Elden Ring Hack Sends Players Into Infinite Death Loops
The majority of big game studios these days prefer to license preexisting engine technology, like Epic Games' Unreal Engine or Bethesda's infamous use of the Creation (neé Gamebryo) engine. While you do give up some control over the low-level aspects of your game—and it's not a silver bullet for technical issues—it's simpler and easier to let someone else worry about the grittiest technical details while you focus on making your game.
Instead, FromSoftware uses its own home-grown engine for its titles. The current iteration seems to be built on the same technology used for Demon's Souls way back when, and certainly it would be difficult to replicate the "feel" of a FromSoftware game in a commercial engine package. Still, one could argue that it is showing its age. Elden Ring has various technical quirks, not just limited to annoying performance problems but also including serious security issues.
⚠️Elden Ring PSA for PC players⚠️
— Mordecai (@EldenRingUpdate) March 18, 2022
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/8et3bl8T1I
Some sites are reporting that this "corrupts" your save file, but that's not quite correct. What's actually happening is that when you die, you will respawn in "the void,” falling to your demise 15 seconds later. You're unable to take any actions while falling, so you'll simply die and respawn again in the same place. Since you can't move or get out, your character is permanently stuck, essentially ending that character's save file altogether.
Some players have reported that they were unable to do this; it seems that having the game running at the full 60 FPS makes this extremely difficult as you only have about one or two frames to actually open the map. Still, this author himself has confirmed that it does work; while he wasn't struck with the exploit himself, a good friend that spends a lot of time in Elden Ring's PvP was affected, and he was able to escape the loop.
If you aren't able to escape the loop that way, there is another way, although it involves using Cheat Engine yourself. Don't worry; you won't get banned, because to use it you need to disable EasyAntiCheat and play offline for a bit anyway. YouTuber Reapra has the instructions in the pinned comment on his video, which we've embedded above.
Neither FromSoftware nor Bandai-Namco have acknowledged this flaw, so until they do, it's unlikely there will be a fix unless the Blue Sentinel team get around to releasing their third-party anti-cheat. It's unfortunate that EasyAntiCheat is so easily defeated; perhaps Epic Games can release an update for the anti-cheat solution that solves these issues as well. Only time will tell.
In the meantime, if you want to avoid this hack, the only solution is unfortunately to avoid online play. You don't have to play offline, necessarily; just avoid multi-player interactions.
