The president of FromSoftware and director of its many games (Elden Ring, Bloodborne, etc.) is more interested in honing his own ideas and making games he’d want to play, despite by his own admission, not being too great at action games himself.
Broadly speaking, that’s what led to the upcoming Switch 2 exclusive in The Duskbloods, a PvPvE game that’s still tough as nails, just in a different context. A little board game influence here, some Souls gameplay there, combined with a pile of unused ideas for competitive multiplayer – it’s easier to see how this game came about.
Miyazaki: I guess there’s not really one thing that specifically served as inspiration, but just to go back, we initially had talks with Nintendo and this was one of the things we pitched. I think in a lot of our previous titles, such as Demon’s Souls and the Dark Souls series, there were a lot of unique online elements that were implemented, things like the Covenant system and Invasions. In addition to that, there were also a lot of other things that we wanted to try, things that seemed like great ideas, but didn’t really fit in the context of a single-player game or within the context of those games, specifically. Over time, a lot of those ideas piled up, things that you wish you could have done here and there. 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.
Miyazaki: So, there are two points I would say that can specifically be pulled from the board games like you had referenced. The first is the Virtue system that are basically victory points, something similar to that. 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.
The other thing is the Sigil system, which is very similar to a lot of RPG elements you might find in a tabletop RPG, for example. 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. In my mind, I’d always 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. Having gameplay elements for that is definitely something that I’ve been thinking about as well.
