Dark Souls 3 Failures Are Bleeding Into Elden Ring

"Dark Souls" is among one of the most popular video game series out there, even with how frustrating FromSoftware's games can be. This is largely due to their gameplay loop, excruciating difficulty level, and cult fanbase. Now that FromSoftware's latest title, "Elden Ring", is right over the horizon, interest in the studio's back catalogue has only grown. However, the "Dark Souls" series also has a huge flaw — not from a gameplay perspective, but from a safety standpoint. And now that this flaw is being pointed out, fans are concerned about the state of "Elden Ring."

According to The Verge, while playing "Dark Souls 3", one streamer on Twitch fell victim to a hacker who compromised his entire computer using a remote code execution (RCE) and used its text-to-speech function to talk smack about the player's ability in the game. Luckily, that was the extent of it. But given that said hacker had access to the player's computer and all of its functions, things could've turned out way worse. With this security failure within "Dark Souls 3" popping up just weeks before the release of "Elden Ring," publisher Bandai Namco has sprung into action to prevent the issue from bleeding over into future games.

Following the reveal of this dangerous exploit, members of the "Dark Souls" community with some technological know-how created a third-party patch to hopefully fix the issue. However, even after modders stepped up, the game wasn't entirely safe to play. As such, publisher Bandai Namco released a statement through Twitter on Feb. 9 that the company will be addressing this issue in existing "Dark Souls" games, as well as the upcoming "Elden Ring." 

"We want to thank the entire Dark Souls community and the players who have reached out to us directly to voice their concerns and offer solutions," Bandai Namco's statement read. "Thanks to you, we have identified the cause and are working on fixing the issue. In addition, we have extended the investigation to 'Elden Ring[.]'" In other words, there's every chance that "Elden Ring" already has the same flaw in its code — which is why it's a good thing it's been caught at this point in time.

Due to the ongoing investigation, "Dark Souls" servers have remained down since January 23 (via TheVerge). According to Bandai Namco, the servers will remain down until after the release of "Elden Ring" on February 25. This gap in service, the statement explained, is "Due to the time required to set up proper testing environments[.]"