As one unfortunate Elden Ring player recently discovered, the game’s NPCs can be far more intelligent than one might assume.
Elden Ring, like any other FromSoftware game, features its fair share of strange and colourful NPCs who occasionally take on a life of their own. This may entail assisting the player in overcoming a particularly difficult encounter, or it may entail entirely destroying their ego with moves that can only be described as curiously purposeful.
Elden Ring users frequently share snippets from their exploits in The Lands Between on the game’s largest subreddit, and one in particular has recently surfaced, courtesy of 97Hshk. In general, the video exemplifies why none of the game’s numerous NPCs should be taken for granted.
Elden Ring’s Leak Teases a Crystal Ball Item that Wasn’t Included in the Game
While some NPCs in the game, such as Elden Ring’s Cleanrot Knight monster, appear frightening right away and put players on edge, others do not. A naked NPC carrying a crossbow was encountered by 97Hsk while exploring an apparently random rooftop, and the player assumed they’d have no issue dealing with such a threat. The NPC rolled out of harm’s path and off the roof in a flash, only to fire a single crossbow bolt that one-shot the player as it plummeted.
“You’re going to be in that NPC’s montage now,” said Misfit 666, one of many Reddit users who mocked 97Hsk’s perplexed reaction to seeing the weird NPC, as well as their apparent refusal to invest in Vigor, one of Elden Ring’s most important survivability qualities. After all, dying from a crossbow bolt’s worth of damage is a bad late-game survival strategy in Elden Ring.
Regardless, this is just one reason why recording footage while playing Elden Ring can be a good idea, just in case something strange happens. That’s how the community learned that players may murder Elden Ring NPCs by leaping on them, which was as amusing as the video above, but also tragic, since the player in question lost an entire side-worth quest’s of progress in the process.
While it’s simple to argue that FromSoftware fails to educate players how to play Elden Ring and that the game fails to express many of its eccentricities in any way, shape, or form, it’s also evident that this approach gives the game a lot of its personality. This method encourages natural inquiry and experimentation, which results to movies like the one above, so at the very least, there’s a silver lining.
Elden Ring is currently available on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
