Miyazaki Confirms FromSoftware Wants to Go Back to Single-Player Games After The Duskbloods and Nightreign

Hidetaka Miyazaki is not subtle when he means something, so when he tells IGN in a hands-on interview that FromSoftware is keen to make single-player games again after shipping The Duskbloods and Elden Ring: Nightreign back to back, the smart money is to read it as it was plainly said. The studio that built Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Elden Ring is publicly admitting that two multiplayer swings in a row has left the team hungry to go back to the kind of game it is famous for. That is a much bigger headline than it looks at first glance, because The Duskbloods is the first major FromSoft project in a decade that does not have a single-player mode as its spine, and the director just used that gap to tell fans the next thing is almost certainly going to feel like home.

What Miyazaki actually said

Talking to IGN’s Michael Higham through a translator, Miyazaki framed the back-to-back release of Elden Ring: Nightreign and The Duskbloods as a coincidence, not a pivot. Quote: “It’s funny because there was never really any big plan that these two games [Nightreign and The Duskbloods] would both release next to each other. 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.” And then the line that matters: “But it’s like, the more you work on something multiplayer for a long time, if anything, it scratches that itch only to want to make something single-player again.” That is not a PR non-answer. That is a director telling you what is on his desk next.

He also pushed back on the framing that FromSoftware is becoming a multiplayer studio. “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,” Miyazaki said. He pointed to a backlog of ideas that piled up over single-player projects and could not find a home there, which is how The Duskbloods got pitched to Nintendo in the first place. Translation: Duskbloods is the scratchpad. The next big FromSoft game is the real thing.

The Duskbloods itself, and why this is not a multiplayer pivot

The Duskbloods is a Switch 2 exclusive built with Nintendo in a PvPvE format with up to eight players, mixing player-versus-environment objectives with player-versus-player brawls in a gothic Bloodsworn lineup. It is also the first FromSoft online game that does not sit on top of a Souls-shaped single-player campaign, and Miyazaki described it as an outlet for ideas that did not fit in a solo game rather than a template for what comes next. “Over time, a lot of those ideas piled up, things that you wish you could have done here and there,” he said. “Having an outlet for them, somewhere we can find a place where they all fit, or can be made to fit specifically in that multiplayer context, is something that was always at the forefront of my mind.” Read that again. The Duskbloods is not FromSoft’s future. It is FromSoft’s recycling bin, with a Nintendo co-developer stamp on it.

It is also worth noting that The Duskbloods’s first closed network test this weekend went badly. FromSoftware pulled the session on Friday after login and server issues hit, apologized in Japanese and Portuguese within hours, and promised to keep iterating across the five-day test window. That kind of stumble is the exact reason Miyazaki is hedging his bets. He is not betting the studio’s identity on a game that has to hold eight players and a tutorial at the same time, and he just said so out loud.

Community reaction: relief more than hype

Reaction across the Souls community is mostly relief. The Duskbloods preview trailer has been generating “interesting but I miss solo runs” energy since the Switch 2 Direct reveal, and the news that Miyazaki still considers single-player the studio’s center of gravity is being read as a quiet promise that the next FromSoft announcement will not be another roguelike spin on Elden Ring. That is the right read. The studio’s last fully single-player project, Elden Ring in 2022, sold over 25 million copies and is still the reference point for what an open-world action RPG is supposed to feel like. Anyone betting the company on The Duskbloods’s PvP hook is betting against the studio’s own resume.

The Critical Pixel take

The single best thing about this interview is that Miyazaki bothered to say it. FromSoft does not usually pre-announce what it is not doing, and it almost never tells fans what is on the whiteboard. The fact that he used this Duskbloods preview to draw a hard line between “multiplayer experiment” and “studio direction” is itself the story. The Duskbloods gets to be weird, it gets to be PvPvE, it gets to borrow FromSoft’s weapon feel for a Nintendo-flavored battle royale. Fine. The next project does not have to apologize for being a 60-hour solo run through a poisoned cathedral with a busted save file at the end. If anything, Miyazaki just gave the entire single-player FromSoft audience permission to skip Duskbloods on day one without feeling like they are abandoning the studio. The Souls crowd already had that permission. Now they have it on the record.