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A Poison Wall Glitch In ‘Elden Ring’ Reminds Us That Video Games Are Hard To Make

Video games are very difficult to make. Any developer can talk at length about the myriad of challenges they faced when making a game, but usually, by the time a game is released, it is in a state where the majority of it works. Sure, we have some necessary bug fixes and the always infamous day one patch, but most major glitches have been found and fixed by the time it gets to your console.

That said, the larger a game, the harder it is to find certain glitches. Sometimes, something small can slip through the cracks, like this glitch in Elden Ring that fans have recently discovered. There is a random wall that, when players approach, they will start getting poisoned, but if they step away from the wall, the poison effect will go away. Most players couldn’t figure out why this was happening beyond “well it’s a glitch,” but one game hacker managed to actually find the core of the issue. Zullie the Witch, a hacker and modder of From Software games, dove into the game’s code and explained why this glitched out wall is different from how poisoning usually works and what likely happened to cause this glitch. (H/t Kotaku).

So, it turns out that the entire reason this one random wall spot can poison players is nothing more than a typo or misplaced label when assigning the wall a material code. It sounds simple when it’s laid out like this in such simple terms, but it makes total sense why a glitch like this would happen. Elden Ring is a massive game with a huge world to explore. Something being labeled wrong like this would far more noticeable in a place like the tutorial area at the start, or maybe one of the game’s many boss encounters, but by a random cliffside that most players would walk by without a second thought?

That is far more difficult for QA testers and developers to find until hundreds of thousands of people are released into the world. Thankfully, as Zullie the Witch explained, this glitch sounds like an easy fix and will hopefully be patched out sooner rather than later.