Ring of Elden Players have always wondered what it was like to have a dog that seemed disinterested in fighting, but turns out to actually be interested in killing you.
On your journey through “Between the Lands,” you may have encountered one particular dog in Ryder. It’s bastardized with a lion, and it will happily try to kill you, but it won’t fight back unless you attack the dog yourself – though it’s still an enemy rather than an unkillable NPC. Of course, players have always wondered why this happened and whether it was intentional. If so, why is this happening? Every dog in the game wants to kill you, why not this one? Well, I’m sorry to ruin this good dog for you, but it does want to kill you, and FromSoftware YouTuber Zullie the Witch kindly took the time to explain why it won’t try to hurt you.
You’ve most likely noticed that many of the enemies in Elden Ring have a startup animation where once you get close enough to them, they’ll notice you before they start fighting you, especially if they’re sitting down or something like that matter. Zullie explains that the triggering of animations isn’t actually handled by the enemy AI, but by event zones that cause enemies to wake up as you approach them – an effect that works really well, like those around corners Like a bad guy who catches everyone by surprise.
Bastards and dogs are both registered to the same event area, so you would expect them to wake up together. It turns out that the dog is actually soft-locked in an animation loop, and the only way to break it is to hurt it. The reason is a bit strange: it’s connected to an active area elsewhere, just outside Ryder Colosseum, which doesn’t contain any enemies. If you enter the area and walk all the way back to the dog, it will try to kill you like every other dog in the game.
According to Zulli, the area outside the Colosseum appears to have been used by the now-removed cemetery guard, and the removal of the cemetery guard appears to be the reason why the dog got stuck. Why that dog is connected to the incident area is another question, but hey, at least we can keep pretending they’re a perfectly good dog, even if we know the truth.
Hopefully we’ll get back to The Lands Between soon, as leaks from last year seemed to indicate that the game’s DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, could be released as early as February.
