Elden Ring's singular good dog does want to kill you, actually
No pets allowed.
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Elden Ring players have been wondering what's up with a single dog that doesn't seem interested in fighting, but it turns out that is, actually, and would love to kill you.
On your journey throughout The Lands Between, you might have come across a particular dog in Leyndell. It hangs out with a Leonine Misbegotten, which will happily try to kill you, but unless you attack the dog yourself, it won't bite back - though it is still an enemy, and not an unkillable NPC. Of course, players have been wondering why this might be the case, and whether it's on purpose or not. And if so, why would it be? Every other dog in the game wants to kill you, why not this one? Well, sorry to ruin this one 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 doesn't try to hurt you.
You'll most likely have noticed that a lot of the enemies in Elden Ring have a sort of startup animation they do once you get near enough to them and they've noticed you, before they start to fight you, particularly if they're sat down or the like. Zullie explained that the trigger for the animation isn't actually handled by the enemy AI, but by event regions that cause the enemy to arouse when you approach - something used to great effect, like those surprise baddies round corners.
Both the Misbegotten and the dog are registered to the same event region, so you'd expect them to wake up together. As it turns out, the dog is actually softlocked in an animation loop, and the only way to break it out is by hurting it. The reason for this is a slightly odd one: it's tied to an event region elsewhere, just outside Leyndell's colosseum, which doesn't have any enemies in it. If you enter that area, and walk all the way back to the dog, it'll act like every other dog in the game and try to kill you.
According to Zullie, it seems that the region outside the colosseum would have been used from a now removed Grave Warden, the removal of which appears to be the reason the dog is stuck. Why that dog is linked to the event region at all is another question, but hey, at least we can just keep pretending they're a very good dog, even if we know the truth.
Hopefully we'll be heading back into The Lands Between soon enough, as a leak last year seemed to suggest that the game's DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, could be out as early as February.