Creator’s Voice blog: Hidetaka Miyazaki on The Duskbloods (part 1)
5 April 2025
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Get the inside scoop on The Duskbloods in this interview with the director, Hidetaka Miyazaki of FromSoftware.
My name is Hidetaka Miyazaki. I work at FromSoftware (1), and I am the director for The Duskbloods.
(1) FromSoftware, Inc.: A game development and publishing company. They have developed games such as Elden Ring™ and have released Dark Souls™: Remastered on Nintendo Switch.
A while back, we had the opportunity to meet with Nintendo to discuss ideas, and during this discussion, we presented a rough outline for The Duskbloods.
It was still very bare-bones at the time—more a loose string of ideas than a proper presentation. The concept itself was different from anything we had done before, and Nintendo seemed very interested in helping make it a reality. So that’s when the project kicked off.
At first it was being worked on by a small team as a title for Nintendo Switch. However just as the game started to take shape, we were approached by Nintendo with talk of Switch 2, which led us to revamp our development path with this new hardware in mind.
The new hardware’s focus on online features allowed us to stay as true to the original vision as possible, which was very good news for us.
In terms of structure, we consider it a PvPvE (2) title. At its core, it’s an online multiplayer* focused game, with both player vs player and player vs enemy gameplay.
(2) An acronym referring to a style of fighting where, in addition to players fighting each other, players also fight enemies (CPUs) that appear in the game.
Yes, I’ve always found the PvPvE structure very interesting. It allows for a broad range of game-design ideas, while also letting us leverage our experience of designing challenging enemy encounters.
As a side note, please allow me to address one thing. As previously mentioned, this is an online multiplayer title at its core, but this doesn’t mean that we as a company have decided to shift to a more multiplayer-focused direction with titles going forward.
The Nintendo Switch 2 version of Elden Ring (3) was also announced, and we still intend to actively develop single player focused games such as this that embrace our more traditional style.
(3) Nintendo Switch 2 software planned for release in 2025. Elden Ring is a fantasy action RPG set in a massive open world, where you develop your character according to your playstyle.
The game’s protagonists, or characters controlled by the player, are known as “Bloodsworn.” The Bloodsworn are a group whose members have achieved super-human abilities through the power of special blood. As a general concept, they’re similar to vampires, but they are not portrayed as the horrifying monsters you might associate with traditional vampirism.
We tried to extract the sort of romantic aspects we found interesting from concepts such as vampires and “blood” and reinterpreted them as the Bloodsworn.
In The Duskbloods, the Bloodsworn are competing for something known as “First Blood.” As human society reaches an end, First Blood flows in an event known as the “Twilight of Humanity.” The Bloodsworn are summoned to the Twilight of Humanity across a variety of different times and places in a bid to obtain First Blood.
Due to this, 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.
The Duskbloods directly refers to the Bloodsworn themselves. As mentioned earlier, the Bloodsworn are summoned to the Twilight of Humanity in a battle for First Blood. “Duskbloods” is a collective term for these characters controlled by the player.
It sounds like blood plays a pretty big role in the game.
Yes. In the context of this game, blood is used more conceptually, as opposed to literal meanings like physical depictions of injury.
Blood symbolizes one of the game’s key themes—the history it holds, the power it passes on, the fates it weaves and the marker of those who have surpassed the limitations of their own humanity.
Read more in Part 2: Superhuman abilities and opportunistic behavior
*Any Nintendo Switch Online membership (sold separately) and Nintendo Account required for online features. Membership auto-renews after initial term at the then-current price unless canceled. Not available in all countries. Internet access required for online features. Terms apply. nintendo.com/switch-online
