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I've been really enjoying all the new events packed in Elden Ring Nightreign: The Forsaken Hollows, with one glaring exception: The Fire-Summoning Beast. My hatred has nothing to do with the mechanics of the fire event, or its difficulty. But the fiery event has, by far, the most tenacious enemies I've ever encountered in a FromSoftware game.
When the event begins, The Forsaken Hollows marks three different areas of your map in red. When you enter these areas, your character will suffer a continual burn that steadily drains your health. Each area has its own boss, the Sundered Tricephalos, who will be familiar to anyone who has taken on the Gladius Nightlord in the base version of Elden Ring Nightreign. Once you beat them all, you get a fantastic buff called Beast's Hunt that will both quicken your stamina recovery and also restore stamina with successive attacks.
The fight itself isn't too bad, as the Sundered Tricephalos seems to go down quickly. But the far-reaching nature of the event is a little tiresome, especially on a map designed to trick players into jumping to their deaths. It is easy to begin the event and never finish it due to confusion about routing and a threatening storm.
What makes the event awful, though, is that once you kill one of the Sundered Tricephalos, The Forsaken Hollows will spawn three mini versions of the boss. And for whatever reason, these fire dogs are programmed to chase you down to the ends of the earth. If you haven't experienced it, you might wonder what the big deal is — don't most tough enemies in FromSoftware games follow the player intently? Yes, but when you aggro a normal enemy in, say, Elden Ring, it's not that difficult to run out of the enemy's radius. If you get away fast enough, the enemy will either give up or despawn entirely.
The fire dogs will not cease until they murder you and everything you love. I've had a beast from the event chase me across the map. I've had the dogs chase me into that one dungeon where your HP is halved by default. As luck would have it, what little HP I did have was being siphoned by the event itself. And the first thing I encountered in that area was a boss. RIP.
Image: FromSoftware/Bandai Namco
If the fire beasts have a limited range, I've yet to find it. Actually, I've only seen them phase into existence from thin air just to keep fighting me after I thought I had run away. In the dungeon example, even the game seemed baffled that the dog was still coming after me. The dog started lagging so hard, it almost seemed like stop-motion animation. But even in that quantum-defying state, the dog managed to end me.
You might also think to yourself, well, why not kill it? The answer depends. Perhaps I ran out of flasks in the middle of the encounter. Maybe I found out that I'm actually not leveled enough to take on the event. Possibly, my teammates did not want to help me complete the fire objective. Or: I merely ran through the area and had no intention of doing the event, except now the beasts kept teleporting to me. And, I expected the beast to despawn at some point. Most likely, though, is that I started the event and couldn't finish it for whatever reason — like the encroaching Night's Tide. In that case, I wouldn't be stopping for anything.
I know I'm not alone in feeling this way. At least two of my coworkers here at Polygon also say that they hate the damn dogs. Players on social media also tend to curse the event as well. "Dog invasion needs to be patched immediately," reads one angry, highly voted Reddit thread. "Hot garbage."
"These wolves are so bullshit, its not even fun and engaging," one commenter opines on the Sundered Tricephalos Wiki page.
"[I] had a few instances where teammates disconnected the moment this event popped up like lmao understandable," another player wrote.
Now that I've been terrorized by the dogs, I'm going to do my best to avoid them altogether. It's difficult, though, when the event is both common and takes up a lot of the map. But as far as I'm concerned, The Forsaken Hollows' fire event joins a distinguished rank comprised of annoying bosses like the Bell Bearing Hunter or Death Rite Bird. The second I see any of these things, I'm probably turning around. Nope. Sorry, future teammates.