Some elements in The Duskbloods were pulled straight from director Hidetaka Miyazaki’s experiences playing tabletop RPGs, which might just explain why you can propose to an enemy player mid-match.
Speaking to IGN, FromSoftware boss and game director Hidetaka Miyazaki says “there are two points I would say that can specifically be pulled from the board games.” Instead of winning multiplayer matches by simply beating everyone else to a pulp, The Duskbloods asks players to earn Virtue by completing side objectives or killing mini bosses that stomp around the map or holding king of the hill-style zones, let’s say.
“That’s something that isn’t as direct as just battling against each other, right? It’s not directly a PvP thing. It’s a common system in a lot of board games and something that through my own experience of playing board games has definitely rubbed off on me and it’s been something that I’ve constantly thought about. I didn’t watch those a lot,” Miyazaki explains.
The second bit of TTRPG inspiration came from the game’s Sigil system, which essentially creates match-specific relationships and objectives between players. One Sigil might let you propose to another player with a bouquet of flowers – naturally, they can reply with the pointy end of their sword – while a different Sigil might put you at odds with a specific enemy player.
Miyazaki calls the system “very similar to a lot of RPG elements you might find in a tabletop RPG,” although, “in the past when I played games like that, a lot of it was basically rolling dice to determine certain aspects of your character, and that was pretty much the extent of it.” With The Duskbloods, Miyazaki “wanted to have a way of controlling not just that, but the relationships between players and a variety of other elements that might be out of the scope of a TTRPG.”
The Duskbloods’ closed network playtests are rolling out now before it comes out in full sometime later this year as a Switch 2 exclusive.