Elden Ring is currently one of the most highly praised games in recent memory and also having its fair share of troubles on PC and PS5. Most recently, tons of Xbox players have reported being unable to play the open world RPG online since it launched yesterday.
While the center piece of Elden Ring is its beautiful, harsh, and mysterious single-player adventure, coop and multiplayer also play an important role. As in previous Dark Souls games, players can invade one another’s games to fight or offer help with difficult bosses. Except, apparently, on Xbox where players say they keep getting bombarded with network error messages when they try to play the game in online mode.
“Has not worked for 36 hours,” wrote one player on the Elden Ring subreddit in a post that’s been getting thousands of upvotes. ‘Please FromSoftware acknowledge and update us.” There are a bunch of other discussions of the issue across the rest of Reddit, Discord, and Twitter as well. Tweets from the official Elden Ring account, as well as Xbox mascot Larry Hyrb’s account, have been bombarded with comments about the issue as well.
Players suspect it has to do with a recent calibration update called version 1.02.1. Those who have the update can get online. those who don’t, can’t, but they’re also not sure how to get the latest version to install. It seems to be affecting players on both old Xbox Ones and current-gen Xbox Series X/Ss. The only official mention of any issue on the Bandai Namco support page says that “Online issues on the Xbox platform” are currently under investigation.
Bandai Namco and Microsoft didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Despite shattering records for past Dark Souls games on Twitch and Steam, Elden Ring has recently seen its review average on Valve’s storefront plummet over performance issues. Still, that hasn’t stopped it from having one of the biggest PC launches ever. There are currently nearly 800,000 concurrent players on Steam alone. I started it up last night on PS5 and found myself immediately intrigued and overwhelmed. I’m looking forward to diving back in over the rest of the weekend.