Elden Ring messages are going nowhere but you can turn them off – here's how

techradar.com:

Elden Ring players who are getting increasingly irked by the messaging system are just going to have to lump it. FromSoftware says it doesn't have plans to offer an option to disable it. But there is a workaround.

Thanks to Elden Ring's surge in popularity, longtime players are seemingly finding the messages more bothersome than previous FromSoftware titles. The game has sold 12M units worldwide as of March 16. By comparison, the Dark Souls series as a whole has sold 27M units at last count (2020), so there's been a massive influx of new players.

Messages in Elden Ring let you leave helpful tips and warnings using a combo of preset words and phrases. You'll find missives about enemies and environmental hazards, and, unsurprisingly, outright trolling. So veterans have become accustomed to not trusting everything they read. People will often try to lure each other to their deaths with false information, but it's all part of the fun!

But now that the game has found a larger audience, all of those 'try finger, but hole' messages next to NPCs have lost their luster. And the lighthearted trolling has arguably turned into griefing. Messages can be left so close to interactable objects that reading them supersedes the performing actions. Escaping up a ladder, for example, can be thwarted by someone looking to mess with other players.     

The tradition of trolling and memeing with in-game messages has become a tradition with FromSoftware's games. I reached out to the devs to ask if there would be an update to let frustrated players turn off messages and the response was that there are «no specific plans to change things for now.» I asked if the studio was looking into ways to prevent this 'abuse' of the system, given how integral a