The Duskbloods

Eight Vampires Enter a FromSoftware Hunt

The Duskbloods is a competitive multiplayer game where eight players control vampiric fighters in a dark, gothic world. Each match mixes conflict against other players with monsters roaming the level, turning survival into a contest with more than one kind of threat.

Triple Jumps Change the FromSoft Silhouette

Combat moves faster than in a traditional FromSoftware action game, and exploration is far more vertical: fighters can triple-jump up large towers while hunting for experience, useful items, and sidekicks. The studio’s punishing deaths, strange characters, and layered systems remain, but they now operate inside a match rather than a mostly solitary journey.

Development began in 2021 on the original Switch before moving to Switch 2. The newer hardware resolved technical problems the team had struggled with, while Nintendo helped refine tutorials and onboarding—areas director Hidetaka Miyazaki says have not historically been FromSoftware’s strength.

Winning Is Not the Only Way Forward

The design aims to welcome players who find pure competition intimidating. Killing lesser enemies, exploring, and gradually unlocking story provide progress outside direct PvP, so a player can engage with the world even without dominating every match.

The Duskbloods launches later this year as a Nintendo-published Switch 2 exclusive. It is a striking experiment from the Elden Ring studio: a new setting, genre, platform, and publisher built around ideas its single-player games could not contain.