FromSoftware's Next Game Asks You to Fight Seven Other Players, and Sign-Ups Just Opened

The Duskbloods was revealed on April 2, 2025 at the Nintendo Switch 2 Direct, and it is directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki, the same person who steered Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring. It is a multiplayer action game for up to eight players that mixes PvP and PvE, set during an event the game calls the Twilight of Humanity. Players take on the role of Bloodsworn, vampire-inspired fighters with superhuman abilities, moving through a world that leans hard on Gothic, Victorian, and early modern imagery. If that sounds like Bloodborne pointed at other players, the resemblance is not an accident.

We have not played it, so this is not a verdict on how it feels. There has been very little extended gameplay shown, and a network test exists precisely because the parts that matter here, matchmaking, connection stability, and balance across eight players, are the parts you cannot judge from a trailer. What is confirmed is the shape: a session-based brawl where combat and objectives decide a winner, wearing FromSoftware's art direction.

Registration is open now through July 28 on the official campaign site, where you sign in with your Nintendo Account to apply. You will need an active Nintendo Switch Online subscription attached to that account. Applications do not work first-come for the slot itself in the sense of a queue you can win by refreshing, but FromSoftware has said sign-ups are not a guarantee, so getting in is a lottery, not a purchase.

Selected participants are emailed on August 7, and the play sessions start on August 21, spread across multiple time slots so testers in different regions can connect. If you want to be one of the first people to actually put hands on the game, this window is the only confirmed way in for now.

FromSoftware has been inching toward multiplayer for a while. Elden Ring Nightreign was the co-op experiment, a three-player survival spin on the studio's biggest world, and it worked well enough to prove the team could build around other players instead of around solitude. The Duskbloods is the bolder version of that bet: not co-op grafted onto a single-player game, but a game designed from the start to be about the other seven people in the lobby, directed by Miyazaki himself, and locked to one console.

A network test is also a tell. Studios run them when the technical risk lives in the servers and the netcode, which is to say when a game's success depends on things that have never been FromSoftware's headline strength. Whether the studio's brutal, deliberate combat translates into something that stays fun when a stranger is trying to end your run is the real question, and it is one nobody can answer until the game is in more hands. For now, the honest read is simple: the most interesting thing FromSoftware has done in years is ask to test a game unlike anything it has shipped, and the sign-up sheet is live.