Elden Ring is full of fearsome foes, but the enemies that reliably make me tuck my tail
between my legs and run — are all.
freakin’.
dogs.
(Red Wolf of Radagon leaping up to crash down on your head)
I hate this guy.
The rotten dogs, the shaggy dogs, the T-rex dogs, the wolves, the BIGGER wolves, are all some
of the most difficult encounters for me to wrap my head around.
And it’s not because they’re cute and I feel bad about whaling on man’s best friend.
There’s something about these canines that upsets me.
Generally in FromSoft games, you succeed by reading the movements of your enemies and timing
your attacks appropriately.
It has been SO DIFFICULT for me to do this with dogs, that even encountering the teeniest little
pupper makes me fear for my runes.
I am THAT bad at predicting their movements and staying calm while I fight them.
I wanted to figure out why that is.
So, I put away my weapons and got murdered until I solved the canine conundrum.
Here are the 4 reasons why dogs are a pain in my whole ass.
Dogs bite me in the butt.
Dog-type enemies have an erratic moveset that’s designed to keep you off-balance.
First the dog will see you and lock on — radiating menace.
Then it barks, which will alert any other dogs in the pack, and charges.
The canine’s main attack is this fast lunge, which it can chain several times.
But like the best FromSoft enemies, canines switch up their rhythm: wolves will retreat
and circle, and then charge you with a headbutt designed to break your poise.
Other dog types don’t do this exact thing, but they’ll still fall back out of range of your attack,
before lunging back in.
Canines also universally try to flank the player, which makes it that much harder to
hit back.
We’ve talked before about how Elden Ring is basically a rhythm game.
To succeed, you need to find the rhythm of attacks and retreats that will let you deal
damage to your enemies, while taking as few hits as possible.
If you mistime an attack against a canine a few different things could happen:
It’ll continue chaining its attacks and bite you
It’ll fall back, letting your attack whiff, and bite you
It’ll zip to the side!!! And bite you.
In short, dogs are really good at interrupting the player’s rhythm, and make it very very
challenging to recover.
If you panic at the first bite and try to retaliate, even the wee-est dog will punish
you for it.
And that panic… is kind of the point.
This dog attack animation has been in FromSoft games for awhile, and it’s meant to mess
with you.
Jacob Geller as Hidetaka Miyazaki: Technically speaking, that motion is a little off,
but we found the somewhat unnatural movement to have an unsettling quality to it,
as you said, so we decided to leave it that way.
Simone: As a first-time FromSoft player, I always find fast enemies intimidating, and this aggressive
LUNGING and SNAPPING is exactly what gave me so much trouble with dogs — at least, until I leveled up
and became powerful enough to level them with one single swing of my scythe.
(crowd cheering)
But there’s a couple other qualities that make dogs very specifically annoying to deal with,
and elevate them above other basic enemy types.
Dogs are STUPID FAST.
If you, like me, accidentally aggro’d your first Monstrous Dog and tried to run away screaming,
you know this.
In my experiments I provoked this rotten stray and found out that they can actually run as
fast as Torrent.
Now, Torrent has a sprint boost, and the dogs tend to stop and attack, which slows them
down, so it’s still very possible to get away.
BUT LIKE.
THEY’RE AS FAST AS A HORSE.
COME ON!
(extremely chilled out, loving ukulele music)
Dog surprise!
FromSoft craftily places dogs around corners where they will scare the skin off of you.
(acoustic groove with rad bass dropping)
Now, if you are a Souls veteran you learn to peek around corners — so I don’t consider
this as much of a problem as the dogs’ general speed and flanking... but.
It feels much worse to get surprised by a dog than one of these, you know, shambling noblemen
enemies, for example, because controlling the rhythm of combat is already so difficult.
Dogs are also low-riders, and can blend into grass or stone, making it really difficult to see them when
you’re combing ruins for goodies.
This is the bloated cherry on top of the scarlet rot sandwich when it comes to dogs.
The only thing worse than one dog, is more than one dog.
All of the wolves and most of the normal-sized dogs will at LEAST come in pairs.
This sucks!
If you can’t peel one off, they'll both dart around, interrupting your attacks and
biting you in the butt.
This is one of the Primal Human Fears.
I haven’t really talked about the Red Wolf of Radagon or the Monstrous Dogs yet.
They have their own movesets and annoying traits, as well as having mouths the size of your
whole hitbox.
But they share a few things in common with their smaller dog brethren: speed, unpredictability,
and the ability to have friends.
The Monstrous Dogs have a howl that will call the pack, and being chased by five of these
guys is simultaneously the funniest and worst thing I’ve ever seen with my delicate
little eyeballs.
When you fight the Red Wolf of Radagon in Raya Lucaria it’s alone, which is nice because
you’re trapped in a tiny little room with a wolf that shoots lasers.
But you might meet other Red Wolf enemies in the open world, and so far I’ve only
encountered them alongside a normal wolfpack that will make your life hell unless you take
them out first.
That’s just another way that Elden Ring subverts your expectations when you encounter
an enemy that you might think is predictable because you've fought it before.
(funny little whistling music sting)
First of all, lock-on.
It is crucial for such a fast enemy, especially one that is constantly circling you.
Using ranged attacks or homing magics can take a dog down easily before they can even touch you.
In the same vein, dogs can’t climb ladders.
As far as I know.
You can climb ladders!
Get up there and drop stuff on their heads.
If the Dog is a Pet, always kill the dog first, you cannot deal with an intricate sword fight
while a terrier is nipping at your heels.
Kite them away or just focus hard on them until they are out.
If you’re doing melee, shields are a good asset — dogs are easy to block and counter.
If you’re LIKE MEEEEEE and you don’t use a shield, UH, my current strategy is just to jump OVER the dog?
Uh, and once I'm on the either side, wack it with my scythe.
The Monstrous Dogs are big enough that, like a lot of other large enemies, you can roll
into them, get underneath them, and do damage that way.
Just be sure to sideroll out of the way when they come straight
at you with their gaping maws. And
do NOT get caught in their bulldozer attack! It. sucksss.
Okay, the Red Wolf of Radagon, man’s worst friend, Clifford of The Lands Between.
Like all dogs he’ll do up to three big swipes in a row, and it is VERY hard to avoid.
But the Red Wolf has clearer attack opportunities than some of the other canines.
Dodging under his leap, and rolling through the flaming sword will give you an opening
to hit.
It’s still a pain in the ass and this stupid fight took me literally a week to finish,
even though he's not even the main boss of Raya Lucaria
But I did it.
If I could do it, so can you.
because i suck.
(some sultry horn music, very low-key
Guess what! Polygon has a TikTok page now.
It's just Polygon — tiktok.com/@polygon,
Uh, and you should go follow us because we're posting a bunch of fun stuff there.
(sultry music with a nice little groove returns)