloodsworn’s blood history, you’re literally rewriting who they are and how they relate to the world and other characters.
That also ties into roles, a new mechanic in The Duskbloods that assigns special responsibilities and objectives to players in online matches. These roles—picked through blood customization—aren’t just cosmetic. They affect how you interact with others in your match.
Some roles are adversarial. The “Destined Rivals” role links two players together as sworn enemies, with a personal reward for taking the other down. Others are more cooperative, like “Destined Companion,” where two linked players must find each other and form a bond mid-match. It’s an inventive system that encourages varied interactions and adds a light role-playing layer to each game.
And yes, that winged rat from the trailer? He’s your guide. Miyazaki called him the Duskbloods equivalent of a Fire Keeper—a source of advice, lore, and upgrades in the hub. In true FromSoftware fashion, he’s both a little odd and unexpectedly endearing. Miyazaki even joked that making him “cute” was a nod to the Nintendo partnership… though technically, he’s still an old man.
The Duskbloods may be FromSoft’s most experimental game yet. But if this interview made anything clear, it’s that Miyazaki and his team are still obsessed with the same things: meaningful choices, indirect storytelling, and gameplay that rewards curiosity as much as combat.
Bloodlines, Rivalries, and Reinvention
This three-part interview didn’t just pull back the curtain on The Duskbloods—it revealed just how far FromSoftware is willing to go to experiment on new hardware. The mix of PvPvE gameplay, customizable lore, and dramatic movement feels unlike anything they’ve done before, and it’s all built around a game structure that encourages both competition and cooperation in equal measure.
What surprised me most wasn’t just the systems—it was how personal and intentional everything sounded. From how “blood history” ties into gameplay and narrative, to the playful addition of roles like Destined Companion, there’s a clear effort to rethink how multiplayer stories can be told without cutscenes or exposition. Even the event system, with its world-altering moments, feels designed to let emergent stories happen naturally.
And then there’s the simple fact that this is a Switch 2 exclusive. That alone gives The Duskbloods a different weight. It’s a bold choice from both Nintendo and FromSoftware—and one that makes me even more curious to see how Switch 2 will support deeper, more experimental multiplayer games.
With its focus on customization, discovery, and multiple ways to play, The Duskbloods feels like a spiritual sibling to FromSoft’s best work—but wrapped in a new format that’s as unpredictable as it is ambitious.
What stood out to you in the interview? Are you more curious about the game now, or waiting to see it in action first? Let us know.
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