Elden Ring launch could be ruined by Dark Souls PC exploit

metro.co.uk:

The now notorious Dark Souls exploit may not only affect Elden Ring, but Bandai Namco allegedly knew of various similar issues for years.

Not too long ago, news of a particularly nasty Dark Souls exploit on PC began making the rounds, prompting FromSoftware to disable the online servers for Dark Souls: Remastered, Dark Souls 2, and Dark Souls 3.

The servers remain down, with still no word on when they’ll come back, and members of the community fear the same exploit will affect the upcoming Elden Ring as well, which has already gone gold and is on track to launch this month.

To summarise, the exploit allows a hacker to take control of someone’s PC. Why this is bad shouldn’t need explaining but some examples of what hackers could do include installing malware and accessing private information.

Reddit user LukeYui claims to have seen Elden Ring’s network code thanks to the closed test and they believe it’s open to the exact same problems as the Dark Souls games.

‘I’ve had the chance to see code from the closed network test and can already tell you that there are a lot of crashes and vulnerabilities in Elden Ring’s netcode, the exact same ones as in Dark Souls 3 actually!’ they told VGC.

‘So, I suspect it’s going to take five minutes for cheaters from Dark Souls 3 to port their scripts to Elden Ring and make release day a hellscape.’

The most shocking part of the whole thing is that LukeYui and numerous others say that the Dark Souls games have suffered from severe security flaws like this for years.

Despite numerous emails to FromSoftware and Bandai Namco, apparently nothing was done to fix these issues, with LukeYui saying ‘I’ve reported many things over the years to Bandai Namco. Every time I’ve been told ‘it will be passed on to