The moment has come. After years of anticipation, Elden Ring finally leaps from the wispy plane of imagination to the very real plane of today’s gaming consoles and PCs. Like any massive modern game, however, it has some issues. And its publisher has an unusual solution for those playing on PlayStation 5: Don’t make use of the console’s key “rest mode” feature.
Elden Ring, an open-world action game developed by the makers of Bloodborne, is taking the gaming world by storm. Reviewers across the board have praised it as one of the best games of all time, making Elden Ring the first runaway smash hit of the year. Right now, it’s shattering records on both Steam and Twitch. Kotaku’s Ian Walker, who’s neck deep in the Lands Between, has spilled ink on everything from its jerk NPCs to its treasure chests (even if those chests completely screwed him over, which: lmao).
On PS5, however, some players have run into an issue with Elden Ring’s save system, most of which seem to occur if the console powers down while you’re playing or if you’ve left the game in “rest mode.” Though the PS5 doesn’t have a feature like Xbox’s “Quick Resume”—which allows you to maintain half a dozen games in a suspended state—it does allow you to suspend one game at any given time by putting the console in rest mode. When you’re ready to play again, you can pull your console out of rest mode and instantly hop back into the game, skipping the time needed for a cold boot. But in some cases, for Elden Ring players, the autosave doesn’t kick in.
In a blog post, publisher Bandai Namco addressed the problem, writing, “We are aware of the cause of this issue and are working on a patch to correct it, but until the patch is released, please save your game manually by exiting the game regularly.” You can do so by hitting the “quit game” option from Elden Ring’s in-game menu. The blog post also addressed issues with Elden Ring’s performance on PC, including framerate hiccups and abnormally high mouse sensitivity, and says a patch is incoming for those as well.
Mind, the blog post does not actually detail the “cause” for save data woes on PS5, nor offer a timeline for when a fix will roll out. Representatives for Bandai Namco did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
Elden Ring is not the first PS5 game to launch with problems regarding the console’s rest mode. Last spring, Housemarque’s Returnal, a relentlessly challenging roguelike about the musical talents of Blue Öyster Cult, launched without any way to suspend a run. If you wanted to stop a run—which could easily last hours—and do something else, you only had one solution, issued straight from the developer: Put the console in rest mode.
That sounds easy enough, right? But when Housemarque rolled out an overnight update shortly after Returnal’s launch, some players—some of whom were in the middle of stellar runs they absolutely would’ve won, thank you very much—who’d kept Returnal in rest mode, as directed, woke up to lost data. In October, as part of Returnal’s splashy 2.0 update, Housemarque added a formal “suspend game” option.
The saying is true: Ain’t no rest for the wicked(ly awesome owners of PS5s).