His own take on the drinking game
An early version of Elden Ring allowed you to bribe characters by offering them alcoholic beverages.
When modder Lance McDonald dug through the Elden Ring November 2021 network test, he discovered the omitted material. There was an NPC named Jiko who gave players instructions on how to make ‘dreambrew,’ a kind of drink that was formerly banned to mortals, and offered a mission to acquire the necessary ingredients.
“Uncover someone’s deepest, darkest secrets” is what he thinks may happen if he doesn’t accept the mission. Elden Ring’s world is full with sleeping animals, and if you accept his challenge, you’ll have to hunt them down and collect their ‘Dense Fog of Sleep’. In exchange for that, Jiko will concoct some dreambrew for characters in the Lands Between if you provide him the ingredients.
With a unique conversation option, McDonald may give the dreambrew to the merchant Kalé, who was present in the network test version. As he drifts off to sleep, he shares some personal information about himself.
Below is a video of the mission in action
A number of additional critters were seen to be dozing off near the network test, indicating that the function had been slashed only months before its scheduled debut. Also, according to the network test, Jiko was an important character who was part of an extensive quest line that had you searching for sleepers shrouded in fog so that you might collect their fog for use in an exploratory minigame.
A wonderful method to keep you crawling about Elden Ring is if FromSoftware hides these monsters all across the Lands Between. It’s not clear why it was omitted from the final product.
The most FromSoftware method to narrative, in my opinion, would be to harvest further information about the game world by chasing sleeping animals and stealing their dreams and converting them into strong hallucinogenic whisky.
While we missed out on trying out this ability on some of Elden Rings favourite characters, maybe removed material like this is what Pat thought Elden Ring lacked in comparison to Bloodborne.