Elden Ring Players Are Already Cheesing Its Dragon Boss

Early this morning, From Software held its first closed network test session for the upcoming Elden Ring. The long-awaited Dark Souls successor transplants that franchise’s fantastic action RPG gameplay into a Breath of the Wild-like setting. Players now have the opportunity to both explore a beautifully crafted fantasy world from the best loresmiths in the business and take cheesing bosses to a whole new level.

Flying Dragon Agheel is one of the many bosses included in this early Elden Ring stress test. Even if you didn’t get in, you probably saw this gigantic beast diving into an unsuspecting group of NPCs seemingly out of nowhere to challenge the protagonist in theofficial preview. Agheel’s intro is a great example of the emergent moments made possible by Elden Ring’s open-world gameplay, as is the simplistic method of dispatching the dragon players quickly discovered.

See, despite Agheel’s obvious flying abilities, the poor thing still takes fall damage, even from heights that don’t seem that precipitous. As explained by a post on the Elden Ring subreddit, if you lure the dragon onto a cliff—either by climbing up there yourself or lucking out by having Agheel land there during one of its strafing runs—the mere act of climbing down will cause it to take massive damage. Gameplay footage, like the clip above, shows Agheel’s entire health bar being depleted from such a fall.

From Software fans have long delighted in discovering these kinds of cheese-y, cheap and quick kills in the studio’s games. Dark Souls’ Taurus Demon can be baited into jumping off the bridge that serves as its arena, as can Dark Souls II’s Dragonrider with some deliberate movement. And those are both very early bosses. Frankly, I would have been more surprised had Elden Ring not included something silly like this.

Both threads on the Elden Ring subreddit concerning this Agheel “bug” are full of users demanding fellow players report it to the developers, but I personally hope it survives to the official February 25 release.