One Elden Ring player suffered an embarrassing defeat after their controller battery died at precisely the wrong time. While there is no good time for a gamepad to give out, this Elden Ring player’s controller picked the perfect opportunity to set them up for a truly humiliating death.
FromSoftware launched its dark fantasy action RPG Elden Ring in February 2023. An open-world take on the successful Dark Souls formula, it introduced a new setting, new mechanics, and a larger world while keeping much of what made the earlier games popular. Elden Ring was a massive commercial and critical success, winning numerous awards. These included Game of the Year awards from The Game Awards, Golden Joysticks, Game Developers Choice Awards, and several others.
One of the many things Elden Ring brought over from Dark Souls is its lack of a pause function. While the lack of pausing is arguably necessary for Elden Ring’s online functions, it can be inconvenient sometimes. Reddit user Brillhouse learned this the hard way when his controller battery died while he was exploring Elden Ring’s Consecrated Snowfield. A short video on Reddit shows Brillhouse dismount Torrent to examine a message from another player, only for his controller to give out. This leaves Brillhouse’s character helpless as a Ram casually wanders up behind him before slowly and humiliatingly headbutting him to death.
Players go into Elden Ring expecting to die a lot, though death by Sheep is not usually something they expect to worry about. In fairness, Brillhouse’s health was already very low when his controller gave out. The player’s health was low enough for one commenter to wonder if the whole thing might be staged, though it appears that Brillhouse ran out of Flasks fighting a Bear in the high-level area. Still, with some of Elden Ring’s deadliest foes inhabiting the Consecrated Snowfield, it’s amusing that a Ram would be the one to do him in. If nothing else, this incident makes a solid case for USB controllers.
While no one in the Reddit thread brought it up, this situation might remind some of the debate around pausing in FromSoftware games. Many games pause automatically when the player’s controller disconnects. However, most of FromSoftwere’s Souls-like games do not have a pause function. While there is a workaround that lets Elden Ring players pause the game, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice was the only one with an actual pause button. Such a feature might have helped Brillhouse evade this embarrassing death.
Elden Ring is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.