‘The Duskbloods’ Is One Of The Strangest Switch 2 Reveals But It Still Feels Too Safe

Bloodborne just passed its tenth anniversary in March, and despite a decade of begging from players, there’s still no sequel in sight. But while the Sun may swallow the Earth before we see a proper Bloodborne 2, FromSoftware has revealed a game with a suspiciously similar art style in an unexpected place. The reveal of The Duskbloods was one of the most shocking announcements at the recent Switch 2-focused Nintendo Direct, but while Bloodborne fans are celebrating, the reveal has me more than a little concerned for the future of FromSoft.

For anyone who somehow missed the Nintendo Direct, The Duskbloods is — actually, I’m not entirely sure. It sure looks a hell of a lot like Bloodborne, from the spires of the architecture in its world to the beastly nature of its enemies, not to mention a focus on the Moon in its voiceover. The similarity is so close that it easily could have passed for Bloodborne 2, despite the trailer showing off trains, jetpacks, and uh, someone transforming into a dinosaur and eating another character.

The trailer is certainly weird, even for a FromSoft game, but reveals surprisingly little of how the game will actually play. There’s combat, sure, and the aforementioned jetpacks and dinosaur vore, but it’s all in quick, disconnected scenes, making the trailer more about conveying mood than any actual information. The actual details on the game came outside of the Direct, where FromSoft revealed that The Duskbloods is “a PvPvE title with multiplayer at its core.” In other words, it’s a game player-versus-player-versus-environment game where you fight both NPC enemies and other players to come out on top.

That makes The Duskbloods something of an inversion of Elden Ring Nightreign, which sees players team up together to take on bosses. That makes The Duskbloods a new concept for FromSoft — but a pretty well explored one for games at large. As excited as some players might be to see FromSoft’s take on the concept, it feels rote in a way that the developer’s games usually don’t, more like cashing in on a trend than exploring new territory.

In some ways, it makes a lot of sense for FromSoft to dive deeper into multiplayer. Summoning other players for help has been a huge part of most of its games since Demon’s Souls, and the ability for hostile players to invade your game does give them a little bit of a PvPvE vibe, not to mention the huge dueling community in FromSoft games. While it didn’t feature summons, Armored Core 6 expanded on the popularity of duels, building a fantastic PvP arena mode into the game.

Armored Core 6 may have the most traditional multiplayer mode of any FromSoft game, but its pitch-perfect execution and the sheer speed of the game make it feel like nothing else. And though Demon’s Souls-style summons are just an expected part of FromSoft games at this point, they were genuinely revolutionary when they were first introduced. Along with being able to invade or support other players, FromSoft’s multiplayer experiments include being able to take on the role of a boss that other players will actually fight.

It’s entirely possible that The Duskbloods will have an equally surprising approach to multiplayer and FromSoft is just keeping it under wraps, but the odds of that don’t look good. The PvPvE formula is pretty well established, and the round-based structure of games doesn’t seem to leave much room for anything too wild, since it means the game needs to feel fair and predictable from one match to the next.

A new FromSoft game is always something to look forward to, but there seems to be a lot less that’s actually “new” this time around. Aside from its familiar multiplayer format, The Duskbloods seems to be borrowing even its visual style from Bloodborne, a move that could be intended to reach players still hungry for that sequel that’s seemingly never coming. FromSoft games have generally leaned into dark fantasy, but Bloodborne, Dark Souls, and Elden Ring all have distinct visual styles, and at least from what we’ve seen so far, The Duskbloods seems to borrow a bit too much from the developer’s back catalog.

FromSoft is already leaning into more marketable multiplayer games like NightReign, and even reportedly pursuing a mobile version of Elden Ring by Tencent. In that context, The Duskbloods looks like part of a move away from the wild experimentation that made the studio’s reputation and toward a model of adding a little FromSoft charm to otherwise established genres. I hope I’m wrong, but it seems more and more like we’re heading for an era of FromSoft games being the last thing they should be — safe.