I’m An Elden Ring Sicko, But 10 Hours With The Duskbloods Has Me Worried FromSoftware’s Next Game Isn’t For Me

After putting well over a hundred hours into Elden Ring Nightreign, I have been stoked out of my mind for The Duskbloods. Even though I had never engaged in FromSoftware PvP before, the PvE aspects of The Duskbloods really appealed to me, and all the previews suggested that the game itself would include enough of a balance of both that I could get by being somewhat mediocre at murdering other players…at least until the final clash. I braced myself: I was probably going to lose a lot, and that was fine. I was going to have fun! Well, the network test is over now, and I had…some fun, I guess. I also had a pretty bad time, because I lost. A lot. Like, egregiously. And losing was deeply unfun. And I’m struggling to work out in my head if things will be better in the actual game, or if I’m just doomed to suck at The Duskbloods and should give up and go back to Nightreign. Now, not all my frustration is loss-related. I actually came out of the weekend with the firm conviction that a Network Test is a terrible environment in which to preview a game. For one, I couldn’t play with my friends. I usually play Nightreign in trios with my partner and a good friend. We know that The Duskbloods is only going to be set up for singles and duos, but we were hoping we’d at least be able to all queue into the same game together and compete with each other. I genuinely have no idea if I’ll be able to do that in the final game or not, though, because that feature was unavailable in the Network Test. We did occasionally manage to get into the same games together by queuing at the exact same time and forming alliances when we could. Those moments where we could team up and work together to collect virtue, defend against other players, and take on bosses were some of the best during all my sessions. But it sucked to not be able to consistently share my experience with my friends, and I hope the main game includes that option. Additionally, the Network Test only had one map available, and a selection of six characters. It took me a while to click with a character, but by the end I ended up liking Trang Lanh quite a bit when I could pair her with a Kin (an NPC ally) that could tank or distract for me a bit. The test also had what I suspect was a deliberately limited pool of bosses and enemies and events. I don’t know that the main game will have more of the latter (it will have three maps and ten characters to start), but if all those options aren’t expanded, it’s going to get real boring, real fast. After a few hours of play, every match felt painfully similar, which I think made losing repeatedly feel even worse than it would have otherwise. Now look. I’m not a sore loser. I suck at all sorts of games and still have fun with them. And I’m extremely willing to admit that PvP is not my bag. But I guess I just thought I’d stand a little more of a chance than I did. The trailers and previews really made it seem like players who wanted to focus more on PvE could use boss fights and exploration to buff themselves up enough to hold their own when it was time to fight. And I think that might be true, but the problem is I kept getting murdered by other players while trying to do these other activities. Folks just swooped in on me and took me out, again and again, then stole my kill or flame or whatever for themselves. On one hand, preventing me from getting virtue and getting some of your own is a viable strategy, I guess. On the other hand, there’s no real reward for killing other players outside of Ritual Sites and certain Sigils (basically specific goals you might have within a match), so getting demolished repeatedly just felt…bad. One guy even killed me, then immediately teleported to the same place I spawned back at, and killed me again before I could get my head on straight. Why! Also, you have to get really close to people to form Alliances with them, but if you get close your Kin likes to attack unprompted, which often led people to think I was attacking them, which prompted them to attack me while I was menuing and…yeah. Also, it seemed like so much comes down to those Ritual Sites, zones players are directed to with goals like claiming stones, defending a pledge, or killing other players, such that the end of every phase 2 and 3 was essentially a PvP free-for-all. If I wanted to instead spend that time taking down a Trespasser boss or something, I could, but I’d be doing it alone because everyone else was busy at war in the chapel or clock tower or something. Usually by this time I was desperate enough to try a Ritual Site, but again, I suck at PvP, so I just died. Again and again. After playing for almost ten hours over the weekend, I didn’t make it to the final Grail fight once. The highest high I felt was the one time I managed to defeat my “sworn enemy,” selected for me by my Sigil before he could kill me…only to prompt him to spend the rest of the match hunting me down and killing me over and over and over again. Exciting stuff. I do want to be clear that I also liked a lot of elements of The Duskbloods. The movement is super fun: I love the quadruple jumps and holy hell that air dash is sick. I love ripping into enemies as the Senator in his dinosaur form, or unleashing a hell of bullets on distant bosses with Layla. All the visual design elements are incredible, from the characters to the Trespasser bosses to the environment itself. I loved finding little hidden areas on the map, like the underground ruins or the top room of the clock tower. I love (most of) the Kin partners, especially the wolf that tears enemies up and the annoyingly persistent Marlowe (the Baritone, however, needs to shut the hell up). And I really, really want to like the premise here: a FromSoftware action game where multiple people are in the world at once, competing and cooperating in different ways simultaneously. That’s cool to me! I want to participate in that! So, I feel torn. On one hand, this was just the Network Test! It wasn’t here for me to develop complete feelings on the game; it was here to test the networks and make sure they worked, which (after the first session) they largely did, very well. Still, it was a valid preview of (some of) what’s to come, provided to myself and other players presumably in the hopes we would enjoy it and want to buy the game. But I didn’t have much fun, and it’s just so hard to tell how much, if any, the vibe of The Duskbloods will change for me upon release. Apparently,you can still progress the story in the full game even if you lose repeatedly, and if that’s the case I might have a better time because at least I’ll feel I’m accomplishing something with each loss. It’s also possible there will be a character in the final roster that I will really click with. It’s also possible that the final game’s skill-based matchmaking will work in my favor more and put me with folks more on my level, or that the meta will develop in such a way as to encourage players to leave me alone while I explore during the first few phases so I’ll have a bit more of a fighting chance in the later ones. Or maybe I’ll just be able to queue with my friends, so even if I lose, I’ll still have fun running around with people I like. Or as the meta develops, maybe I’ll become more familiar with a strategy that will help me collect virtue while avoiding players. That’s a lot of maybes, though! And it’s also possible that I just, with time, get good. At the moment, I don’t see any world in which I can close the massive skill gap between myself and folks who have been doing this sort of thing for years, but who knows? It’s just, in order to improve, I have to be motivated to play. Losing in a game like this still has to be at least a little fun, or else people like me drop out over time, the skill ceiling keeps rising, and the game gets super sweaty. Is losing over and over at The Duskbloods fun enough to motivate me to improve? In the Network Test, it was unfortunately not. In the main game, it might be. I’m still going to try The Duskbloods out at launch, but the excitement I felt at the prospect of vampire battle royale going into the weekend has had a lot of blood drained out of it.