You can shoot while falling in Arc Raiders, but ledge grab damage negation’s gone

One of my favourite things from Arc Raiders’ second tech test was how you could fall from any height so long as you grabbed a ledge on the way down, cancelling out any fall damage. It led to moments where I was backed into a corner, and my only option was a desperate escape, jumping for some distant handhold or falling backwards off a building and hoping. 

I felt like it fed into the game’s risk/reward mindset, since it just as often ended in me pancaking myself into the floor as it did a heroic escape. Embark feels different though, and it won’t work the same way when Arc Raiders launches for PS5, Xbox and PC on October 30. 

“It was a little bit too good, so we toned it down for the later releases,” executive producer Aleksander Grøndal explains. “We want a game where you feel like you're making a choice about how you navigate the terrain, and we want to make sure taking damage is part of your consideration. If there's no consequence to your actions, that's the opposite of where we want to be. We want there to be consequences to your actions, your stamina or health or something. 

“But from the wild clips we saw from the earlier playtests of people jumping off massive towers and just grabbing on, that was a bug. That went a bit too far, so we dialed it in, but we're also looking into how people can get down from buildings like that in different ways, of course. So it's part of what makes it fun, I think, to experiment and try to find new ways to navigate around. We don't really want to put too many restrictions on the players, in that sense. We want to keep it a sandbox as much as possible.” 

Now, you can still ledge grab to prevent damage up to a certain height, but once you hit terminal velocity, you hit a falling pose where you start flailing your arms. Once in that pose, you’re going to take damage no matter what you do. 

To make up for it, though, you can now shoot while falling. 

“If you fall off a really tall building, you kind of get into this free fall state where you can actually move around and shoot and go down guns blazing,” Grøndal smiles. 

Embark recently detailed its plans for voluntary wipes in Arc Raiders.

Try it out when Arc Raiders launches this Thursday.