FromSoftware's focus hasn't shifted to multiplayer, Miyazaki says, despite Elden Ring: Nightreign and The Duskbloods
FromSoftware boss Hidetaka Miyazaki has confirmed the studio hasn’t shifted to focus on multiplayer games.
The studio is best-known for its single-player games, from its Soulsborne games to the hugely successful Elden Ring. Yet that game’s follow-up, Nightreign, is an online co-op roguelike, while the studio’s Switch 2 exclusive Duskbloods has been confirmed as a PvPvE game following its reveal earlier this week at the Nintendo Direct.
“As previously mentioned, this is an online multiplayer title at its core, but this doesn’t mean that we as a company have decided to shift to a more multiplayer-focused direction with titles going forward,” said Miyazaki in an interview with Nintendo.
“The Nintendo Switch 2 version of Elden Ring was also announced, and we still intend to actively develop single-player focused games such as this that embrace our more traditional style.”
However, he stated he’s always found the PvPvE structure “very interesting”, adding: “It allows for a broad range of game-design ideas, while also letting us leverage our experience of designing challenging enemy encounters.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Miyazaki provided more details on The Duskbloods. At first it was designed for the original Switch, but development changed to the newer console as its “focus on online features allowed us to stay as true to the original vision as possible”.
As for characters and setting, player characters are known as “Bloodsworn” and have super-human abilities through the power of special blood.
“As a general concept, they’re similar to vampires, but they are not portrayed as the horrifying monsters you might associate with traditional vampirism,” said Miyazaki.
“We tried to extract the sort of romantic aspects we found interesting from concepts such as vampires and ‘blood’ and reinterpreted them as the Bloodsworn.”
He continued: “In The Duskbloods, the Bloodsworn are competing for something known as ‘First Blood’. As human society reaches an end, First Blood flows in an event known as the ‘Twilight of Humanity’. The Bloodsworn are summoned to the Twilight of Humanity across a variety of different times and places in a bid to obtain First Blood.
