The international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement are calling on people to cancel Game Pass subscriptions, avoid Microsoft-owned video game properties such as Minecraft and Call Of Duty, and boycott all Microsoft Gaming and Xbox-branded products in protest at the company’s reported business connections with the Israeli military.
FromSoftware unveiled a new exclusive for Nintendo’s new console during this week’s Switch 2 Direct. The Duskbloods had an ominous trailer, showing lots of action, horrors, and magic. In a new interview, we’re now learning much more about FromSoft’s plans for this multiplayer experience.
Nintendo posted a three-part interview series with The Duskbloods director Hidetaka Miyazaki, going over what The Duskbloods is, and how it’s different from other FromSoftware games.
Despite the multiplayer PvPvE focus, Miyazaki has assured fans that FromSoftware will keep making single-player focused games. But with The Duskbloods, the studio is experimenting, with everything from general game type to having a cute hub keeper.
Here are some of the major takeaways we’ve learned about The Duskbloods from this new set of interviews.
While the name, aesthetic, and constant mention of blood might bring to mind another FromSoftware title, Miyazaki said The Duskbloods refers to the Bloodsworn themselves. These Bloodsworn—the characters players control—are people who have achieved superhuman abilities through special blood, similar to vampires.
“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,” Miyazaki said.
The Duskblood is a collective term for these characters, who all partake in a bid for First Blood, which flows during an event known as the “Twilight of Humanity.”
Because the Twilight of Humanity takes place across different times and locales, there is no “fixed era or location” to pin down when or where 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,” Miyazaki said.
In a manner that sounds similar to the upcoming Elden Ring Nightreign, players can choose from “over a dozen” characters in The Duskbloods. Each character can also be customized, and you’ll swap between those options in a main hub area.
While characters will each have their own abilities, it sounds like some skills are universal. The Bloodsworn fighters are essentially superhuman, so they can sprint, super jump, and double jump. Additionally, every character is equipped with “some means of attacking from a distance,” which Miyazaki said he feels is one of The Duskblood’s “unique aspects” when compared with previous FromSoftware games.
A key component of The Duskbloods is the PvPvE set-up. Online matches support up to eight players, vying for a win. Miyazaki said online matches are “generally” last player standing, but there are “certain cases where victory conditions differ.” He gave the example of players being tasked with teaming up to take down a powerful boss, or “other special circumstances.”
“Regardless of whether it’s PvP or PvE, the idea is to provide players with an experience that allows them to learn and hone their skills as they play,” Miyazaki said. “We’ve therefore designed the PvE boss encounters to present a tough challenge and a sense of accomplishment upon defeating them.”
Obtaining “Victory Points,” which ultimately decide the outcome of a match, can happen in a few different ways. Direct combat is one, but engaging in more “opportunistic behavior” is also an option. And Miyazaki noted that when players return to the hub after a match, they receive a reward whether they won or lost.
There will be world events through the event system, which has the potential to shake up a match. This can range from special enemy spawns to additional objectives, all with bonus rewards offered.
Miyazaki drew attention to a portion of The Duskbloods trailer, where a giant stone face loomed in the sky. “This is one example of the events that can occur in a match,” Miyazaki said. “In this case, the appearance of this stone face affects the environment and changes match rewards, which can have an immediate impact on player motivations and objectives.”
While First Blood is something worth chasing, Miyazaki said there will also be “personal objectives” to provide separate rewards for players.
It’s unclear whether these fully tie into another system Miyazaki also mentioned, called “roles.” While online, roles offer players unique circumstances and opportunities to interact with each other. He outlined a few examples, like the “Destined Rival,” which tasks a player with finding and defeating another player. Doing this will count as a personal goal, separate from the overall victory conditions.
Roles can be assigned to characters through customization, so players can roleplay a bit and, as Miyazaki said, add to the “drama” of these engagements.
FromSoftware is no stranger to putting some deep lore in its games. And there will, of course, be lore in The Duskbloods.
“One thing I love doing in any game I direct is leaving fragments of lore and worldbuilding details, allowing the player the fun of using their imagination to make connections,” Miyazaki said. “The Duskbloods is no exception to this.”
