For more than a year, the line on The Duskbloods was simple: it's coming in 2026. As of October 29, it isn't.
FromSoftware announced on X that its Switch 2 exclusive will now arrive sometime in 2027. No month, no season. The studio says the game is in the final stages of development and it wants more runway to tidy up how the thing plays.
That's about the whole announcement. But a delay from the studio behind Elden Ring is never only a calendar change, so let's pick it apart.
What FromSoftware actually said
The studio pointed to a network test held in August. According to its post, as Engadget reported, testers showed "active interest in the core concepts" of the game, which covered combat, strategic depth and player expression.
So the audience liked the foundation. The stated reason for the slip is that FromSoftware wants to spend the extra months on "final adjustments to game rules and balancing."
Notice what's missing. Nobody said the game is broken, or that a core system needs rebuilding. Rules and balance are the dials you turn last, once the structure is standing and you're arguing over how much damage a thing should do. In a multiplayer game, those dials decide whether people stay for a week or a year. It's like salting a stew: nobody notices when it's right, and nobody forgives it when it's wrong.
A test can't fully show you that until real people have hammered on the thing. August would have handed the team a pile of data on how players actually behaved, and a studio known for punishing, finely tuned design has every reason to act on it rather than ship and patch.
What set off the decision beyond that test hasn't been spelled out. The studio hasn't said what needs changing or how big the adjustments are.
Why the delay was easy to see coming
The gothic steampunk project made its debut back in April 2025, as part of Nintendo's Switch 2 presentation. Nintendo's new hardware got a marquee exclusive out of it, and FromSoftware stuck with a 2026 target for a long stretch. Holding a promise that long makes the reversal sting a little more.
Still, the calendar wasn't doing the game any favors. Engadget's argument is that even a finished Duskbloods would have been smart to steer clear of the rest of this year, because two enormous releases, Grand Theft Auto 6 and a remake of Ocarina of Time from the Zelda series, are expected to soak up a huge share of player attention. I'd go a step further. A new multiplayer game needs a crowd showing up together, and a launch week where everyone's looking elsewhere is a launch week with empty lobbies.
Online games live or die on the population of their first few weeks. Slipping into 2027 buys FromSoftware a cleaner stretch of the schedule, even if nobody has named a date yet.
A familiar pattern on Switch 2
This isn't the studio's first delay on Nintendo's console. A Switch 2 port of Elden Ring was originally slated for 2025. It didn't land until this August. Engadget noted that the extra time looked necessary once reports surfaced of performance issues with the port.
Two data points don't make a trend, but they do make a pattern worth watching. Getting FromSoftware's games to run well on the Switch 2 has evidently taken longer than the schedule allowed, at least once. The Duskbloods is a different case, since the stated issue is design balance rather than performance. Nothing in the announcement points to technical trouble, and it would be unfair to invent some.
Still, a studio that has now moved two Switch 2 projects past their first targets has release dates that deserve a little caution. That isn't an accusation. Delays often mean a team would rather be late than sorry, and FromSoftware's catalog earns it more credit than most.
What happens to the hype
Players who wanted this game under the tree will be disappointed. Nintendo, too, loses a high-profile exclusive from its holiday-season conversation, though it's hardly short of other things to talk about.
The more interesting question is what a long wait does to a multiplayer game's momentum. Announced in April 2025, then pushed into 2027, The Duskbloods will have spent ages in the public eye before anyone gets to keep it. A reveal is easy. Sustaining interest across that gap is harder, and you'd expect the studio to need something more than a calendar notice to keep people talking.
There's an upside, though. A game whose rules have been scrutinized by testers and then reworked is, in theory, less likely to launch with the balance headaches that sink online releases in their first month. Whether the extra months deliver that is something only launch will show.
What to watch next
A few signals will tell us how this plays out.
First, a release window. "Sometime in 2027" is a wide target, and the first narrowing of it (a quarter, a season) will say a lot about how deep the rework goes.
Second, any further testing. If FromSoftware opens another network test before launch, the changes are probably big enough to want fresh eyes on them.
Third, how the studio talks about the changes. Specifics about combat or balance would hint at what the August data actually showed. Silence would leave players guessing.
For now, all we have is a vague year and a studio that says it likes what it saw. That's more than most delay notices offer, but it's not a launch date.