Sometimes the best way to win a fight is to be the biggest, toughest badass in the room. However, there are other times when it pays to keep your head down and do nothing. One Elden Ring player did just that, pretending to be an NPC when their game was invaded by another player. And eventually, their crazy strategy paid off.
Like previous FromSoftware RPGs, the recently released open-world of Elden Ring allows players to invade the game worlds of other players. Once you have invaded someone else’s game you can then track them down and kill them. Simple enough, but things get more complicated if someone decides to dress up as an enemy and then pretend to be that NPC.
This is exactly what Reddit user xdc_lis did in a video they uploaded to the Elden Ring subreddit over the weekend.
After first donning the armor of their NPC target, they headed out towards a specific spot where the enemy they were cosplaying roamed. Then xdc_lis carefully killed the enemy so as to hide the body in a nearby bush. Finally, they opened up their game to invasions by other players. With that, the trap was set.
Once someone invades, xdc_lis does a magnificent job playing the role of an NPC, even when the invader gets very, very close to them. While the invader runs around, desperately looking for xdc_lis, they just keep marching back and forth over and over. Eventually, the other player gives up and leaves.
For tricking the player, xdc_lis receives a nice sum of runes, because Elden Ring considers someone leaving as a win. And in this case, I’m inclined to agree. Unless there is some explicit rule against tricking and trolling other players who invade you, I don’t think xdc_lis did anything wrong. If anything, based on my knowledge of FromSoftware RPGs, this seems like the kind of stuff the devs would encourage folks to do.
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