Rumor: FromSoftware Has Been Secretly Cheating on Us With Nintendo Since 2019
It turns out Hidetaka Miyazaki has been living a double life, and his mistress is a Nintendo console.
If you thought Elden Ring was the only thing FromSoftware was stressing over for the last half-decade, you were wrong. According to new rumors circulating from a credible Chinese journalist, the studio’s upcoming Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive, The Duskbloods, has been in active development since before 2019.
The report claims this game spent the "longest time on gameplay prototyping" of any FromSoftware title. The reason? It contains so many "innovative elements" that they basically had to reinvent their own wheel.
For context, Sekiro came out in 2019. That means while we were learning to parry Genichiro and getting our asses kicked by Malenia, a B-team at FromSoft was quietly building a multiplayer vampire nightmare for Nintendo.
The "Switch 1" Origin Story
This actually lines up perfectly with previous interviews where Miyazaki admitted the game started as a Switch 1 title. It began as a "loose string of ideas" presented to Nintendo years ago. But just as the game started taking shape, Nintendo pulled a classic Nintendo move and whispered "Switch 2" in their ears.
The team reportedly revamped the entire development path to take advantage of the new hardware’s online capabilities. This explains why a game greenlit six years ago is only just now surfacing as a 2026 title. They essentially had to hold the door for the console itself.
Wait, It’s a Hero Shooter?
If you missed the fine print, The Duskbloods isn't just "Dark Souls with Vampires." It is weirdly closer to a hero shooter.
Unlike Elden Ring where you build a wretch from scratch, here you choose from over a dozen pre-set characters. These "Bloodsworn" come with their own unique weapons and abilities. One guy might have a massive axe and a grapple, while another is flying around with a steampunk jetpack.
It sounds terrifying on paper. A "FromSoftware Hero Shooter" sounds like a corporate buzzword salad from hell. But if they have spent six years prototyping it, maybe they actually cracked the code on how to make pre-set characters feel as deep as a custom build.
The Chaos of "First Blood"
The gameplay loop is where that six-year prototyping time probably went. It is a PvPvE hybrid where up to eight players fight for "First Blood."
But it isn't a simple Battle Royale. The victory conditions shift mid-match. One minute you are stabbing another player in the back, and the next minute a giant moon monster appears and you are forced to team up to kill it.
It sounds chaotic, experimental, and exactly the kind of thing that would require half a decade of testing to balance.
The Performance Anxiety
The big question mark is performance. We are talking about FromSoftware, a studio famous for stuttering frame rates on high-end PCs, making an online multiplayer game for a handheld console.
As one comment brutally put it, this game combines realistic graphics, Nintendo netcode, and the FromSoftware engine. That is a recipe for a slideshow. But if they really have been polishing this thing for six years, maybe it won't run like Blighttown on a toaster. We can dream.
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