The Putrid Avatars in Elden Ring are a perfect example of the way that FromSoftware designed its latest title to push players to rethink the way that they approach even familiar boss fights. This is because not only are the Erdtree and Putrid Avatars examples of bosses that are repeated in Elden Ring, but also use an older Dark Souls moveset to punish players for relying on older strategies.
While it is plenty common for FromSoftware to take mechanics or basic parts of enemy movesets from older games and fill out their newer content with these assets, some of the bosses in Elden Ring take this a step further. The Erdtree Avatars and their variants are a clear example of this, as they so closely emulate the Asylum Demon and its reskins found throughout the original Dark Souls.
Evolution of Dark Souls' Asylum Demon
With Dark Souls being many fans' first entry in FromSoftware's flagship series, the Asylum Demon is the first boss encounter that most players will face off against in the franchise. Of course, this is immediately an uphill battle, as the Asylum Demon will likely defeat the player on their first attempt to fight it with either a bare fist or a broken strait sword. However, this specific boss doesn't only appear once in the game, or the series, as magic-wielding variants of this demon can be found throughout Lordran in the form of the Stray Demon and Demon Firesage.
Continuing further into the series, this boss design of a giant demon that wields a massive hammer-type weapon appears again in Dark Souls 3 as the Stray Demon mini-boss. Then the design is given a much more substantial rework for the Old Demon King, which shares a handful of hammer swings in its attack patterns alongside a host of new magical attacks. Most recently in the FromSoftware catalog, Elden Ring offers two new redesigns for the Asylum Demon with the Erdtree Avatar and its variant, the Putrid Avatar.
Elden Ring's Avatars are Built to Catch Fans Off Guard
An important feature to note about the Avatar bosses in Elden Ring isn't the ways that they are similar to the older Asylum Demon, but in the much more subtle way that these enemies change up a few attacks. The first new addition to the moveset that appears in every fight against an Erdtree Avatar comes in the form of the vertical hammer slam.
Against the initial Asylum Demon, this simply does damage in a small area around the boss, while variations from the Stray Demon and Demon Firesage increase the range with a magical explosion. However, in perfect Elden Ring fashion, the Erdtree Avatar version of this attack doesn't only add an extended range, but a delayed second blast that spawns homing projectiles that chase the player for a few seconds.
The second major change in the Demon attack pattern comes from Elden Ring's Putrid Avatars specifically, which adds a secondary effect to the ground slam that every version of these bosses has. Instead of a follow-up blast or the addition of simple magic damage, Putrid Avatars take an exceptional step into cruelty by covering the area directly in front of the boss with pools of scarlet rot that tick the player with damage and the accompanying status effect. It's an incredibly deadly attack that can quickly mean the end of a fight if the player isn't prepared to avoid half of the boss arena, or if the Putrid Avatar decides to spam the ground slams repeatedly.
In both cases of these attacks being altered, this was done to make strategies used in FromSoftware games less effective. This is because both of these attacks were previously the ones that players were most likely to punish when fighting the Asylum Demon and its variants, since they offered large openings as the bosses recovered. So, making these deadlier than they've ever been, and specifically forcing players on the defensive almost seems like a direct response to the strategies that historically worked in the older games.
Elden Ring is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
