Elden Ring patch stops hackers putting players in an infinite death loop
Elden Ring recently received a giant patch that, among other things, addressed some of the performance issues affecting PC players, fixed certain NPC questlines that weren't working, and added NPC quest markers. Today a minor patch for the patch has been released on PC, which has to be applied before playing online.
Most notably, the patch notes include this: "Fixed a bug in multiplayer that allowed players to teleport others to incorrect map coordinates." This fix is aimed at a major new exploit that had emerged only a few days ago, whereby Elden Ring hackers were entering players' games and crashing them. When the player restarted the game and logged in, their character would spawn in a new location out-of-bounds and enter a recursive loop that sees them fall to their death again and again.
You can see this glitch in action below: hopefully you won't be seeing it again.
⚠️Elden Ring PSA for PC players⚠️There's an exploit going around on PC where hackers will corrupt your save file while you're invaded. First they will crash your game, and when you open it back up, your character will be constantly falling to their death... pic.twitter.com/8et3bl8T1IMarch 18, 2022
Other major elements of the patch are a fix for Nepheli Loux’s questline, which was apparently not progressing for some players, and a bug that was causing players to die when descending from a spot near Bestial Sanctum that should not be fatal. The Ash of War called Endure was not, in fact, granting the promised endurance—now it will.
You won't be able to play online without this patch, and it's live now. The focus here is obviously on fixing immediate problems but Elden Ring, great as it is, still needs some work on PC performance-wise. The game may prove that frame rate isn't everything, but it would definitely be nice to play without transitional stutters.
It will be interesting to see what FromSoftware chooses to address in the next major patch, given that in 1.3 it showed a willingness to mess with some pretty fundamental aspects of Elden Ring. The map now shows NPC locations, there's more NPC summons around bosses, some bosses were slightly nerfed, and the Mimic Tear Ash was nerfed into oblivion. The success of Elden Ring means there's no shortage of opinions about how it could be 'improved'—though I think we can all agree that nixing the latest hacker nonsense was certainly one.