Hidetaka Miyazaki, the president of FromSoftware and director of so many revered Soulsian games, has suggested the studio is keen to return to making single-player games after The Duskbloods.
Speaking to IGN, Miyazaki explained it was a coincidence that 2025’s Elden Ring: Nightreign and The Duskbloods were both multiplayer games. “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,” he said.
“I mean, that’s a different director,” he added, referring to Junya Ishizaki who helmed Nightreign, “but both of those ideas just coincided with being multiplayer games. 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.”
It was while continuing this thought, and saying it had been fun to make a multiplayer game, that Miyazaki said: “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.”
FromSoftware’s last big single-player game was 2022’s barnstorming Elden Ring, which included a more traditional form of multiplayer for the studio – including co-op and invasions. But Elden Ring didn’t showcase multiplayer in the way Nightreign did or that Switch 2 exclusive The Duskbloods will – with a much more actively competitive multiplayer PvPvE experience.
Indeed, it seems as though it’s The Duskbloods that’s the anomaly for FromSoftware, with Miyazaki describing it as an outlet for ideas that “didn’t really fit in the context of a single-player game”.
“Over time,” he said, “a lot of those ideas piled up, things that you wish you could have done here and there. Having an outlet for them, somewhere we can find a place where they all fit, or can be made to fit specifically in that multiplayer context, is something that was always at the forefront of my mind.”
The Duskbloods is a Switch 2 exclusive made in partnership with Nintendo. Miyazaki said this relationship came about from a mixture of Nintendo being “very excited and very receptive to the idea” of The Duskbloods, and “very forward thinking in terms of how to do it”. Nintendo’s input can be felt in the game, as well, particularly in how it helps ease players in..
“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,” Miyazaki said. “We’ve definitely just dropped players in and hoped they would figure it out. In this case, 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.”
This weekend’s The Duskbloods network test runs in five phases, one each day from 21st August (Friday) through to 24th August (Monday). The full game has no release date yet, despite a 24th September date appearing briefly today, but FromSoftware has previously committed to it coming out this year. The pertinent question this autumn is: how close to GTA 6‘s 19th November release dare it go?
