A controversial aspect of challenging video games is artificial difficulty. One way this can manifest is input reading, a technique that allows the game’s AI to respond to certain player actions to continuously punish them.
Since its release, many Eldon Ring Players suspect that some of the bosses in the game, especially the ones that give us the hardest, can read our control inputs and get into unfair territory.
The idea isn’t actually new, and has been proposed time and time again in other FromSoftware games, most recently in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. But Elden Ring is a massive game by any standards, so while those instances are few compared to the number of bosses in the game, they’re enough to get some attention.
So, does Elden Ring really read player input? The answer is – technically – it doesn’t. That’s according to modder Zullie the Witch, who himself analyzed the AI behavior of the worst bosses to see if they were programmed to perform certain actions in response to the player’s actions.
In practice, however, what actually happens is the effective input reading. As you can see in the video below, bosses are programmed to react to specific player animations regardless of context – such as when the AI detects that the player has initiated some healing animations.
Crucially, however, this does not include all The only ways to restore HP during battle are those that use the Healing Bottle animation. In the shot, Zuli isolates the AI of the Godskin Apostle boss, and only triggers healing punishment and evasion.
When the animation starts, it creates a sign that the BOSS AI detects and responds quickly. That’s why in the case of Divine Hide Apostle it will always throw black flames at you. immediate You pull out the flask. As Zullie pointed out, the way the animations are blended together makes it difficult to detect exactly when that response happens under normal circumstances.
The same method is also used to make some enemies and bosses dodge your ranged/spell attacks. In this way, the AI will look for different flags and avoid them. Even if you don’t aim them directly, the animation is enough for them to start dodging. This doesn’t apply to all spells, of course, only to those with accurate tracking.
This might make some fights unfair, but now that we know what’s actually going on, we can at least keep ourselves from going nuts trying to prove the boss is psychic.
Zullie the Witch has been the source of many of Elden Ring’s discoveries since Elden Ring’s release. Our Elden Ring tags have many of these and they all shine in different ways.