However, for The Duskbloods, Miyazaki said the team is going about it a little differently from previous games. Fragments are found in character customization items, the “blood history and fate.” Customizing characters, analyzing and altering their blood history and fate, will reveal more information about the world and its story.
“Focusing these elements on the concept of ‘blood’ or ‘blood history and fate’ allowed for a deeper exploration of customization and is another reason we placed the Bloodsworn as the protagonists,” Miyazaki said.
FromSoftware is certainly painting an interesting picture, but we’ll have to wait a little bit to see the image fully realized, as The Duskbloods is currently planned to be a Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive sometime in 2026.
For now, you can check out more info about the Switch 2 by reading over our first-hands on with Nintendo’s newest console, or read up on the sudden delay of Switch 2 pre-orders here.
Eric is a freelance writer for IGN.
Eremite Studios and Hooded Horse’s bestest best city-builder Against The Storm is getting a free update and a new paid expansion, featuring a new biome, mechanics and faction. Details are thin on the ground, but we can safely say that it’ll involve bats. I know: bats! Let the wannabe Hunter S. Thompson write-ups abound. Back in the halycon days of New Games Journalism we’d have had a field day with this. Come now, help me word this introduction more appropriately: “we were somewhere around the Smouldering City, on the edge of the Blightstorm, when the DLC packs began to take hold…”
HD Rumble in the Jungle.
The whirlwind reveal and showcase of the Switch 2 hardware and software was a complete blowout. So many ports! A brand new Donkey Kong game! The C button actually does something! Sure, there were some pretty big issues in the fine print, but I think there’s something that Nintendo massively undersold and didn’t even really talk about much until we got some hands-on time with the games.
How many people actually leave the rumble or vibration on? With the Switch, I think I turned it off long ago because I’m always worried about the battery life of the console or the Joy-Con. The Pro Controller is different, but I also have it turned off there. It’s just how it’s always been, and since controllers have largely gone wireless, that’s how I’ve always been. Apart from the haptics of the PS5 Dual Sense, which, poor thing, has been more susceptible to drift and quick-draining battery than any other controller I’ve owned in my life.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Last week, we asked you share the epic landscapes of feudal Japan in Assassin’s Creed Shadows using #PSshare #PSBlog. Here are this week’s highlights:
irmarie_diaz shares Naoe riding a horse through agricultural fields in the fall.
visualcam9 shares Naoe wandering through cherry blossoms
RivalsUniverse shares sunlight streaming through a bamboo forest
DexM_ds shares Naoe perched atop an icy winter landscape
TakaSanGames shares a castle surrounded by cherry blossoms
tim14009498 shares Naoe atop a roof overlooking a settlement in fall
Search #PSshare #PSBlog on Twitter or Instagram to see more entries to this week’s theme. Want to be featured in the next Share of the Week?
THEME: Heights
SUBMIT BY: 11:59 PM PT on April 9, 2025
Next week, look down below. Share breathtaking moments taken from great heights in the game of your choice using #PSshare #PSBlog for a chance to be featured.
City-building can be an exhausting affair, once you’ve evolved beyond the initial joy of cottage windows lighting up at night and start having to deal with things like traffic congestion and rubbish collectors going on strike. As such, it’s nice to play a city builder in which you can rest easy in the knowledge that any urban sprawl you engineer will soon be obliterated. It’s even nicer that said city builder is free.
Nintendo has taken the unprecedented decision to delay Switch 2 pre-orders in the U.S., blaming the impact of Trump’s tariffs and “evolving market conditions.”
Pre-orders were set to go live in the U.S. on April 9. Nintendo did not share an updated kick-off date, but did promise that the June 5, 2025 release date of the Switch 2 itself remains intact.
Nintendo issued IGN the following statement:
Pre-orders for Nintendo Switch 2 in the U.S. will not start April 9, 2025 in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions. Nintendo will update timing at a later date. The launch date of June 5, 2025 is unchanged.
Nintendo announced the Switch 2 at $449.99, with a Mario Kart World bundle priced $499.99. Mario Kart World itself is priced $79.99.
