The FromSoftware team were relieved when they heard about the Nintendo Switch 2 since the studio was apparently struggling to get The Duskbloods up and running on the base Switch console, according to game director and subgenre pinoeer Hidetaka Miyazaki.
Speaking to The Verge, Miyazaki says the studio’s upcoming multiplayer game actually began life on the original, much weaker system of Switch consoles back in 2021, years before the world found out about the next-gen handheld hybrid and years before FromSoftware transitioned production to make The Duskbloods a Switch 2 exclusive.
According to him, the Elden Ring and Dark Souls company didn’t have an easy time working with Nintendo’s previous generation of consoles. “We were definitely very happy when we heard about the Switch 2, because we were thinking, ‘How are we going to do this?'” Miyazaki tells the website. “The Switch 2 came along and all of those problems were solved.”
Not only were Nintendo likely providing hefty tech support to the team, Miyazaki also says the publisher helped FromSoftware with another crucial part of the dev process it’s traditionally struggled with.
“The Duskbloods is a challenging game for us,” the famed game developer notes. “There are a lot of new things in terms of designing the systems and the rules, and it requires a lot of fine-tuning and adjustments, and Nintendo has provided a lot of support in that regard. Things like onboarding and tutorials for players are something that we are historically not great at, so the support they’ve provided in that regard has been very, very good and we think that it’s been a great relationship in that sense.”
If there’s anything you can criticize FromSoft games on, it’s their sometimes shoddy performance and arguably obtuse tutorialization – something that’s doubly important in a competitive multiplayer game, and triply so in a game with such a drastically different structure. It’s encouraging to hear Nintendo’s helping smooth over both issues here, then.