Elden Ring

Elden Ring is FromSoftwareEngineFromSoftware in-house engineFromSoftware builds its action RPGs on a proprietary in-house engine, carried forward and evolved across the Dark Souls games, Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Elden Ring. It has no official public name and is not licensed externally, which is why it is its own family in this catalog.1 game in this family →'s open-world action RPG, directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki with worldbuilding from George R. R. Martin, published by Bandai NamcoPublisherBandai Namco EntertainmentBandai Namco Entertainment is the Japanese publisher behind a wide catalog of console and PC games, including FromSoftware's Elden Ring and a range of anime-licensed titles. Its games span anti-cheat postures from Elden Ring's Easy Anti-Cheat to the same kernel-mode EAC in its free-to-play hero battle royale My Hero Ultra Rumble, developed by Byking.2 games in this family → and released on PC February 25, 2022. It won Game of the Year at The Game Awards 2022 and had sold more than 30 million copies by 2025, one of the best-selling games of its era. It runs on FromSoftware's proprietary in-house engine, the lineage carried forward from the Dark Souls games and Bloodborne; the engine has no official public name. Online play blends cooperative summoning with player-versus-player invasions.

Running Elden Ring online on PC means Easy Anti-Cheat's kernel driver loads with the game and unloads when you close it. The game is eldenring.exe and the EACAnti-cheatEasy Anti-Cheat (EAC)Easy Anti-Cheat is one of the most widely deployed kernel anti-cheats in PC gaming. Founded by Finnish company Kamu in 2006, acquired by Epic Games in 2018, and bundled with Epic Online Services. The kernel driver loads while a protected game is running. User-mode daemons EasyAntiCheat.exe and EasyAntiCheat_EOS.exe are catalogued in the Field Guide's processes section.18 games in this family → wrapper is start_protected_game.exe; if launches fail with an anti-cheat error, repair EAC from the game folder rather than disabling it. If you only want single-player with mods, the offline method removes EAC but also removes all online play, which is the trade you are making. The durable lesson is in the history: keep the game patched, because the most serious risks in these games have come through the online layer, not the campaign.

Elden Ring uses Easy Anti-Cheat, in the Epic Online Services variant whose easyanticheat_eos.exeProcesseasyanticheat_eos.exeEasy Anti-Cheat for Epic Online Services (EOS variant)Open plate → daemon is catalogued in the Field Guide's processes section. On Windows, EAC runs a kernel-mode driver that loads while the game is open and unloads when it closes. The main game process is eldenring.exe, launched through start_protected_game.exe, the EAC wrapper. EAC is required for all online play; renaming the wrapper to run the game offline, the common way to use single-player mods, disables multiplayer entirely. As kernel anti-cheats go this is the standard posture: present during play, scoped to the session, not resident at boot.

Elden Ring launched into one of the clearest lessons in PC gaming that an online layer is itself an attack surface. In January 2022, weeks before Elden Ring's release, a critical remote-code-execution flaw was disclosed in the online code shared by FromSoftware's Dark Souls games on PC, catalogued as CVE-2022-24126. At a high level, a malicious player in an online session could run code on another player's machine. FromSoftware took the Dark Souls PC servers offline and kept them down for most of 2022, deliberately holding them off until after Elden Ring shipped so the team could verify the new game did not carry the same flaw; consoles were never affected. BleepingComputer, PC Gamer, and Eurogamer covered it. After launch, Elden Ring had its own problem in PvP: in March 2022, malicious invaders used cheats to corrupt PC players' save files and trap characters in a death loop, which FromSoftware addressed through patches. No exploit details belong on this page; the point is that the multiplayer code, not the single-player game, was where the risk lived.