When they aren’t making me laugh with lewd jokes, tricking me into hitting walls in search of hidden passages, or labeling every animal a dog, my fellow Tarnished are doing a great job of highlighting some of Elden Ring’s weirdest bugs via the messaging system.
I first stumbled upon one of these messages while exploring the Academy of Raya Lucaria, an early-game area that’s like Hogwarts if it were overrun with marionette soldiers, giant crabs, and pot goblins rather than a bunch of transphobic wizards-in-training constantly shitting themselves. I obsessively try to read almost every little note left behind by other players (hey, I need all the help I can get) and couldn’t stop myself when I saw a few positioned in an out-of-the-way corner of the ruined school’s outside pavilion.
“Try jumping,” suggested both of the cross-dimensional messages, with one hinting at a “bug ahead.” I’ve done weirder things in Elden Ring, so I did what I was told and leapt into the space where the two walls met. It took a couple of tries, but once I hit the sweet spot, the world around me disappeared, leaving behind a ghostly void through which I could see the silhouettes of far-off enemies. I played around with the glitch a little more but, afraid that it might crash my game, I left it alone after capturing some footage.
I thought this might be a one-time thing, but I found a similar message much later during one of my lengthy sojourns into the recesses of Elden Ring’s massive underground biomes. As soon as I read the otherworldly scrawl, tucked into a corner in the Siofra River region, I knew I was in store for another glitch. I jumped into the recess and the game bugged out much like it had in the academy. It wasn’t quite as dramatic as before, but I still tried not to poke and prod it too much for fear of angering the gods of Elden Ring’s code and losing progress in this difficult area.
I discovered the last of my buggy Elden Ring walls on Twitter rather than in-game. ShrimpChips, a Twitch streamer, posted about the glitch a few days ago, and I reached out to see if he wouldn’t mind pointing me toward the hard-to-discern spot where he snuck through the game’s boundaries. He didn’t, uploading a helpful video with directions from the closest checkpoint. Thank you, ShrimpChips, you are a gentleman and a scholar.
Getting there myself took a bit of doing since I hadn’t discovered the region in question yet. But after fighting my way through a pair of surly gargoyles and what felt like an entire colony of gigantic ants, I finally arrived at the building in ShrimpChips’ video. Funny enough, the entire structure was a buggy mess rather than just a single corner, with almost every wall allowing me to safely slip out-of-bounds for a split second.
Much like the other areas, there were copious player messages pointing out just how weird this all was.
Don’t get me wrong, Elden Ring is a big, beautiful game. Development is hard in the best of circumstances, so the fact that FromSoftware was able to create something this ambitious in the middle of a pandemic borders on miraculous. These bugged walls and the messages leading to them are just another example of how communal an experience Souls games can be. Not only are players helping fellow Tarnished by pointing out the unseen dangers lurking in every shadow, but the notes they leave behind can also be used for something as simple as pointing to a glitch and saying, “That’s pretty weird, huh?”
Let me know if you’ve found any other areas with strange, easy-to-replicate bugs and how (if at all) you signaled the oddity to other players. I’d love to stop by and upvote your message.