Watching Duskbloods is Making Me Crave Bloodborne II

 I think it's actually a violation of the terms of service for the Duskblood Network Test, but there are some videos of footage from the game on YouTube. Is that ethical to watch? Eh, I don't think it's that bad. This is more like a closed beta test, and that's not something you intentionally release to random players without some expectation that stuff is going to get shown around. Honestly, it's not that much more enlightening than the official footage that the various reviewers were using in compliance with FromSoft's stuff.

Also, hey, I wasn't the one who uploaded it.

But ethical issues aside, I find myself reminded that while I'm incredibly curious about the lore of the game and very impressed with its aesthetics and gameplay systems, I just don't think this is the one for me: these sorts of time-limited match multiplayer games don't really appeal to me. And while the Network Test is only previewing one of the game's multiple (I think 3 at launch) maps and only some of its playable Bloodsworn characters, but it's clear that any sense of story progression is going to take place largely outside of the main game (I assume in a similar manner to Nightreign).

I have few doubts that those stories will be fascinating, and, I mean, look, I'm a total sicko for FromSoft's vague and evocative storytelling style, with its surreal imagery and reframing of established tropes to create something truly new and unexpected.

But all of this is basically making me lament that Bloodborne never got a sequel.

Naturally, there are comparisons to be drawn between The Duskbloods and Bloodborne (including, you know, having Blood in both names,) both having a broadly Gothic aesthetic. Now, I am also curious to see if the Duskbloods is quite as (classically) gothic as we're led to believe: the map in the Network Test isn't totally like Yharnam, but has a similar architectural style - the kind of high stone buildings that vampires might perch upon. I'd argue it's not quite the same - I think the city map in the test looks a bit more late-19th-century or even early 20th in vibes, including a very Big Ben-like clocktower (though I think I learned somewhere that Big Ben is actually the bell in said clocktower, and that the actual tower is just "The Clocktower," later named Elizabeth Tower in 2012). Meanwhile, Yharnam in Bloodborne was likely inspired more by Edinburgh, Scotland, and given the tricorne hats that are so iconic to the Hunter's Attire, I've always thought of it as taking place slightly earlier, kind of Regency period (then again, the alternate Hunter's cap is a top hat, and I'm no fashion historian. Actually, one of my best friends sort of is, so I should ask him).

Still, if Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, and Elden Ring all fit in that broad "medieval fantasy" aesthetic with plate armor, shields, and big weapons, The Duskbloods seems to share a lot more DNA with Bloodborne as a revisit about a decade later to this Gothic vibe.

Bloodborne was intentionally designed to encourage a faster pace of combat, including using the Rally mechanic to make players a little less worried if they wind up taking a hit so that they'd keep up the assault. We've seen with Nightreign and with Duskbloods that From is very much experimenting with faster movement speeds, slowly dialing up the pace of combat since the laborious days of Dark Souls. Indeed, I even think that just giving everyone such high starting Stamina in Elden Ring was in part to let people swing their weapons around more.

The high speed of Nightreign and Duskbloods character, though, also makes sense in a game where there's limited time to accomplish your goals. Duskbloods has you racing other players to gather the most Virtue (gained by doing various things across the map) to avoid being Culled from the competition. Given that you'll be racing to the various sources of Virtue, it makes sense that you can move at such high speeds and jump an insane number of times in the air (I believe it's a quadruple jump that can be followed by an air-dash, and also your initial jump can be charged, so it's way easier for you to overcome vertical obstacles).

I wonder if such abilities would be used in a future single-player game.

Now, look, it has only been two years since The Shadow of the Erdtree DLC came out, and while that was DLC for a game that itself was two years old at the time, it was a massive amount of content, one that would have felt like a whole game if the original hadn't been even more massive.

In other words, I don't want to get greedy. Bethesda seems to only finally be moving toward getting Elder Scrolls VI out a full fifteen years after Skyrim came out (and I'd guess we'll be waiting at the very least until 2027). FromSoft did have its crazy 2014-2016 run of Dark Souls II, Bloodborne, and Dark Souls III, but especially if they're developing new IPs that won't allow quite as many development-saving measures (that said, there are for sure some Pthumerians among the foes you fight in Duskbloods) I can be patient.

The main thing, though, is that I'd really love to get a game that looks like The Duskbloods but has a fully fleshed-out single player experience.

I'm fine with - even encourage - them to futz with the formula a bit. FromSoft invented the Souls-like genre, and I think one of the reasonable criticisms of properties like Bloodborne and Elden Ring is that they do borrow a lot from earlier games by the studio. But I think the saving grace is that those two are two of my favorite video games of all time, and the iteration on the existing concepts feels more like refinement than laziness.

