Best-selling PC Game Includes Nasty, Game-breaking Bug

To the joy of millions, Bandai Namco Entertainment and FromSoftware released the long-awaited Elden Ring game on current and last-gen consoles, as well as on PC late last month. The game's launch on PC has been less than ideal, but a new, ugly bug that has the potential to cause major headaches surfaced only recently.

Delayed to fix older bugs

FromSoftware delayed the game to polish the final release but also to fix another nasty bug that existed in the engine of their previous release - Dark Souls 3. The older bug in question allowed for truly scary malicious activity and under specific conditions allowed hackers to obtain remote code execution capabilities on the machine of the victim. Infiltration happened using the game's multiplayer component, where one player can "invade" the world of another. Obviously, this is not the kind of invasion anyone wants, so FromSoftware put the game on the backburner for a bit to take care of the issue and make sure it's not present in the new release too.

However, security researchers are now reporting another bug, once again stemming from the game's multiplayer component. Reportedly, a hacker who joins another player's game has the ability to significantly damage their save file. This causes the victim to appear in strange places after loading back into the game,

Instead of appearing on the ground, in a safe location near the last checkpoint location the player visited, they would instead appear high above the world map, at a height that would immediately kill them when they fall to the surface.

Patch released to address issue

The bug has been addressed in a recent patch from the developer, and the patches are mandatory for online play, as usual. This means that anyone playing today should not be affected by the issue.

However, the fact that the developer managed to let this issue slip unnoticed in the release, after previously dealing with a similar, even more severe bug, as well as the fact that the game uses an anti-cheat frontend launcher that should ensure there is no foul play going on while online is concerning.

Elden Ring has sold a staggering 12 million worldwide, across all platforms. Concurrent PC players on peak days were nearly a million.