Fall damage

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Fall damage refers to an aspect of video games, most often first-person shooters and third-person adventures, in which a character's health is reduced after falling from a significant height.

In most games that feature fall damage the amount of damage incurred is relative to the height of the fall; in those cases any fall beyond a certain height will guarantee death. In some cases fall damage is ignored when falling a certain distance and a unique death is instead automatically incurred, such as when fall damage becomes a broken leg—and immediate game over—in Tomb Raider. In other games the player simply has to fall through space a certain amount of time and the game incurs loss of life, as can be seen in Advent Rising; this is a way to detect falling so high in the air that death would be guaranteed, but it also gives players a way to continue from a safe location when a software bug causes them to fall through the floor of a map and into empty space that was never designed to be explored.

Fall damage is sometimes used by game designers as a means to prevent players from accessing areas they are not intended to reach by simply falling to them, however other games have purposely included ways to prevent the fall damage with proper player choices, examples being The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind—in which the player can use a spell effect to slow falls—and Deus Ex—in which a cybernetic upgrade reduces fall damage.

In Half-Life 2, falling objects accelerate to a terminal velocity as in real world physics, whereas in most games with fall damage it is simply increased based on vertical drop. Thanks to ever-increasing complexity in game physics one can surmise that fall damage will become more and more realistic in games that intend to imitate real-world physics.

In Halo 2, the effects of fall damage were removed. This allowed the main character to fall from any height and land without any health penalties. The only exception is when the character falls to an area off the level, and dies.

In Metroid Prime (apart from Hunters) there is no fall damage, except that the protagonist seems to suffer from the fall and the shield blinks as if there were damage.

In Resident Evil 4 there is no fall damage either, Leon S. Kennedy can literally fall from any height and live, with the exceptions if you can't see the bottom, or there are spikes waiting for him.

In the Super Smash Brothers series, falling is an integral part of the game. However, no damage is ever taken from falls unless the player is magnified by leaving the arena briefly.