Shortly after Elden Ring’s release last month, players discovered that the latest FromSoftware game shares more than just surface-level similarities with its Souls predecessors. A notorious Dark Souls bug can still be found deep in the recesses of Elden Ring’s code, and it may even provide some exciting new opportunities for speedrunning enthusiasts.
The earliest instance I could find of the bug—known colloquially as the “deathcam” glitch—occurring in Elden Ring comes from a video posted on the day of its release, February 25. A speedrunner named Ginz discovered that tumbling off a specific cliff makes the game think you fell to your death without actually having to touch the “kill plane,” an invisible part of the level geometry that, well, kills you.
This puts Elden Ring’s camera into deathcam mode, positioned looking down on the player to better capture them falling into whatever pit, hole, or cliff was supposed to be deadly. But as shown in the video above, Ginz is still able to move around and might have even gotten back to the solid ground with the spectral steed Torrent’s double jump if they hadn’t accidentally fallen again.
The deathcam glitch has been found in several previous Souls games, including Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3, but it’s best known in the original Dark Souls, where it can be utilized to sequence break into Sen’s Fortress. In that game, the bug is activated by positioning an enemy so that riposting them briefly pushes you out of bounds, triggering the deathcam. And since certain objects don’t load when the glitch is in effect, you’re free to walk right into Sen’s Fortress even if its gate is down.
Since Ginz discovered Elden Ring’s deathcam glitch almost two weeks ago, players have found several areas from which to activate the bug, some much more useful than others.
Elden Ring speedrun strategies at the moment mainly focus on playing well rather than exploiting a handful of glitches, but I’m sure there’s more than one person out there looking for ways to skip bosses and possibly even entire areas with the new game’s deathcam. It’s just a matter of time before folks blow Elden Ring’s massive world wide open, and I can’t wait to see how fast they do it.