BODY: One of the most anticipated FromSoftware titles in years barely made it out of the gate. On August 21 at 7:00 p.m. JST, the studio behind Elden Ring and Bloodborne opened the closed network test for The Duskbloods โ and within hours, the servers buckled.
Players who had secured a coveted test slot found themselves locked in a "login war," repeatedly bouncing off connection errors as they tried to enter. FromSoftware soon confirmed that a game server failure had made stable play impossible, and announced that the rest of the day's network test was being cancelled outright while engineers worked on fixes.
The Duskbloods is a Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive and a PvPvE multiplayer title, marking a notable departure from the largely single-player campaigns that built the studio's reputation. Directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki, the game drops players into a Gothic, blood-soaked world where up to eight "Bloodsworn" compete and clash. That online-first design is exactly what made the server stumble so painful โ unlike a solo Souls game, there is no offline mode to fall back on when the servers go dark.
The demand itself is a testament to the hype. A closed test with a capped participant pool still generated enough concurrent traffic to overwhelm the infrastructure, underscoring just how much appetite there is for anything bearing the FromSoftware name โ especially on Nintendo's new hardware.
The insider take
Server meltdowns on FromSoftware launch windows are practically a tradition here โ veterans still remember the rocky online debuts of Dark Souls III and Elden Ring. But there's an added wrinkle this time: The Duskbloods is tied to the Switch 2, a platform Nintendo is still scaling up. A closed test exists precisely to surface this kind of load problem before release, so from a Tokyo vantage point the cancellation reads less as a red flag and more as the stress test doing its job โ provided the fixes land before the wider public gets its hands on the game.
Originally reported by AUTOMATON (Japanese).