Duskbloods Beta Selections Are Live — Check Your Switch 2 Status

A red ‘SELECTED’ message is waiting for a lucky few on FromSoftware’s Duskbloods signup page, styled to echo the studio’s immortal YOU DIED screen. That’s where the network test verdicts live — not in your inbox, not in a Switch 2 notification. The design choice is a warning: if you got in, those four-hour sessions will likely end with your name on a tombstone more than once.

This is FromSoft’s strangest handheld bet yet — a Victorian Gothic, eight-player PvPvE exclusive for a console you’re as likely to play on a train as in a living room. Selections closed and the results are posted, but you have to go find them. Here’s how to check your status, and what the test’s brutal schedule will demand from your battery, your Wi-Fi, and your weekend.

FromSoft Skipped the Email: Red Means Selected

Head back to the site where you applied in late July, sign in with the same Nintendo account, and open Account in the side menu. You’ll get one of two messages: a cold blue ‘You were NOT SELECTED,’ or a red ‘You were SELECTED’ that borrows its gravity from the death screens every FromSoft player knows by heart. Codes don’t arrive by email either — they’re distributed through the same dashboard starting Aug. 18 at 6:00 a.m. PDT.

It’s a deliberately low-tech flow, and easy to resent: no push notification, no console prompt, no courtesy email for the rejected. For Switch 2 owners juggling a commute, a dock, and three other games, that means the beta’s fate is a bookmark you need to remember to check. Set the reminder now — an unclaimed code doesn’t wait.

Five Four-Hour Sessions: The Switch 2’s First Endurance Test

The test runs five four-hour windows between Friday Aug. 21 and Sunday Aug. 23 — up to 20 hours of Duskbloods if you chase every session. That schedule collides with how most people actually use a Switch 2: short bursts, sleep mode, dock-to-handheld transitions. You can’t suspend a live PvPvE match the way you’d pause a single-player campaign, and when the window closes, it closes. Four hours is also a long stretch for a demanding title on one charge; FromSoft and Nintendo haven’t disclosed Duskbloods battery or performance targets, but an eight-player networked game with this art direction will rank among the hungriest things the hardware runs. If you’re going portable, a Switch 2 power bank belongs in your bag.

The bigger stakes are about identity. A chunk of FromSoft’s fanbase is sour on the multiplayer pivot — Nightreign, now this — and the criticism stings hardest for handheld players, who’ve treated Elden Ring and Dark Souls as portable treasures. But Duskbloods being Switch 2-exclusive flips the question: the network test is the first hard evidence of whether Nintendo’s hardware can carry an always-online third-party exclusive at full scale, not just Splatoon and Mario Kart. If those five sessions hold up on the go, the Switch 2 becomes the most interesting online multiplayer machine on the market. If they don’t, you’ll know long before launch — which is exactly what a network test is for.