FromSoftware director Hidetaka Miyazaki has revealed that the studio's upcoming Switch 2 title The Duskbloods originally had a much cuter, more "Nintendo" art style before settling on its current dark, Victorian Gothic aesthetic. Speaking at a roundtable Q&A, he said the change was one of the most drastic shifts during the game's five-year development, offering fans a glimpse of how differently the project could have turned out.

At the start of development in 2021, Miyazaki said the team experimented with short, stylised characters roughly three heads tall, an approach influenced by working with Nintendo and reminiscent of designs like the Mii-based game Miitopia. He said the idea "did not work the way that we thought it would", so the team scaled it back, though he stopped short of ruling it out entirely for the future. In contrast, the game's core PvPvE structure, including its Virtue system and unpredictable in-match drama, has remained largely unchanged since inception, with development focused mainly on balancing rather than the underlying concept. The Duskbloods is due for release on Nintendo Switch 2 sometime in 2026.