FromSoftware Rushes Emergency Elden Ring Patch After Players Duplicate Tarnished Edition DLC for Free
By CriticalPixel ·
FromSoftware spent Tuesday plugging a hole players tore open within days of Elden Ring's Tarnished Edition launch on Nintendo Switch 2. The new five dollar DLC pack, which bundles the two starting classes and cosmetic extras from the Switch 2 port onto every other platform, shipped with a duplication exploit baked right in. Patch 1.17.1 landed on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox on September 8, and its entire purpose is closing that loophole before it spread any further through the game's multiplayer community. FromSoftware did not add anything else to the update. It exists purely to stop people from getting paid content for free.
According to Eurogamer, the exploit worked through the game's item trading system. A player who bought the Tarnished Pack could join a session with someone who had not, drop the DLC exclusive gear on the ground, and let the other player scoop it up. The items never disappeared from the original owner's inventory, which turned a normal trade into a free copy machine for the Idus Knight and Heavy Knight starting classes, their armor sets, and the new cosmetic skins for Torrent, Elden Ring's goat horse mount. Once the patch went live, trading between players still works exactly the same way it always has. The difference now is that the game correctly removes a traded item from the original owner's stash instead of quietly letting both sides walk away with a copy.
The whole mess traces back to how FromSoftware structured the Tarnished Edition rollout in the first place. Switch 2 owners get the two classes and the cosmetic extras built directly into their seventy dollar port, while anyone who already owns Elden Ring on PC, PlayStation, or Xbox has to buy the same content separately through a five dollar DLC pack now sold on Steam, the PlayStation Store, and the Xbox Store. That price split is exactly what made the duplication bug so tempting to exploit. It let players outside the Switch 2 ecosystem grab premium extras that were supposed to cost real money, for nothing, during the same week Eurogamer's own impressions coverage was praising how well the four year old RPG runs on Nintendo's new hardware.
Fans Are Not Exactly Cheering the Fix
Reaction to the patch on X leans more annoyed than grateful. Replies under the official Elden Ring announcement post range from sarcastic jabs at the line no additional content is included to open frustration that FromSoftware charged for cosmetics at all. One widely liked reply argued the Tarnished Pack should have been free from the start, calling the five dollar price tag one of the developer's worst calls in a long time. Other fans used the same thread to push for something bigger, asking Bandai Namco to bring Shadow of the Erdtree weapons and the Everdark Heolstor boss fight into Nightreign instead of spending patch cycles plugging exploits in the base game. Reaction stayed limited to what surfaced in that single thread, so it reads as mixed rather than a coordinated backlash, but not one reply defended the price of the DLC.
What Comes Next for Tarnished Edition Buyers
FromSoftware has not said whether patch 1.17.1 is the last word on Tarnished Edition exploits. The Switch 2 port only launched this month, and dataminers were already picking apart its file structure before the ink dried on early reviews. Bandai Namco has stayed quiet on whether the studio plans to acknowledge players who bought the five dollar pack legitimately and then watched everyone else get it for free through the glitch. History suggests FromSoftware moves fast on security patches and slow on pricing complaints, and nothing about this response breaks that pattern. The bigger question is whether Nightreign, the spinoff built on the same engine, inherits any of the same trading logic that made this exploit possible in the first place.
The CriticalPixel Take
Charging existing owners of a four year old game five dollars for two starting classes and a horse skin was always going to invite trouble like this. FromSoftware built an artificial wall between Switch 2 buyers and everyone else who already paid full price for Elden Ring years ago, and players found the crack in that wall within days. That is what happens when cosmetic content gets gated behind a paywall instead of shipping as a free update for a fan base that has already spent hundreds of hours and multiple expansion purchases on this game. The patch itself is a reasonable, fast fix for a real exploit. The pricing decision that created the incentive to exploit it in the first place is the part that actually deserves the criticism, and FromSoftware has not addressed that side of the complaint at all.
Elden Ring remains one of the best selling games of the last decade, and FromSoftware clearly is not finished squeezing new revenue out of it between Nightreign spinoffs and platform ports. Patch 1.17.1 is live now on every platform, so anyone who grabbed a duplicated Tarnished Pack item before September 8 keeps what they already picked up. The free ride just stops there, and the next argument over what should and should not cost extra in a five year old open world game is already brewing in the replies.
Sources
Eurogamer report on Elden Ring patch 1.17.1 and the Tarnished Edition duplication glitch