FromSoftware Has Not Left Single-Player Behind, Miyazaki Says

Hidetaka Miyazaki says the two multiplayer games FromSoftware has shipped and announced back to back are a coincidence rather than a plan.

"We still have a heavy focus on single-player content as well."

— Hidetaka Miyazaki

Speaking to IGN ahead of The Duskbloods network test, the studio president and director of the game was asked whether Elden Ring: Nightreign and a PvPvE follow-up signal where the team is heading. He said they do not.

He added that no one at the studio set out to release the two next to each other, and that the timing worked out the way it did on its own. The Duskbloods came out of a pile of ideas that had built up over years, many of them drawn from board games and tabletop RPGs, which Miyazaki said never fit the context of a single-player game. Building one gave him somewhere to put them.

"Personally, it's very fun to make a multiplayer game like this."

— Hidetaka Miyazaki

He also said the studio has not done much of this and is waiting on player reactions, and that spending a long stretch on a multiplayer project mostly makes him want to go back to a single-player one. A souls-like built around PvPvE reads as the most interesting thing FromSoftware has tried in years, and I would rather see the studio test that idea than ship another variation on the same solo run. FromSoftware's record on servers is the part I trust least, and this weekend is where that gets checked.

Kadokawa, FromSoftware's parent company, has spent the year under public pressure. Its head survived a shareholder vote on his position after an activist investor argued the company has failed to make enough of Elden Ring, which has sold 30 million copies since 2022. What has followed it are the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion in 2024 and Elden Ring: Nightreign in 2025, both built on the same game. Miyazaki addressed that pressure in June, saying FromSoftware can still make the games it wants without excessive interference. On a direct sequel he has been narrower: in December 2024 he said the studio was not considering Elden Ring 2, while leaving the door open.

The Duskbloods closed beta test on Switch 2 runs from 21 to 24 August, and the entry requirements cut the pool hard: a Switch 2 and an active Switch Online membership. Registration opened on 22 July, closed six days later, and selected players heard back on 7 August. The servers run inside five fixed windows, two of which start at 3am BST, so anyone who sleeps through a slot loses the session. Matches hold up to eight players, in line with the PvPvE format FromSoftware confirmed in 2025, and the studio said in advance that bugs are likely and balance is unfinished. Players take the role of Bloodsworn, vampiric fighters chasing the First Blood during an event the studio calls the Twilight of Humanity, and the game keeps no fixed era or place: Gothic and Victorian maps sit beside later settings, one of them glimpsed in the trailer with a train running through it. The reveal at the Switch 2 Direct in April 2025 mixed jetpacks, steampunk hardware and a clock tower, and the game stayed out of sight for 14 months before June's Nintendo Direct promised a test for summer.

A day before it opened, gameplay leaks hit social media after 4Gamer posted footage by accident; someone reuploaded it to Bilibili, and the original came down. The clip covers the last seconds rather than the first: three players fighting on a rooftop under a red moon, dashing, double jumping and dropping into aerial attacks, calling in computer-controlled allies, one of them turning into a large velociraptor for a short burst of damage. A cinematic closes it with the winner raising a grail toward the moon. Nintendo and FromSoftware have said nothing about the footage.

Anyone joining on Friday already knows how a match finishes, which is the one thing the build was there to show in play. Movement in the clip runs quicker than the studio's usual combat, closer to an arena game than to a Souls fight, and eight players in that space will put more weight on the connection than on the animation.

Elden Ring: Nightreign is the other half of the argument that FromSoftware has gone multiplayer, and it is still growing. The game drew more than 3.5 million players in its first week, with an all-time peak of 313,593. Its next chapter, The Forsaken Hollows DLC, arrives on 4 December on every platform running the base game, announced during Sony's most recent State of Play. Artorias returns, the Dancing Lion comes back from Shadow of the Erdtree, and a new field boss variant of the Gladius Nightlord joins them. Two Nightfarers are added: the Scholar, an academic who reads the battlefield, and the Undertaker, an abbess built around faith and strength. A new Shifting Earth event called The Great Hollow drops players into the ruins of an ancient civilisation, where crystal formations leak a life-draining miasma.

Elden Ring on Switch 2 is due in the same window. Kadokawa listed Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition and The Duskbloods together in its financial report as 2026 Switch 2 releases, and Nintendo has repeated that the schedule holds. Tarnished Edition was originally set for late 2025, then pushed after reports that it ran poorly on the hardware, and the version now coming bundles the base game with Shadow of the Erdtree and adds two classes. Neither company has named a month for The Duskbloods, and a slip into 2027 is still possible.

The single-player game Miyazaki points to has not been announced or dated, and his comments to IGN are the only public sign it is a priority. What the Duskbloods test produces this weekend, on servers running in four-hour blocks, is the nearest thing to evidence anyone gets this month.

Read also, filming on the Elden Ring movie has wrapped: director Alex Garland and producers Allon Reich, Matthew Penry-Davey, Peter Rice, Andrew Macdonald and Charlie Reed thanked the cast and crew in a since-deleted post from prop maker Sean Schofield. The adaptation now moves into post-production ahead of a premiere set for 3 March 2028.