Elden Ring’s dogs give me problems. The rotten dogs, regular dogs, Monstrous Dogs, wolves, and Red Wolves, are all the bane of my existence.
After playing more than 150 hours of Elden Ring, I’ve learned to overcome plenty of challenging enemies. But I still get regularly surprised, harassed, and murdered by freakin’ dogs.
I wanted to figure out why that is, so I stowed my weapons and provoked a bunch of canines in Elden Ring. I came up with four reasons why dogs are a pain in my butt.
Their moveset is the main problem. Dogs have an erratic set of movements that involves leaping in, jaws bared, and then jumping away from the player or circling to flank them. As Caleb Clark pointed out in the comments, if you’re fighting a pack of dogs and target lock on one, your camera will follow that dog when it flanks — and expose you to rear attacks from the rest of the pack. Dastardly!
The dogs’ animations also aren’t remotely realistic. Their skeletons are distorted, and their jaws appear to basically unhinge when they bite. Combine this with their hyper-aggressive and fast lunging and snapping, and you get a recipe for me tilting and losing all my runes. And for a time, dogs were even more deadly than they had any right to be.
Check out the video for more on Elden Ring’s awful dogs, including a foray into what makes the Monstrous Dogs, wolves, and the Red Wolf of Radagon a little different. Make sure you subscribe to Polygon on YouTube to catch all our latest videos!