Elden Ring players who are getting increasingly annoyed with the mail system will need to regroup. FromSoftware states that it has no plans to offer an alternative to disable it. But there is a solution.
Thanks to the rise in popularity of Elden Ring, veteran players reportedly find the messages more annoying than previous FromSoftware titles. The game has sold twelve million units worldwide as of March XNUMX. By comparison, the Dark Souls series as a whole sold twenty-seven million units at last count (two thousand and twenty), so there has been a massive influx of new players.
Messages in Elden Ring let you leave helpful advice and warnings using a combination of predefined words and sentences. You'll find missives about opponents and environmental hazards and, unsurprisingly, trolling. So veterans have gotten into the habit of not trusting everything they read. People will often try to mislead themselves with false information, but that's part of the fun!
But now that the game has found a wider audience, all those "finger test but hole" messages next to NPCs have lost their luster. And light trolling undoubtedly morphed into smothering. Messages can be left so close to interactive objects that reading them overrides execution actions. Escaping from a ladder, for example, can be thwarted by someone looking to play with other players.
The tradition of trolling and reminiscing with in-game messages has become a tradition with FromSoftware games. I reached out to the developers to ask if there would be an update that would let frustrated players disable messages and the reply was "no concrete plans to move things around the game." I asked if the studio was looking for ways to prevent this "abuse" of the system, given how integral it is to the game, and the answer to that question was the same.
If you're one of the contingent of players who get annoyed with the mail system, there is a workaround... but it has advantages and disadvantages.
How to disable Elden Ring messages
I'll state it right now: you can't disable messages in Elden Ring. I'm sorry, I'm not sorry). If other people are discovering the joys of the game and making mistakes, there is something you can do: disconnect.
Yes, you read it right. That means no summons, no bloodstains, no invaders, no messages! So if you're happy to go solo with a purely single-player experience, here's what to do.
- From the main menu, choose System
- Go to the Network tab
- Scroll down to Startup Settings
- Switch from playing online to playing offline
- Go back to the menu and launch your game.
Now you can enjoy the Elden Ring experience offline! Which is not even half as enjoyable, let's be frank. But it is the only solution at the moment, if the mail system makes you lose the will to live.