The Duskbloods was announced during the Nintendo Switch 2 showcase as an exclusive title (at least for now), and is already one of the most highly anticipated video game releases for 2026. I mean, what’s not to love? It looks like the Bloodborne spiritual successor we’ve been asking for. The music is insane, as always. The bosses and enemy types look amazingly terrifying.
Oh right, it’s also a multiplayer game.
While there’s still plenty yet to be revealed about The Duskbloods, we know this much for sure: it supports up to eight players and features PvP and PvE scenarios. And that, in my view, might very well be the ultimate deal-breaker for me, especially after having seen what Elden Ring Nightreign has to offer.
To be clear, the issue isn’t strictly about The Duskbloods‘ multiplayer features. I’ve played every Souls game, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring, and have thoroughly enjoyed my co-op and PvP experiences in those games. The unpredictability of an invasion, for instance, is what makes these games so special. As is the cooperative experience, where you’ve spent hours beating your head against a wall, and you finally overcome that seemingly insurmountable boss fight with some jolly cooperation.
The issue arises when multiplayer becomes the core identity of a FromSoft game, as we’ve seen demonstrated in Elden Ring Nightreign. I also want to be clear that I don’t think Nightreign is a bad game per se. It might have its shortcomings here and there that make it difficult for me to recommend it wholeheartedly, but by and large, I see the appeal and I even enjoyed it, once I got over the steep learning curve.
That being said, the multiplayer rogue-lite nature of Nightreign completely goes against what I believe to be the core design philosophy of Elden Ring. FromSoftware has always excelled at creating intricate, hand-crafted RPG experiences. The verticality of Lordran’s level design is genius and still holds up to this day, and the loop of exploring an area for hours to finally find that one incredible shortcut that takes you all the way back to the beginning of a level will forever be compelling.
Nightreign has none of that because it’s not supposed to be that kind of game. And now, with The Duskbloods seemingly doubling down on that multiplayer philosophy, I’m afraid I’ll end up feeling disappointed with this one, too.
The Duskbloods trailer opened with quick shots of various different player characters, all with varying builds. This is a step up from Nightreign at least, where build variety was severely limited. It also supports up to eight players, which suggests that we could end up in a battle royale type situation where all players are tasked with hunting each other down. As someone who’s never particularly enjoyed that genre, having it shoehorned into my FromSoft RPG sounds a bit like a nightmare when I just wanna be back in the Hunter’s Dream, man.
While it’s unlikely that The Duskbloods will feature restrictive time constraints like Nightreign does, it being a multiplayer game does imply that there’ll be less room for truly exciting exploration. Will I just be constantly jumping into fights with seven other players? Will the PvE scenarios be similar to Nightreign, where we’re just rushing from boss to boss or fighting off enemy hordes?
Even without all these initial concerns, there’s also the fact that FromSoft has never really inspired much confidence when it comes to multiplayer. The developer is notorious for having unstable netcode in the Souls games and Elden Ring with hit delays and lag. Nightreign was also missing some core features like duo queues, and still relies on the archaic (though charming in single-player games) function of setting matching passwords.
I can’t help but hope that I’ll be wrong, and that The Duskbloods will end up separating out its multiplayer modes from the main game. Or, at least, make it so that the eight-player PvP is optional and the entire game is about exploring a beautiful Gothic city with some friends in co-op. I could be down for that.
Elden Ring Nightreign is now available on consoles and PC. The Duskbloods is set to be released for the Switch 2 in 2026.
