This Secret Wall In Elden Ring Only Opens After 50 Hits, What Was FromSoftware Thinking?
Anyone who has played much of the game "Souls" at all will be familiar with taunting messages from other players that say "Hidden passage ahead" or "Secret path ahead." There's usually a second message right behind it that says "liar ahead," or in recent mega-hit Elden Ring, "dastard ahead."
Most of these messages are placed in locations that look like they certainly could have been a secret path. The "Souls" games are made using map "tiles" that are crafted to have multiple exits even if they don't all get used in a given room. As a result, you end up with weird circular crannies and oddly-square nooks that may have been an archway or door in another area.
FromSoftware's latest dark fantasy RPG, Elden Ring, is an open-world game, and by necessity the larger play area means that more map tiles are being re-used more often. As a result, there are spots that look like they should be doorways or cave entrances all over the place, and players have been gleefully trolling each other by leaving messages promising hidden paths and secret doors everywhere.
Well as it happens, some of those places may in fact be secret doors after all. See, normally the way you find a secret door in a FromSoftware game is by walking up to it and attacking or attempting to roll through the wall, at which point the illusion will vanish and you can step through. Never in the entire history of the series, going back to Demon's Souls at least, has there been a secret wall you needed to hit more than once.
apparently some fake walls in Elden Ring take multiple hits to reveal, and oh my god this changes everything
— Iron Pineapple (@IronPineapple_) March 18, 2022
(clip from user teristam on r/eldenring) pic.twitter.com/Jt8MNUDY0j
This discovery has left Elden Ring players reeling. What if all of those "hidden path ahead" messages were legitimate? Where else could there be hidden walls like this? Until now, it seemed as if the developers of Elden Ring had used hidden walls very sparingly throughout the game; except for a few areas that are riddled with them, there are only a handful in the whole game.
Fortunately, players don't have to go whacking every wall fifty times. Thanks to clever game modders, there are camera and wall-hack mods that players can use to explore areas and find regions that seem to be out-of-bounds. Nobody's found another fifty-hit wall yet, but if there's more hidden places in the game, the players will find them sooner than later.
