The Duskbloods Could Have Been a ‘Cute’ Nintendo Game

FromSoftware’s new game The Duskbloods is steeped in the developer’s established aesthetic. It’s a dark, Victorian Gothic world that can occasionally get a little weird — it has steam trains, dinosaurs, and a giant frog lady. But the earliest version of what would become The Duskbloods was quite different, game director Hidetaka Miyazaki revealed in an interview earlier this month. He said that the game’s art style has changed “drastically” since the project started in 2021, when FromSoftware pitched something that was more “Nintendo.”

Polygon recently attended a roundtable Q&A with Miyazaki, where the game director was asked what has changed over the past five years of The Duskbloods‘ development.

“In terms of something that has changed quite drastically, at the very, very start of development, we were playing around with the idea of having the characters be sort of short, almost like three head-lengths tall,” Miyazaki said through a translator. “Working with Nintendo, we were thinking maybe that would be a better fit.”

Miyazaki didn’t elaborate on the specific art design of the game besides tiny characters, but his response immediately made me think of Nintendo’s Mii characters and the fantasy role-playing game Miitopia, pictured above. Miyazaki said of the diminutive characters, “We did it, and it just did not work the way that we thought it would. So we were like, ‘Let’s just, let’s back off a bit there.'”

But for FromSoftware fans hoping for something a little cuter than the typical blood-drenched horrors preferred by Miyazaki, the game director says it’s “an idea that we haven’t given up on entirely.”

Beyond the art style for The Duskbloods, Miyazaki said that the game’s PvPvE structure has been in place from day one.

“There’s definitely been a lot of adjustments that have been made to the overall balancing and the implementation of the systems. But I think in terms of the core concept, it’s actually quite similar to what it was from the very beginning,” he said. “The only two points that we had at the start was [that] we wanted something like the Virtue system. Something where players could enjoy matches without solely having to rely on PvP skills. They could do their own thing and still enjoy competing in the matches. As well, we wanted to have the sort of unexpected drama that builds throughout the match […] without the player necessarily actively doing things.”

You can read more about The Duskbloods in Polygon’s hands-on preview of the Nintendo Switch 2 game, which arrives sometime in 2026.