It’s been over a year since we first got a look at Elden Ring developer FromSoftware’s fascinatingly weird multiplayer adventure The Duskbloods, but finally – after its publisher stepped in to offer assurances that it’s still out this year – it’s reappeared. There’s still no release date, mind, with its latest showing merely confirming a closed playtest is coming to Switch 2 this “summer”.
The Duskbloods was originally announced during Nintendo’s big Switch 2 unveiling last April, and immediately intrigued with what appeared to be a strange mix of FromSoftware classics Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Dark Souls, with jetpacks and dinosaurs chucked in for good measure. Questions were raised, and FromSoftware boss Hidetaka Miyazaki followed up The Duskbloods’ reveal with a short interview that offered a few additional answers.
At the time, we learned its PvPvE action casts players as vampire-like creatures known as Bloodsworn, all competing for the mysterious First Blood in an event known as the Twilight of Humanity. “Due to this,” Miyazaki explained, “there is no fixed era or location in which The Duskbloods takes place. There are more traditional Gothic- or Victorian-style maps as well as those depicting the closing years of the early modern period, like the one glimpsed in the trailer with the train running through it.”
Some 14 months later, The Duskbloods is back, giving a fresh – albeit it extremely brief – look at its action. But the big news, for now at least, is that playtest. It’s coming to Switch 2 relatively soon, it sounds like, with FromSoftware currently targeting this “summer”. That’s all we know so far, though, so the waiting game begins anew.