Anyway, if it were somehow revealed that The Duskbloods takes place in the same universe as Bloodborne, I wouldn't find it tremendously shocking on a storytelling level. It's the licensing and exclusivity that makes that unlikely. Bloodborne was a PS4 exclusive (and kind of the reason I got a PS4 in the first place) and The Duskbloods is a Switch 2 exclusive - a console I still haven't gotten, though given that I've had every Nintendo home console from the SNES forward, I expect I will eventually.

But I do think that the exclusivity might be a big part of why there is no Bloodborne II. Like Demon's Souls (which was a PS3 exclusive,) FromSoft instead created a new and similar franchise to keep refining the formula. (Actually, funnily enough, a cut voice line from Bloodborne seemed to imply that it took place in the Demon's Souls universe, though it might have just been a cheeky reference).

So, I could just go back and play Bloodborne again. It's tempting. But I've also played so much of that game. I don't think I've actually beaten everything on all of these characters, but I think I've gotten, like, through most of the game and the DLC on something like six characters. Bloodborne, of course, doesn't have quite the same build variety that Dark Souls or Elden Ring do (indeed, while you might make an effective character that blends Strength and Skill, for the most part, the builds for Bloodborne are just "put more into your main damage stat, and maybe ensure you have, like, decent Health and Stamina"). Sure, one of my Strength-focused characters uses the Whirligig Saw and another uses the Boom Hammer, but it's not much of a distinction.

My real hope here is that, after two games in a row with iconic characters whose entire kit is determined by their pre-determined personality, that From has cultivated a lot of new ideas for powers and abilities that a future game can let us build around. Having a game where we get to choose to invest in stats that enhance, say, the weird rocket attack that Zork in the Duskbloods uses, or going for more conventional Dexterity to wield rapiers and scimitars, or blending them some way to create something really weird - I'd love that.

But also, man, I'm a sucker for the Gothic aesthetic. In a way, I worry that because Duskbloods exists, it's less likely we'll get a single-player successor to Bloodborne from them (whether part of that franchise or no).

Greedily Absorbing Whatever Lore I Can From a Duskbloods Preview Video

 No one really does worldbuilding like From Software.

Famously, the head of FromSoft, Hidetaka Miyazaki, has talked about how he used to read English-language fantasy novels as a kid, only sort of knowing the language, and thus only getting a vague sense of the worlds that they described and piecing together what clues he could as to what we going on. That sense of deep mystery - mystery almost in the ancient, religious sense - permeates the worlds of games like Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring. To this day, even in a game like Dark Souls, there are elements of the story that are left open for debate, entire plotlines in the backstory of the world that are only vaguely alluded to.

It's an approach that can turn some people off, but the loyal fans of the company's titles tend to be more fascinated and intrigued. There's an entire secondary "game" of finding a dozen different YouTube channels that explore elements of the games' lore.

What's exciting here is that we appear to have an entirely new world, the first since Elden Ring dropped in 2022 (to be fair, there's only been one new FromSoft game to come out between then and now, which was a sort of spin-off of Elden Ring).

What's frustrating, of course, is that Duskbloods is going to be a PvP, short match-focused game, in other words the kind of game whose structure does not appeal to me (I say structure because the moment-to-moment gameplay looks very cool). So, like Nightreign (which is similar in structure, though PvE-focused, and so at least more in line with my tastes) I'm expecting to experience this vicariously, to absorb the game through the videos people share.

But hey, let's see what we can glean.

First off, the overall setting of the game seems to be kind of Gothic in tone, though unlike Bloodborne, which skewed kind of early-to-mid 19th Century (tricornes might even push it back to the 18th century,) there are multiple characters who carry what appear to be early-20th-century firearms, and there's an event involving a zeppelin that makes it look almost World War One-like in time period.

In a way, this kind of fits: Dracula, the most famous vampire novel, came out in the 1890s, and there are elements of that story that seem to be sort of forgotten, like the fact that one of its heroes is a Texan cowboy. Interestingly, Lies of P, which owes a lot of its gameplay mechanics to the Souls-like games pioneered by FromSoft, has an belle epoch aesthetic, a period at the end of the 19th century in France, which has some real overlap.

Juxtaposed with this kind of Steampunk technological level, though, the environments of Duskblood seem to evoke the gothic. The hub, similar, I think, to the Nightreign version of Roundtable Hold (obviously the one in Elden Ring is also a hub, but for a very different kind of game,) is called the House of Dusk, and from what we can see in preview videos, it has a very "gothic manor" vibe, with elaborately carved wood panels on the walls.

