All 14 The Duskbloods character classes have reportedly leaked early online. The upcoming FromSoftware multiplayer game appears to feature a lineup of truly disturbing characters for players to choose from.

The Duskbloods Characters Reportedly Leaked by Dataminers

We are now only a few days away from The Duskbloods network test on August 21, and the game has reportedly just suffered a major leak. According to a post on FamiBoards, dataminers were able to uncover new information about the Switch 2 multiplayer game after files were pushed to its servers ahead of the beta.

According to the leak, The Duskbloods will have 14 playable characters and classes. If the information is accurate, we also have a description of each character. And, well, they are pretty interesting to say the least! For your convenience, here is the full list of leaked The Duskbloods character classes reportedly uncovered by dataminers:

All 14 Leaked The Duskbloods Character Classes

1. Blood-Eater | Walter: The sole survivor of an extinct clan of rare-blood hunters. He uses his extraordinary sense of smell to track the blind spots in others’ pasts. He descended into madness after repeatedly licking the blood spatter from his sister—whom he himself had killed—and still walks the line between life and death in search of pure blood.
2. Guillotine | Gillian: An executioner of the Marisbel Inquisition. He carries a massive iron guillotine blade on his back. Having been exposed to too much blood over the years, he has begun to mutate and now wanders in search of the “Blood of the Beginning” before his own head is severed.
3. Foul-Rot | Veronica: A blind nun abandoned in the basement of a ruined cathedral. She inflicts self-harm to spread the grotesque blood blisters multiplying inside her body. The footprints she leaves behind instantly cause anything they touch to rot.
4. Nail-Pierced | Sebastian: A fanatic saint who drives silver nails into various parts of his body, using the flowing blood as a catalyst for miracles. By inflicting wounds on himself, he temporarily gains overwhelming ferocity, but his mind and body are already completely broken.
5. Coffin-Bearer | Maurice: A man who continued to collect corpses on the streets of Temurat at dusk. A mud-like monstrosity that was once his family writhes inside the iron coffin he carries on his back. By slamming the coffin against enemies, he sucks up their blood and feeds it to the creature inside.
6. Thread-Torn | Oscar: A deranged taxidermist who sews the flesh of beasts from all eras and regions directly onto his own body. During battle, he seizes enemy tissue and uses it to eerily patch and reinforce himself. Through the accumulation of tainted power, he transforms his own body into that of an ancient, rare beast.
7. Mud-Treader | Ulan: A female warrior who gained superhuman leg strength through human experimentation. Filthy blood constantly gushes from her ankles, and a red, poisonous swamp forms wherever she runs.
8. Candle-Snuffer | Isabel: A former waitress at the Siltera Noble Mansion. She possesses the ability to materialize shadows and trap her enemies’ blood within them to drain it. All light vanishes from the places she passes through.
9. Gut-Rinner | Randolph: An assault trooper of the Sampere Weapons Corps. Equipped with a back-mounted mechanism that allows him to fly freely and a massive piercing spear, he rips through his opponents’ flesh and blood along with their armor. His abdomen is heavily mechanized, enabling him to unleash devastating wide-area attacks using bloodlust as a catalyst.
10. Gazer-of-Flesh | Yuri: A heretical observer who cut off his own eyelids. He possesses the ability to intensify a target’s blood flow simply by fixing his gaze on them, causing their body to explode from within.
11. Ash-Crown | Camilla: A girl whose clan was burned to the ground. She wields “blood ash”—a mixture of the victims’ ashes and her own blood—to petrify and crystallize her enemies before shattering them.
12. Rust-Gospel | Baldur: A former priest of Kinmitsu who has stuffed his mouth with large amounts of scrap iron and needles. Every time he utters a prayer, his mouth is torn apart, and the mist of blood he spits out becomes a powerful attack.
13. Dusk-Silt | Elsa: A woman whose Dusk Disease has progressed to its final stage. When attacked, her body transforms into a blood-mud-like substance, allowing her to evade attacks and flow freely before injecting her own poisonous blood directly into her opponent’s body.
14. First-Shard | Nameless Shadow: An imperfect mass of flesh known as “First Blood,” incapable of understanding language and lacking any sense of its own origins. It is a cursed being that eerily mimics and unleashes the techniques of every bloodline.

When Is The Duskbloods Network Test?

