The Duskbloods Playtest Falls Apart on Day One

FromSoftware closed the first session of The Duskbloods network test less than two hours after it opened. Players who logged in at 6:00 a.m. EDT never got past the title screen. The game returned a login error, and selecting OK sent the console into a loading screen for a couple of minutes before the same message came back.

FromSoftware confirmed the shutdown on its official X account, saying the session had been closed early because of server problems. A second session was scheduled for 7:00 p.m. EDT the same day, and the studio has not said clearly whether it will go ahead. The remaining windows run from 22 to 24 August.

Failing on day one is what these events are for. The point of a network test is to put load on live servers before launch and find what breaks, and the servers broke immediately, which is information FromSoftware did not have yesterday. A test that collapses in hour one is doing its job, and I would rather this happen now than in the week the game ships.

The failure lands on a smaller pool than most tests get. Entry required a Switch 2 and an active Switch Online membership, so the crowd stressing the servers was already cut down before anyone reached the login screen. The Duskbloods Playtest schedule made it tighter still: five fixed windows, two of them starting at 3am BST, with no way to make up a missed slot. Registration closed on 28 July and selected players heard back on 7 August, which means a queue of people who applied a month ago spent this morning reading the same error message.

Matches in the build hold up to eight players, in line with the PvPvE format FromSoftware confirmed in 2025. The studio said in advance that bugs were likely and that balance was unfinished, and that warning covered the game rather than the infrastructure around it. What went down was the layer between the player and the match.

Gameplay leaks put the final seconds of a match online a day before the servers opened, after 4Gamer posted footage by accident and someone reuploaded it to Bilibili. The clip shows three players fighting on a rooftop under a red moon, dashing, double jumping and calling in computer-controlled allies, with one turning into a large velociraptor for a short burst of damage, before a cinematic hands the winner a grail. Nintendo and FromSoftware have said nothing about that footage either.

Servers running in four-hour blocks give FromSoftware perhaps eight hours of usable load testing before Monday, assuming the fixes land. Anyone who applied for a Friday slot and got nothing has no claim on the Saturday and Sunday sessions.

The game underneath all of this is still undated. Kadokawa listed The Duskbloods among its 2026 Switch 2 releases and Nintendo has repeated that the schedule holds, but neither company has named a month, and a slip into 2027 stays possible. Elden Ring on Switch 2 sits in the same 2026 listing, with Tarnished Edition bundling Shadow of the Erdtree and two new classes after a delay for performance work.

The studio's other lane is unchanged, going by what Miyazaki said about single-player games this week.

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

— Hidetaka Miyazaki

He told IGN that Elden Ring: Nightreign and The Duskbloods arriving back to back was a coincidence, not a direction. The Duskbloods came from ideas drawn from board games and tabletop RPGs that never fit a solo game, and he said long stretches on multiplayer mostly make him want to build a single-player one again.

I do not own a Switch 2 (waiting for OLED), so today cost me nothing except the clips I wanted to see, and the players who cleared both the hardware barrier and the application draw are the ones who paid for it. My read is that a studio whose online history is mostly asynchronous ghosts and summon signs is now learning what eight-player sessions do to a server, in public, on a console with one shot at this launch.