It's interesting: while it of course transforms more into a kind of Lovecraftian tale of Great Ones and alien mutations, Bloodborne initially presents itself as a city taken over by its own take on Werewolves. This ranges from the hunters in the city streets who have more of a Lon Chaney-style "person with a lot of fur on their face" to more extremely lupine monsters (I can't recall if those are all considered Darkbeasts, but you know what I mean: the ones on the bridge near Cleric Beast and the guys who attack you in the Upper Cathedral Ward). Of course, keeping with a classic horror convention, they never come out and call the werewolves werewolves, and it's sort of fitting given that they're... like, yes, they're people who have taken on lupine aspects, but the rules are a bit different.

In Bloodborne, the one tip of the hat to the other most classic Gothic monster (well, I guess ghosts might also be in there,) the vampire, was primarily in the form of Castle Cainhurst, with its Vilebloods. Vilebloods who are basically all wiped out, unless we think that those gargoyle-like foes and maybe the blood tick foes are part of that "genus." Cainhurst is a fun optional side-dungeon with one of the tougher bosses in the game, but by that point you're probably going deep into the weird dream-logic of the full on cosmic horror and leaving the Gothic behind.

In The Duskbloods, the characters you play seem to all be coded as vampires, but I suspect that we'll never hear the word vampire uttered at any point within the game. Again, this is a common convention, such as in the excellent Mike Flanagan mini-series, Midnight Mass, though one of the things that this convention allows is for the creators to set their own rules as to how these things work. Fun fact, did you know that it wasn't until the 1922 film Nosferatu (an unauthorized adaptation of Dracula with the names all changed to avoid legal issues) that the convention that vampires burst into flames if exposed to sunlight was established? Dracula goes out in the day all the time in the novel and the Coppola movie.

Ok, let's talk about other elements at play.

In the preview, we see players fighting against robed figures who seem to be in some kind of religious attire. Notably, most are of human proportions, but there are giant ones who have the same gaunt, pallid faces as the Pthumerians from Bloodborne. I'm inclined to think this is probably a case of re-using assets, something FromSoft does all the time, but it's interesting. I wonder if there's a similar bit of lore here where some ancient civilization has connected with modern humans.

There is apparently a gameplay system called Sigils, which gives players special objectives to increase their Virtue (which Miyazaki describes as being inspired by Victory Points in various board games, and are what you need to maximize to avoid being Culled at the end of different rounds of the game - basically only the three players with the most Virtue get to the game's final phase). One of these has what appears to be a heraldic or religious symbol, and boy howdy does it sure look like it's the rough shape of a uterus.

This isn't surprising: FromSoft's games have often used anatomical themes, especially those related to childbirth and reproduction. Bloodborne is chock full of this stuff, but we also have things like the Formless Mother in Elden Ring (an Outer God referred to as a mother that's all about constant bleeding? That... that make you think of anything?)

I mean, once again, we have a kind of gothic-horror-looking game that literally has the word "blood" in the title. And indeed, since Dracula (actually, since at least Carmilla, the lesbian vampire novel that pre-dated Dracula by about twenty years and to which Stoker was kind of responding with more buttoned-up sexual mores,) vampires have been tied to ideas about sexuality. And FromSoft is the sort of game company I don't expect to shy away from such themes, even if they'll probably approach them from really oblique angles.

I'm actually curious to see if technology plays a major thematic role in this game. Bloodborne gave us the insane trick weapons and firearms (using guns in a way probably no other game has used them) but I think the technology felt largely incidental, with the manipulation of people through religious authority was the far bigger thematic focus.

But in this game, with all the guns and zeppelins and the player character Zork, who wears a giant metal Iron Man-like suit, I think this might be part of the ideas that the game intends to explore. I'm given to understand that the moment the game takes place in is sort of apocalyptic in vibe (which isn't, like, unprecedented in FromSoft games. Weirdly Elden Ring might be the exception as the one in which things have already fallen apart, and the world is desperately waiting for something to change) and I wonder to what degree that apocalypse was driven by technology (certainly World War One was this horrifying revelation to the world about the degree to which the mechanization of warfare had made killing so much more efficient. Interestingly, the US I think was less psychologically wounded by this because we had gone through our first really industrialized war with the Civil War).

The other curious question is what motivates our player characters. In Nightreign, the Nightfarers seem to be there basically to save the world, and even if their individual stories introduce some shades of grey, they're meant, I think, to basically be good guys. But especially with this more PvP-focused game, I wonder if that's quite different here.

The ending cutscene if you wind up winning a match seems to involve you bowing before a sun dripping with blood - a little like the symbolism of the sun at the end of Dark Souls III, actually. Is victory a... good thing in this game? Or are we to play as the monsters that are bringing about the end?

