FromSoftware spent months building one of the tightest anti-leak operations the industry has seen for a test build, going as far as disabling the Nintendo Switch 2 capture button outright for everyone in this week’s closed network test.
Then a Taiwanese gaming site published its hands-on preview a day early, and the whole thing walked out through the front.
The preview went live on 4Gamers before the embargo lifted. It came down fast, but not fast enough: someone had already mirrored it to Bilibili, and from there it did what leaked previews do.
What Actually Got Out
This was not a grainy off-screen phone video. It was a licensed, hands-on press preview with details a publisher normally spends a marketing cycle rationing out.
- Fourteen playable character classes, enumerated in full before FromSoftware had shown more than a handful.
- Confirmation that this is an 8-player PvPvE game rather than the mostly single-player RPG some fans were still hoping for, as Wccftech reported from the pulled article.
- A mechanic called Moon Blood Bestowal, a late-match showdown between the three players holding the highest Victory Points.
- Combat described as fast and arena-shaped, built on heavy mobility with double jumps, aerial attacks and transformations. Eurogamer’s account of the footage clocked the speed as closer to Bloodborne than to Elden Ring, with wolves and velociraptors in the mix.
The Lockdown Was Real, and It Was Pointed at Players
Give FromSoftware credit for effort. The closed network test running August 21 to 24 across five four-hour windows is invitation-only, requires a Nintendo Switch Online subscription, and ships with the console’s built-in capture function switched off. Screenshots and clips are prohibited outright.
That is an unusual amount of control to demand of a console maker whose whole pitch includes a dedicated share button. Nintendo agreed to it, which tells you how much both companies care about how this game gets introduced.
And it worked, as far as it went. The test build has not obviously bled. What leaked was the press channel, which is the one part of the pipeline FromSoftware handed to other people and could not switch off remotely. You can disable a button on a console. You cannot disable a CMS in Taipei.
Why This Particular Game Needed the Message Control
Here is the part the aggregators are underplaying. FromSoftware is not protecting a surprise. It is protecting a framing.
The Duskbloods is a genuine risk. This is a studio whose reputation rests on brutal, largely solitary, atmosphere-heavy single-player games, and it has made a competitive multiplayer title, exclusive to a Nintendo console, in a genre where the audience expects seasonal content and a healthy matchmaking pool for years. Vice noted that the class-based structure reads more like a hero shooter’s roster than anything in the Souls lineage.
A chunk of the existing fanbase has been openly unhappy since the reveal. The marketing job was therefore never “show the game.” It was “sequence the reveal so that the PvPvE part lands after people have seen how much of the FromSoftware texture survived.” A leaked preview that opens with 14 classes and a Victory Points scoreboard inverts exactly that order.
The Exclusivity Bet Is the Bigger Story
Step back and the leak matters less than what it revealed about strategy. FromSoftware built its modern reputation on being everywhere at once. Elden Ring shipped across PlayStation, Xbox and PC and sold to everybody. Going single-platform, on the newest and smallest install base of the three, is a deliberate narrowing.
It is also happening at precisely the moment Microsoft went the other way. We covered the Xbox reset and its 4,800 layoffs in July, a strategy that has quietly abandoned hardware exclusivity as a growth lever and started shipping first-party titles onto rival consoles. Nintendo is buying the thing Microsoft decided it could no longer afford, and paying for it with the kind of concessions that get a capture button disabled.
Whether that bet pays depends on a number nobody has yet: how many Switch 2 owners want a competitive multiplayer game from a studio they associate with suffering alone in a fog.
What to Watch This Weekend
The network test starts Friday. Notebookcheck reported that the sanctioned previews were always scheduled to run around it, with a 2026 release still confirmed, so most of what leaked would have surfaced within days regardless. The damage is measured in hours and framing, not in secrets.
The more useful question is whether the capture-button lockdown holds for four days across five sessions of players who were not asked to sign anything enforceable. Phones exist. They always have. FromSoftware has built a fortress with one wall made of other people’s good behavior, and this week it already found out what that is worth.