Elden Ring Swapped Its Trick Wall For A Worse One

If you thought poisonous swamps were bad, wait until you run into what might just be the most dangerous wall in "Elden Ring." Longtime fans of FromSoftware are familiar with the studio's penchant for illusion walls. These walls, once smacked by the player, fade away to reveal a secret room or passageway. The fun — and sometimes confusing — part about illusion walls is that they're often indistinguishable from ordinary walls. Of course, finding them is made even harder when messages left by other players constantly say that every wall is an illusory one.

"Elden Ring" has continued the inclusion of these magical barriers, but recently an entirely new magical wall has been found by the hacker Zullie the Witch that's even more dangerous than the game's wave gesture. Located on a cliffside beneath the game's mysterious Volcano Manor, Zullie has found a wall that will actually cause poison damage to build up on players that touch it. While it doesn't sound too out of place for a world as fraught with danger as "Elden Ring's," it's actually not supposed to exist.

As Zullie the Witch explains in a video exploring this odd patch of poisonous pebbles, this is simply a coding error involving the game's "Hit Material." Typically, Hit Material acts as an invisible blanket that gives different pieces of information about a video game's physical terrain. Whether the player is walking on dirt, stone, or magically ethereal bridges, Hit Material tells the game what audio effects should be used or, in some cases, if the physical terrain should be damaging players. Ever wondered why walking on lava in "Elden Ring" can kill you? It's Hit Material's fault. 

Lava isn't the only lethal flooring in "Elden Ring." Poisonous pools and swamps exist, and — surely by accident — so do poisonous walls. It's incredible that Zullie was even able to find this particularly pestilent outcropping due to the fact that it's tucked away on an obscure cliffside. Odds are that FromSoftware wasn't even aware of this glitch, given that "Elden Ring" is an absolutely massive game. A strange bug here or there is an occupational hazard when it comes to creating an enormous open-world game.

Maybe it wasn't intentional, but it's yet another fun thing to find in a game that's filled with exciting discoveries. Even if the wall poisons you, it can't be nearly as bad as cursed underwear that gets players banned.