Hidetaka Miyazaki says The Duskbloods began as one of the games FromSoftware pitched to Nintendo, built from multiplayer ideas the studio had wanted to use for years. He also said the game grew out of material that did not fit earlier single-player work, which places the project between FromSoftware's online experiments and its more familiar solo campaigns.
FromSoftware and Nintendo
“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,” Miyazaki said in the interview. He added that he is “quite optimistic about the future of online games,” while describing The Duskbloods as a PvPvE game.
That matters because the project did not begin as a clean break from the studio's past. Miyazaki said FromSoftware had already built online systems in Demon's Souls and the Dark Souls series, including Covenant and Invasions, and had accumulated ideas that never fit a single-player structure. Those mechanics now look less like side features and more like the design storehouse behind the new game.
Eight hours, two points
Miyazaki said board games influenced The Duskbloods, and he described the Virtue point system as “basically victory points.” That gives the multiplayer loop a clearer competitive shape: players are not just hunting opponents or co-op targets, they are also managing a score layer that can decide outcomes inside the match.
He also said he is not too great at action games himself, which is a useful reminder that his designs usually ask for systems broad enough to reward more than raw reflexes. In that sense, a point-based structure fits the broader FromSoftware habit of building games around rules, not just reaction speed.
Single-player still stays
“The team is by no means moving away from single-player games,” Miyazaki said, drawing a clear line between this multiplayer-only project and the studio's larger output. He also said The Duskbloods was one of the games FromSoftware initially pitched to Nintendo, which makes the project sound less like a one-off experiment and more like a deliberate fit between studio and platform.
The cleaner read is that FromSoftware is expanding its multiplayer toolkit without abandoning the solo games that built its name. For players, that means The Duskbloods should be treated as a separate lane, not a signal that the studio is walking away from the design space it has already mastered.
