Elden Ring patch nerfs its murderous dogs

FromSoftware released a new patch for its wildly successful and difficult open-world RPG Elden Ring on Tuesday. You can view the long list of patch notes at Bandai Namco’s website, but the 1.04 update features a few key changes: the overpowered bleed dogs are nerfed, and the illusory wall is gone.

YouTuber Zullie the Witch test drove the patch on Tuesday, and found that the over-powered Rotten Stray dogs weren’t as tough as prior incarnations. Before the update, the bleed dogs had a glitch whereby the game could deal massive health damage to your character thanks to an error tied to their attack animation — an error making Rotten Stray dogs stronger than some bosses, even. Now, they’re fixed. And we don’t mean “fixed,” as in, “taking them to the vet” fixed, either. Zullie the Witch demonstrated the changes in this video.

Zullie also documented another key change: the mysterious illusory wall no longer disappears. In March, players discovered a fake wall in Volcano Manor that dissolved when you hit it 50 times. At first, players weren’t sure if developers were using it to hide secrets, or if it was just a bug. After the patch, the wall doesn’t fall down to expose another room. So it appears that the illusory, but destructible, walls were just a clever way for the developers to hide an unwanted room and not a doorway to bigger secrets.