Elden Ring’s worst hack reportedly hasn’t been patched out of the PC version yet

An RCE is bad news.

Screenshot of Elden Ring featuring the Fire Giant

Screenshot by Gamepur

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Elden Ring is a massively popular game — more than 12 million copies have been sold since launch less than a month ago. While the PC version has some great settings to run the game at a high framerate and fidelity, it’s also prone to a particularly nasty hack.

The hack in question is called remote code execution (RCE). Essentially, an Elden Ring player can join your game via co-op invitation or invasion and then take full command of your PC, running code on your machine from their own. RCE is very dangerous, and it’s reportedly still happening. Twitter user @notasnervous uploaded a video (not their own, but one they claim to have seen elsewhere) of the hack in action. As you can see in the clip, the affected player’s PC switches over to a web browser and begins ceaselessly opening YouTube tabs.

https://twitter.com/notasnervous/status/1504481788051157010

As @notasnervous points out, Elden Ring’s Easy Anti-Cheat architecture doesn’t help in this scenario. The same issue of RCE plagued previous Soulsborne games, leading to Dark Souls’ PC servers being shut down for a time leading up to Elden Ring’s release. FromSoftware fans were already divided on the company’s anti-cheat implementation, and reasons like this are why. Hopefully it can be fully remedied with additional updates.

Most recently, Elden Ring’s patch 1.03 was released across PC and consoles. The update fixed a number of bugs, added new quest phases for a handful of NPCs, and made additional balance changes to several spells.