I love The Witcher 3. It's one of my favorite games, and I fondly remember the first time I played it: My husband was away on a three-month work trip, and I stayed home in our tiny apartment in Massachusetts. I didn't know a ton of people in our city at that time, so Ciri and Geralt were my company. I look back on it remembering loving absolutely everything about that game. When I booted it up to replay for a second time, many years later, I remembered that there was one thing I hated—fall damage.
The Witcher 3 is one of the more egregious examples of fall damage. Geralt, despite being a brutal man, could not handle a relatively short fall. When The Witcher 3 was released, falls that would have just twisted my ankle in real life would kill Geralt instantly. You could do a well-timed roll to break his fall, but I still died a lot to gravity. When CD Projekt Red released the current console generation patch in 2022, it adjusted the height at which falls would kill Geralt, so people could survive more easily. Geralt still takes damage, I'm sure—I haven't played since then—but won't get annihilated by a short tumble.
Unfortunately for me, it's not just The Witcher 3 that uses fall damage. A lot of games do. I understand why: Some people want a lot of realism in their games. Other people are looking for a technical challenge. Sometimes that person is me, but the majority of the time, it's not. Fall damage feels reasonable in games that are based in some sort of reality; I get it for Red Dead Redemption 2, for instance. Arthur Morgan is a normal guy, and he should take some damage and perhaps die if he falls off a cliff and breaks his neck. (I don't like it, but I get why it's there. I still wish it wasn't there.) But if I'm the Dragonborn in The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, I don't want to die if I jump off a cliff. I don't care how high it is! Let me take the shortest route possible by flinging my character around. I like to explore in these big, open-world games, and I don't want to have to worry about tripping and falling. I don't want to tiptoe around. I want to fall, and fall a lot. Then just get back up. I'm fine!
Recent Assassin's Creed games are a good compromise, I think. Climbing and jumping from high points has been key to the series since it began. For the earlier games, you could die from fall damage, but Ubisoft adjusted that in later games, beginning with Assassin's Creed Odyssey. And die from fall damage in those earlier games I did. Like, a lot, because I often missed those hay piles. But in Odyssey, there's an ability that lets you, essentially, ignore fall damage. I like the change, and it didn't impact how it felt to play the games for me. You may still take some damage from the fall, but it won't kill you, and it's automatically unlocked. Fall damage death came back in Assassin's Creed Valhalla, but Ubisoft added an ability, Breakfall, that automatically broke Eivor's fall. You still take damage, but it's not enough to kill you, and health is easy to come by.
I like to push buttons. Some might call what I do spamming buttons, but I've always kind of played like this. It's why, in Red Dead Redemption, Arthur Morgan always accidentally punched his horse. (I feel really bad about it!) This sort of playstyle means that I accidentally always pick things up, and, as I've said before, accidentally jump from high places. I can play video games with precision, and I do when games explicitly call for it. If I'm playing a platformer like Celeste or something that requires precise button pushes like Baby Steps, I'll happily do it. But there are some games where I just want to mash buttons.
Let me do that, and let me survive all my big falls. Games that kill you for fall damage can fuck right off!!
It's Hater Week here on Aftermath. This week we’re letting the hate flow through us by examining what it means to be a hater (and… a lover?), venting about some of our biggest pet peeves in games and life, and giving others a space to do the same.
