Elden Ring Review - From Software's Answer to Zelda!

ZyroXZ2 said:

The_Liquid_Laser said:

Yeah, I agree that it's mostly about development time. I think that what bothered me most about the dogs is that they are in a camp with a bunch of guards. Why do guards have dogs? To prevent people from sneaking up on them. So, the dog doesn't really fit its role in that situation. There are other places where you can sneak up on a bunch of wolves or other animals, and while it's unrealistic, its doesn't jolt me out of the immersion as much.

So, it's part programming and part design. If they aren't going to make the dogs hear better, then don't make a camp with guard dogs, because they'll do a terrible job guarding. Or they can always go the other route and be unintentionally realistic, which is often a better choice. In 2D Mario games you can always shoot fireballs underwater, and people just go with it. They've done this in Elden Ring too. The animals will sometimes roll away instead of running away from you. Maybe they ran out of time to program a good run animation for some of these animals? In the end the rolling is kind of funny, but it works better than if they just had a poorly animated animal running.

Guards actually sometimes have dogs as forward backup. Example: police force K9s are often used to provide fast attack support for chasing/taking down a suspect (sometimes even separately trained from drug sniffing dogs). Dogs can hear, see, and smell better than humans, but are often trained into a honed type of singular response. It's actually regular civilians that use dogs as "alarms" more often than military or para-military (combatants).

Granted, your point still stands, even a K9 would have a better sense of someone sneaking up from behind, but that's often not why they have a K9 unit with them lol; additionally, humans are actually better at sensing someone sneaking up than 99% of games depict, too. If anything, the majority of videogames make "sneaking" wayyyy easier than it would really be (obviously), so I hear your point but also see that the dogs being super effective would be out of place if you can quite literally just walk right up to all the other dudes without dogs near them. That just creates an "avoid dogs" situation which is somewhat already the case since they can crowd you pretty easily without really adding to the stealth factor that is barely existent in Elden Ring to begin with ("stealth" in most Souls games is just running right past the enemies) lol

Now we are talking about finer points, but I don't consider modern police or military to be guards. Guards protect a specific location or thing. The guy in uniform at the bank would be a guard, and the night watchmen at any locked up facility would also be a guard. Police patrol an area and that makes them different from guards. (And that assumes we are talking about regular patrolmen and not police with special functions like detective, SWAT, K9, ect...). Typical police patrols don't use dogs.

Surveillance cameras and other high tech solutions have replaced dogs in the modern setting as far as guarding goes. Regular people still have guard dogs, because they are simple and effective and double as a pet. However, throughout most of human history guards have used dogs, both for attacking and as an alarm. In fact, the alarm part will often scare off an invader so that the attacking part isn't necessary. Elden Ring is a medieval fantasy setting, so at an outpost with dogs, they are guard dogs. The main reason why they would be there (historically) is to prevent people from sneaking up on the guards with the element of surprise.

Last edited by The_Liquid_Laser - on 04 April 2022

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