Regarding the individual characters. Naturally, I'm fascinated by the weird Steampunk Iron Man that is Zork. The other characters we've seen are Albert, a messy-haired... um, dude. Bloodhand Jan wears all white and a metallic helmet that covers his eyes. We see him smashing his head into what looks like a rock in order to bleed enough for his blood to form a trail for him to follow to his target, and I wonder if the white clothing is there to evoke a straightjacket, like poor Renfield from Dracula (who, I'll point out, is not complicit in Dracula's plans in the novel, and is basically just another victim who also happens to be mentally ill). Trang Lanh has an east-Asian (I want to say the name sounds southeast Asian, but I could be wrong) who fights with a big chakram that appears to be sort of pitted or rotten in the inner rim. Sniper Layla carries a giant rifle and wears a long duster, and is also bald and gaunt with skin that looks corpse-like. Senator Samir Patres is also gaunt and swarthy, but wears elegant cloths and glasses. And then there's Zork, whose massive bell-shaped helmet has bulbous eyes and a sharp beak that comes out the front, and fights with some kind of weird giant riveted pipe contraption.

Most of the details we've gotten are about gameplay systems, so we'll probably have to wait a fair bit before we learn more.

The Duskbloods Looks Really Cool But I Don't Think I'll Play It

 I've been a pretty consistent fan of FromSoft's games, admittedly never beating either Dark Souls game I've gotten (though I got very far in DSIII, with only the last two DLC bosses and the final boss unbeaten) but adoring both Bloodborne and Elden Ring.

When Elden Ring: Nightreign was released, I considered playing it, but ultimately decided that the kind of short match-style multiplayer system is just not what I'm into (I've been more or less a solo player in WoW of late, thanks in large part to how the game now accommodates such a playstyle with things like Delves as my endgame).

Gameplay-wise, though, Nightreign seems like far more of a fit for me than The Duskbloods, as while the former is entirely built around co-op, the Duskbloods is ultimately a competitive PvP multiplayer game (though with environmental threats to face largely as a way to earn character progression and avoid being "culled." I am also given to understand that there are scenarios not available in the initial demo that end in boss battles rather than PvP free-for-alls, but it's still built around competition with other players).

So, once again, I'm left with a game I'll probably be curious to hear a lot about, but I doubt I'll actually play it (I don't have a Switch 2 either, though that feels like an eventual inevitability. I've had every Nintendo home console starting with the SNES).

But on an aesthetic level, The Duskbloods actually looks incredible.

The game has more of a gothic look than the medieval look of Dark Souls and Elden Ring, though in contrast with Bloodborne's more "early to mid 19th century" look, this really appears more Steampunk in vibe, arguably more of an early 20th century feel.

Like Nightreign, you pick from established characters with their own built-in capabilities. Probably the most distinctive is a guy (actually, I'm making an assumption here. I don't know that they're male) in a big steampunk armor suit whose signature attack is to use rockets to shoot forward and ram into their foes. There's also evidently an event that can bring a big airship overhead that you can call upon to bombard large groups of foes.

If Bloodborne is... sort of... about werewolves, Duskbloods is far more vampire-coded, with the player characters having vampiric abilities, including the ability to bite foes and temporarily make them into allies (I assume only for the NPC ones).

FromSoft is known for re-using assets, so I wouldn't read too much into this, but many of the non-player foes that I saw in Vaati Vidya's preview looked like the Pthumerians we encounter in Bloodborne. Now, I don't think we can draw any direct lore conclusions from that - Bloodborne was a Playstation exclusive and Duskbloods is a Nintendo exclusive, so I think it extremely unlikely that there will be any canonical connection between their stories.

But thematically we might see some similar ideas. What I find interesting here is the presence of, well, kind of World War 1-era weaponry. I believe the idea of the game is that it's an era called "humanity's twilight," and massive wars like WWI felt pretty apocalyptic to those who lived through it. Again, unlike Nightreign, this game does seem to be oriented toward competition, with only one victor arising from each match, and I wonder to what extent that theme of competition winds up being part of the story as well - a world brought to perdition because of endless competitiveness.

FromSoft's combat has undergone an interesting evolution. Early games like Demon's Souls and Dark Souls had very slow, methodically-paced combat. But over time, they've pushed for faster styles of combat that still maintain the meaning and weight of each strike. Duskbloods actually looks kind of insane, with what appears to be all characters getting several in-air jumps and the ability to clash mid-air.

Anyway, it's a little frustrating that, two games in a row, I'm finding myself likely to be looking in through the window. But maybe we'll see the next single-player game from the company incorporate some of the cool ideas developed for Nightreign and Duskbloods.