While this leak appears to come from dataminers, we still caution everyone to take it with a major grain of salt. That said, we should learn whether the information is legitimate in just a few days, as The Duskbloods’ first playable beta goes live this week.

The first The Duskbloods network test session begins on Friday, August 21, 2026, and runs from 3:00 AM to 7:00 AM PDT. FromSoftware will hold multiple test sessions throughout the weekend, with the final one running on Sunday, August 23, from 7:00 PM to 11:00 PM PDT. The network test should give players their first opportunity to see how many of these leaked characters actually appear in the game.

The post The Duskbloods Character Classes Leaked Before Network Test appeared first on VICE.

The first thing I noticed when I gave up American technology was the silence.

My phone usually starts up before I get out of bed, buzzing every few minutes throughout the day with calls, messages, headlines, calendar reminders and social media alerts. It’s a constant pulse that averages nearly 200 iPhone notifications on weekends and twice as many Monday-to-Friday.

But on this warm mid-summer Sunday, my life was on an unlikely version of mute. After years of reporting on Europe’s push to wean itself off U.S. tech giants and cultivate homegrown alternatives, I had decided to test my own daily habit by cutting myself off from using any American technology for 72 hours.

No iPhone. No Mac. No Slack or Teams. No Google Search or Maps. No ChatGPT. No WhatsApp or Signal. No Facebook or Instagram feeds. No credit card payments.

I wondered if I would turn into a digital monk.

For three days, I set out to live and work in Brussels as if U.S. tech had suddenly become unavailable to me overnight. It was a purposefully fictional scenario rooted in a very real European anxiety: what happens if Washington weaponizes our continent’s Silicon Valley dependence and reaches for the tech “kill switch?”

Limited versions of that scenario have already surfaced. When U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration cut off French-born International Criminal Court judge Nicolas Guillou from U.S.-linked financial and technology services, he called it a form of “civil death.”

Meanwhile, U.S. export controls in June forced Anthropic to block foreign nationals from accessing two of its most advanced AI models, offering a glimpse of what government bans on access to cutting-edge technology can look like.

Such episodes feed into mounting fears that the Trump administration could use Europe’s overreliance on U.S. tech as leverage in trade fights or disputes over EU regulations. A Proton survey released earlier this month found that 74 percent of European business leaders worry such a cutoff could disrupt their operations.

In my own little experiment, the stakes were much lower. Yet I was about to find out that replacing American tools with those built here in Europe was going to make almost everything harder — and lonelier.

Trying to live without U.S. tech, I would find out, essentially amounts to trying to live without tech at all. That was partly because, like virtually all of my fellow Europeans, I had locked myself into those consumer choices.

Dumbphones and FOMO

The early symptoms of going cold turkey looked suspiciously like withdrawal.

On that first morning, with my iPhone shut off, I reached for a Nokia brick from Finland. The so-called dumbphone is the type of device now enjoying a second life among people detoxing from screen time and is also a favorite of drug dealers seeking to avoid getting busted by any tracking and data collection.

Several hours in, I realized there were no notifications on the Nokia. Nobody calls or texts anymore. Then came the shameful part: a sense of helplessness, followed by FOMO-fueled restlessness. The world had surely kept spinning at full speed, and I was missing it. For the next few days, I would still catch myself checking the phone compulsively like an addict.

“The phone aged you instantly,” my best friend joked later that day as we traded our now-standard FaceTime video calls for a regular one. It was unclear whether he meant the muffled audio or me struggling with a new-but-actually-old device, or both.

I did notice that I was pacing up and down my flat because my usually overstimulated brain apparently couldn’t handle focusing on a voice-only call.

One instant benefit from my dumbphone: no doomscrolling in bed.

It all took me back to my first cellphone at 13, when texting meant tapping the same tiny key several times for a single letter, every SMS cost money and abbreviations and emojis were not just stylistic choices but ways to squeeze more into a message.

I knew my social media life would be at risk in my experiment. European alternatives such as Mastodon have gained traction since Elon Musk turned Twitter into X. But who joins a social network when none of their friends are there?

That was fine. I was actually eager to disappear for a while, well aware of the anxiety social media induces in me and the insecurities created by constantly watching other people’s supposedly perfect lives.

