We recently reported on an ‘annoying Elden Ring Steam Deck error‘ that plagued players who didn’t have the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC installed. The ‘Inappropriate activity detected’ error message would force you into offline mode unless you bought the expansion, or used a workaround. However, a new Proton patch now solves the issue without any user interference required.
Steam Deck players have been flocking to play the latest Elden Ring DLC. In fact, the game recently became the most-played game on Steam Deck off the back of the new expansion’s launch. However, not everyone is ready to jump into the new content yet, with many newcomers to the game also looking to enjoy some Souls-like action on the handheld device.
GE-Proton9-10 has been released and includes EAC fix for Elden Ring
A new version of Proton GE, GE-Proton9-10, has now been released. You can see the full patch notes on GitHub, but there’s one we’re particularly interested in: “protonfixes: added EAC fix to allow elden ring to run even if dlc not owned”. There are also a couple of mentions of the new DXVK merge which will help improve Steam Deck performance in older games, but that isn’t relevant to Elden Ring.
As we said, you’d previously have to use a workaround to stop this error from occurring. It turns out it had something to do with EAC (Easy Anti Cheat), hence why users were being thrown into offline mode. The game would fail to find a file named ‘DLC.bdt’ as it isn’t included in the base game. Users figured out they could simply place a file of the same name to stop the error from occurring, but now this Proton GE update resolves that issue more naturally.
It could cause another problem though
Even though this fix seems like a great little addition that should make Steam Deck gamers’ lives easier, there is somewhat of a caveat. According to a comment on Reddit, it may cause problems down the line when (and if) developers FromSoftware officially fix this bug, rather than relying on Proton – Valve’s compatibility layer for Steam Deck.
Since we don’t know for sure whether the presence of the ‘DLC.bdt’ file affects downloading the DLC at a later stage, it could disrupt base-game players who then go on to try out Shadow of the Erdtree at a later date. This was reportedly a problem in The Coalition’s title, Gears 5, as an unofficial EAC fix caused problems when the devs got around to addressing it themselves.
