Elden Ring's Secret Walls May Be Far More Elusive Than Any Of Us Imagined
"Elden Ring," and by extension similar FromSoftware titles like "Dark Souls," have earned a reputation for being difficult. But not just difficult — the games are also somewhat notorious for not supplying (or in some cases even obfuscating) much of their information to players. Not without meticulous item description reading or consulting online walkthroughs, anyway.
Fake walls, referred to as "illusory," are the kind of secret (or not-so-secret) element that you definitely will not see signposted by a tutorial message outside of maybe a brief tutorial area, if you're lucky. If you're playing online you might find the occasional message left by other players as a clue, but more often than not those types of breadcrumbs are left as a joke to make you waste a few seconds attacking a solid wall.
In the past, it would typically only take a single strike or a press of the interact button (depending on the game) to clear an illusory wall and find the secrets or horrors hiding behind it, but Reddit user teristam has discovered an exception to that rule in "Elden Ring" that has many FromSoftware fans worried. There's an illusory wall that takes up to 50 (yes, fifty) hits to disappear.
Or it might just be a mistake
Many who jump head-first into FromSoftware games like "Dark Souls" and "Bloodborne" take extra care when exploring to try and find as many secrets as possible, including fake masonry. So the concern now is that this particular wall may be an indicator that there are other walls like it in "Elden Ring" that will require more hits than a golem or a troll to defeat.
Twitter user MallowyGoodness theorizes that it could be a development error, however, stating that it may be a leftover from changes made to the area's map. More specifically, the path players are meant to take through the area may have changed at some point during development, which negated the need for the illusory wall. But instead of removing the fake wall or rebuilding the virtual facade, it was marked as an indestructible object. Though clearly if that is the case something may have gone wrong with attempting to make the wall indestructible.
A very sound and probable theory, but FromSoftware itself has developed a bit of a reputation for being cheeky with its players. So, for the moment, nobody is entirely sure whether this is a bug, a one-off thing that's meant to get into people's heads, or a full-blown element to some of the game's secrets.