One Elden Ring player has discovered the RPG's friendly dog really isn't that friendly after all.
Since Elden Ring launched in February 2022, players have been intrigued by one dog in Leyndell. It sits next to a fearsome Leonine Misbegotten enemy, but unlike its handler, the dog won't attack the player when approached. Instead, it only attacks if attacked by the player first, leading many to declare it a lovely friendly pup.
That assessment, however, is far from the truth. As FromSoft YouTuber and dataminer Zullie the Witch explains in the video below, Elden Ring enemies aren't aggroed by AI, but by player proximity - once you get close enough to a foe, you'll trigger them to get up and start attacking. In this case, however, if the player enters a specific zone outside the Leyndell colosseum, it can lock the dog into a permanent animation, preventing it from becoming aggressive alongside the Leonine Misbegotten when a player comes within a certain distance of the pair.
There was apparently a Gray Warden enemy in the zone outside of the colosseum, but it was removed from the final version of Elden Ring. As such, the dog is stuck in this looping animation forever. However, if the player never enters the colosseum zone, it never locks the dog into its animation loop, which allows it to activate like any other enemy as intended. So the dog does actually want to attack the player all along, but it can't because of a script that overwrites its ordinary aggressive animation with the Misbegotten.
It's all a bit complicated, but nonetheless still an intriguing look at what's going on underneath the hood of Elden Ring. FromSoftware designed enemy aggressiveness around zones to better control the flow of combat and ambushes, but in this very rare case, it's somehow backfired, resulting in a dog that's dictated by a zone on the other side of Leyndell.
So the "friendly dog" in Elden Ring really isn't very friendly after all, and that's a crying shame. But, as Zullie points out in the video above, even these unintended accidents can create beautiful moments - like a friendship between players and a dog that wants to tear their throat out.
Last week, Elden Ring patch 1.10.1 added anti-cheat features - and literally nothing else.