Nintendo’s statement issued today raises the prospect that it could hike the price of the Switch 2 and its games further amid what is already an angry backlash to its next-gen pricing strategy.
Speaking in a video on their YouTube channel, former Nintendo of America PR managers Kit Ellis and Krysta Yang criticized Nintendo for the way it revealed the $449.99 price of the Switch 2 and the $79.99 price of Mario Kart World following this week’s Nintendo Direct.
“I don’t want to blow things out of proportion, but this does feel like a true crisis moment for Nintendo,” Ellis said.
U.S. markets tumbled today after China hit back against Donald Trump’s raft of tariffs. China, which faces a 54% import tax, has retaliated with an additional 34% tax on U.S. goods from next week.
Moments before the U.S. markets opened, Trump said “China played it wrong, they panicked,” and insisted his policies would “never change.”
The world is now left facing economic uncertainty, with some mainstream news media declaring the era of cheap goods now over for the American consumer. Some economists are predicting higher tariffs will automatically pass through to inflation and higher prices.
For more, check out everything announced at the Switch 2 Nintendo Direct, and what the experts have to say about the Switch 2 price and Mario Kart World’s $80 price tag.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
Last year Assassin’s Creed Shadows associate game director Simon Lemay-Comtois made headlines by revealing that Ubisoft’s latest open world game had a “smaller” map than its predecessor, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. He compared it instead to Assassin’s Creed Origins, which recreates roughly 80 square kilometres of ancient Egypt, next to Valhalla’s exhausting 250 square kilometre expanse of land and sea.
That story sparked a couple of thoughts for me. A surge of relief, of course, because life is short and video games are often far too long. And secondly, the realisation that I don’t really know what “bigger” and “smaller” mean in a video game, and I’m not sure anybody else does either.
FromSoftware has shared some more info about its recently announced Switch 2 exclusive, The Duskbloods. The partnership with Nintendo seemed to affect not just the style of game FromSoft is making, but even the design of the keeper of The Duskbloods’ hub area into something different — something… cute.
The trailer shown during the Switch 2 Direct this week closed on a shot of a winged rat character, with glowing glyphs drawn all over it, looking at the camera. Curious fans might have wondered what this rat’s deal was. As it turns out, this is our new hub companion.
“That character shares a similar role with the fire keepers from the Dark Souls series. They remain in the hub area, providing the player with advice and guidance,” director Hidetaka Miyazaki said in an interview with Nintendo.
“I suppose you could say we tried doing something a little Nintendo-esque in the spirit of the partnership.”
When asked what Miyazaki means by that, he added: “We tried something cute for a change. Although I will say this character is actually an elderly gentleman (laughter).”
FromSoftware’s shrine keepers have been central figures for player’s journeys through their worlds. Familiar faces like Melina, the Maiden in Black, the Doll, and others are characters you return to over and over on your trip, often offering power to help you move forward.
With a PvPvE game like The Duskbloods, though, it remains to be seen what kind of advice and guidance the winged rat will offer. Miyazaki said the team at FromSoft has tried its hands at introducing “a lot of new and interesting ideas,” so expect the unexpected when it hits Nintendo Switch 2 sometime in 2026.
We’ve got plenty more on The Duskbloods, including Bloodborne fan reaction, and Miyazaki’s comments on whether FromSoft plans to leave single-player behind.
Meanwhile, if you’re looking for more Switch 2 news, check out our first hands-on with Nintendo’s newest console, its big launch title Mario Kart World, and the upcoming Donkey Kong Bananza.
Eric is a freelance writer for IGN.
I cannot review Psycho Patrol R in any way that matters. I could approach this mech-piloting, bullet-hungry immersive policing sim like any other first-person shooter with RPG elements, and tell you about its levels, storytelling, and gamey features. Or I could evaluate it on its own terms, as a piece of hallucinogenic hypercapitalist critique wrapped in a kevlar jacket of impenetrable irony whose own €39 price tag appears to be part of the joke. Neither approach is going to work. Psycho Patrol R requires a buy-in of brain rot and an almost memetic openness to mania. You’ll need to play it to better misunderstand it.
