Elden Ring players were happy to discover there was a glitch that made the game’s new $5 Tarnished Pack DLC appear in their multiplayer kingdom, even if they hadn’t paid for it. But developer FromSoftware has speedily issued a patch stopping players in their path.
“Patch 1.17.1 has been released for #ELDENRING,” says the official Elden Ring account on Twitter. “This update fixes an issue in multiplayer where, under specific conditions, DLC-specific items could be obtained when not normally eligible. No additional content is included. Thank you for your support, Tarnished.”
After Patch 1.17 introduced new, paid content that comes included with Elden Ring’s fresh Switch 2 edition – the $5 pack contains the Idus Knight and Heavy Knight starting classes, plus more weapons and glamorous horse armor – a helpful bug made it so players with DLC items would automatically spawn copies of those items as pick-ups when entering a multiplayer game with someone who didn’t have the DLC. It was the Lands Between’s equivalent of dollar bills raining from the sky.
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But Patch 1.17.1 smacks players’ wrists and tells them to get their own $5. While Elden Ring fans can still trade DLC items with each other, including with people who don’t own the Tarnished Pack, they can no longer enjoy a bounty of doubles. And they are not happy.
One exasperated Twitter reply says to the official Patch 1.17.1, “In other words someone found out how to get the $5 Tarnished DLC stuff for free. It should have been free anyway, guys. Charging $5 for a few pieces of gear is the biggest L From Soft has taken in a long time.”
“I’ll get downvoted for this, but it’s crazy they released a whole patch for something as harmless as this,” another player reacts in a Reddit thread on the topic, “but they can’t bother to give us more balance or QoL changes. You know stuff that would actually improve the game’s experience?”
“People love to claim that From soft is somehow beyond criticism,” says another Reddit comment in the same thread, “but this was clearly a financial decision. They want more money from people. Simple as that.”
As much as it pains me to agree as a hardcore FromSoftware fan (I’ve played all the games more than once, I’ve watched a total of at least 100 hours of lore videos), I do. The Tarnished Pack DLC is the developer’s first experiment with something close to “microtransactions,” and I have to try hard not to see it as the first ember in a house fire. Usually, I fail. But it’s clear from Patch 1.17.1 that FromSoftware has the opposite reaction – if $5 DLC is an ember, it wants to keep it glowing.
Deep in FromSoftware’s sicko arc, Elden Ring and Dark Souls boss Hidetaka Miyazaki says “you can’t make anything that’s as fun” just by following the same old rules.
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