Online shopping was out — but so too was paying by card in stores and restaurants. The payment networks I rely on are American: Visa and Mastercard dominate card payments across Europe, meaning that even a purchase made with a European bank card often still runs over U.S.-controlled rails.

It meant I had to buy everything using cash, which I hadn’t done regularly in ages. Fortunately, unlike in some other European countries, Belgian legislation requires merchants to accept banknotes. The hard part was finding some of those stores without the help of Google Maps, which I’d come to rely on almost as much as my credit cards.

The invisible grip

Swearing off Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and YouTube was also part of the deal — already eliminating a sizable chunk of my leisure time. But it turned out I could barely watch anything at all, or even properly test European streaming platforms, because my television and tablet both ran on Google software.

Thankfully, an offline Nintendo Switch from Japan, good old books and the legendary Snake game kept me company.

These invisible dependencies run deep. Beyond the products we use every day, U.S. systems often serve as gateways to European companies trying to take on Big Tech.

Take Sweden’s Spotify or the Estonia-based rival to Uber, Bolt. Both still heavily rely on U.S.-controlled app stores, operating systems, payment networks and other digital infrastructure.

And then there is the cloud: the data centers and servers that host websites, process data and route traffic. The vast majority of that market is dominated by Amazon, Microsoft and Google, whose infrastructure supports large parts of Europe’s digital economy.

Many corners of Europe would go dark if those services were shut down, with its economy, public administration and communications infrastructure struggling to function normally.

Working outside the stack

On Monday morning, I walked into the office with the slightly misplaced confidence that I had prepared for everything. My efficiency at work, admittedly during a very quiet summer week, took less of a hit than I expected.

I was still working from the office. I used an open-source, Linux-powered computer. I communicated by email through a Switzerland-based Proton address, browsed the web using the Norwegian browser Vivaldi and French search engine Qwant, wrote everything in LibreOffice and even tried Mistral’s generative AI assistant. And there was always a good old notebook.

I felt productive. But the workflow around me was not. The tools themselves worked perfectly well once I accepted that breaking years of habits would take time. The disruption ultimately came from stunted collaboration: meetings, messages, shared documents and the constant stream of small exchanges that keep a newsroom moving.

“It was like you disappeared,” one colleague would tell me later.

European alternatives do exist in that space. The problem is, just like for social media, they only work properly when everyone else uses them too or when competing systems are interoperable — something the EU has long tried to legislate and enforce, often against resistance from large technology platforms.

For this little while, despite technically being able to continue working, I became an outsider within my own team. I had to skip our routine video meetings on Slack and Teams, while missing messages sent over WhatsApp and Signal.

In a trade, a city and an era built around instant messaging, sending a good old SMS felt almost prehistoric — a reminder of the longstanding complaints from the European telecom industry about losing messaging and calling revenues to U.S. tech firms.

Ultimately, this underscored one of the major pinch points in Europe’s push for greater tech independence: digital sovereignty is not an individual project. It only works if people, companies and institutions move together.

On their own, individual efforts are more likely to leave people feeling digitally isolated rather than digitally sovereign.

Relax and relapse

And yet, there was something blissful about these three days.

The initial anxiety slowly gave way to a kind of peace. Of course, that feeling may only reflect that the experiment was temporary and my digital life had not been erased.

The experience nevertheless highlighted how much I had taken these tools for granted. I have placed all my eggs in the same digital basket: my communication channels, the tools I use to authenticate myself and access the digital world, my polished digital self and years of accumulated knowledge, all stored inside one sprawling digital safe.

The concern is no longer simply whether that safe could be broken into from the outside. It is also whether somebody could lock it — or empty it — from within.

Now, as you might wonder how I’ll act on what I’ve learned, I am strangely reminded of Covid.

Many of us emerged from that temporary era of lockdowns and involuntary limits full of healthy new habits and grand ideas about how our lifestyles should change, only to return remarkably quickly to our old routines.

Sadly, the same thing happened here. My iPhone came straight back into my pocket. Messages began flowing through again. My bank card returned to its usual place. Within hours, I had fallen comfortably back into the U.S. technology stack.

As I switched my smartphone back on, my screen lit up with incoming texts inquiring whether my little experiment was over. After 72 hours of old-school SMS exchanges, two different friends were both clearly eager to return to reality, sending me the same final text: “Back to WhatsApp?”