FromSoftware president and longtime Souls series director Hidetaka Miyazaki says the studio doesn’t make games to target a specific audience. In his case, he says he just makes the games he wants to see.
Miyazaki discusses his, and the FromSoftware team’s, design philosophy in an interview with IGN. “We don’t really have a set audience in mind at the start,” he says. “It’s very much showing that this is what I wanted to make; the motivation is that this is a game I want to see exist.”
The Duskbloods comes at an unusual time for FromSoftware. 2022’s Elden Ring proved to be the studio’s biggest commercial success – and, to many or most fans, its finest RPG – which is the type of game that many companies would want to make a sequel for, or at least a similar follow-up. But ever since, and for several years now, we haven’t gotten even one of the single-player dark fantasy RPGs that the studio is known for today.
2023 saw Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon, the first-in-a-decade numbered installment in one of FromSoftware’s oldest series. Per our Armored Core 6 review, the game was great – but it (very deliberately) wasn’t more Elden Ring and didn’t scratch the same itch. Ironically, neither did Elden Ring Nightreign, an experimental PvE battle royale of sorts forged from Elden Ring assets in a cave.
The Duskbloods is the studio’s next game, and while it is a dark fantasy action RPG, it’s a multiplayer-first experience with a blend of PvP and PvE. Thanks to a Nintendo partnership, it’s also FromSoftware’s first exclusive game since Bloodborne, making it another outlier in about 13 years of otherwise consistent action hits.
Miyazaki says there was no grand design behind this brief multiplayer bubble, nor has the studio moved away from single-player games. “At the end of the day, our motivation is always to just make a game that we want to play, something we’ve been wanting to make,” he reiterates.
“There was never really any big plan that these two games [Nightreign and The Duskbloods] would both release next to each other,” Miyazaki continues. “I mean, that’s a different director, but both of those ideas just coincided with being multiplayer games. It’s not necessarily some big reveal saying that this is the direction we plan to go moving forward. We still have a heavy focus on single-player content as well. This is just something that happened to work out the way it did.”
The director of Nightreign, Junya Ishizaki, joined by FromSoft producer Yasuhiro Kitao, said as much to me in an interview last year: FromSoftware is dabbling in more multiplayer, but its interest in single-player games hasn’t waned.
However, Miyazaki says it is “very fun to make a multiplayer game like this. It’s not something we’ve done a lot and we’re looking forward to seeing players’ reactions and getting the feedback.”
Separately, he explains that The Duskbloods leverages ideas that were brought up years ago but didn’t suit the likes of Dark Souls or Demon’s Souls.
Similar comments come up in a separate chat with Inven Global, with Miyazaki reaffirming that FromSoftware hasn’t suddenly lost interest in single-player games despite a small string of multiplayer releases.
“Our stance remains unchanged even now: ‘We make the games we want to make,'” he says. “The timing of planning The Duskbloods and the timing of planning by the [Elden Ring] Nightreign team happened to overlap by chance, and Nightreign just happened to be released first, which seems to have led to this misunderstanding.” The Duskbloods actually entered development before Nightreign, which reflects the quick-and-dirty development pipeline that Nightreign seems to have had.