Elden Ring players are having to explain their obsession with dogs to newbies

When they’re not trying to complete seemingly impossible runs through the game, raging at their own mimic tears or having their heads explode, Elden Ring players can be a pretty lighthearted bunch.

After all, when you spend lots of time being mercilessly slaughtered by bosses you’re randomly trying to beat with a drawing pad or while only using one hand, a good sense of humour goes a long way.

Sometimes this manifests in the guise of a discussion about which enemies you could beat up in real life, a controversial hat tier list, or even a Thomas the Tank Engine-themed mod, but currently, it’s taking the form of a discussion centred around on of the game’s fan base’s most amusing quirks.

What's my name? Elden Doggy, Dogg (the roped fire pot)

This important discourse is the subject of a thread on the subreddit r/eldenring, which began with a post from user Darkstardust98, who posted a meme of a player holding up a tortoise and declaring it to be a dog and asked: “Can anybody explain (to) me why every animal in Elden Ring is a ‘dog’?”

Their fellow tarnished were quick to offer a range of justifications for the practice, with user BatchThompson simply declaring: “Anything with (three or more) legs is (a) dog, because sometimes you get a dog with three legs, but it's still (a) dog.”

Similarly, user Nemesis2pt0 decided to get out their dictionary in order to defend the habit, saying: “The city defines a dog as any living entity with four legs and a tail. So raccoons, bears, mountain lions, mice, these are all just different sizes of dog.”

Mercifully, several users did break character and provide Darkstardust98 with the information they sought, with EldaVeikko revealing: “(It’s) because ‘tortoise’ isn’t a vocabulary option for multiplayer messages.”

User waffling_with_syrup was also on hand to tell the full story of why this limitation led to ‘dog’ becoming the go-to word, recalling: “One of the first things you see (in the game) is the tortoises by the cave north of the starting chapel. Somebody left ‘Behold, dog!’ (as a message) and the rest is history.”

Regardless of whether you were an early enough arrival in the Lands Between to encounter said message, make sure to follow us for coverage of some great Elden Ring mods.