Fall damage scales with HP unfairly hindering high level characters
Input bugs, lag can put players into fall damage situations leading to unfair deaths
Devs
Without fall damage there is no moment-to-moment risk/reward when exploring
All players should fear fall damage regardless of their max HP
Fall damage repercussions should carry into combat
Maybe we can meet all constraints by making fall damage a debuff instead. The more you fall, the longer the debuff lasts; just like other debuffs. You can invest in Zeal or use cleanse bombs to get better faster.
What does the debuff do? My best thought was to reduce move speed (walk becomes crawl, run becomes walk). I’m sure there’s other options.
One of the things I really like about moving it to a debuff is that when wildstock knock you around you’ll take the enemy damage from the initial hit and then get a disorienting debuff. Rather than taking damage twice and getting one-shot. Nobody likes being one-shot.
Didn’t the devs already say they are already looking into fixing the fall damage because it’s something that hasn’t been quite right since the beginning?
They did mention it some time ago. I don’t think debuffs are needed though. They just have to recalculate how much damage is incurred by distance fell. I also don’t think hitting walls from grapple use should damage the player either. I can understand if you hit the floor but the walls are unnecessary.
Why didn’t you bring this up in my thread? With that said I will debate your points for keeping it
What is a moment-to-moment risk/reward? What’s the reward? Not taking damage?
There is only one fair use of fall damage in combat, and it’s laughably avoidable. The cuttletrunk’s Galaga-esque hypno beam lifter that puts you up in the air from a not-so-bad distance. The wildstocks procing fall damage almost always ends up being unfair or negating a HUGE amount of HP and just being buggy in general.
I’ve had moments while exploring when I just run off a cliff. It’d be a shame if that didn’t produce an “oh ■■■■” reaction. Keep fall damage, just tone it down and/or fix the problems with the physics side. Now it’s momentum based, a simpler “how many blocks were between your highest point and landing point after leaving the ground” might feel better.
Games should be layered with stuff to do at different spans of time: moment-to-moment, session-to-session, day-to-day, etc. When you’re running around in Boundless you’re playing a moment-to-moment minigame. How quickly can I traverse the terrain (reward) without suffering (fall damage, large stretches of swimming, going perpendicular to contours, etc.)? Having fall damage is what makes your decisions interesting when you’re at a high elevation. Without it, running around would be less interesting. However, the penalty is way out of line with what it brings to the table. If the penalty were lowered it would match up better. But removing it entirely is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The game loses texture as well.
The nice interplay I see between fall damage and combat is not its role when you choose to fight, but its role when you choose flight. When fleeing, the tension of the terrain traversal minigame is heightened since the risk is greater. Again without fall damage these moments would be less tense. You’d just leap off mountains and escape the AI. Airtime is the fastest, easiest way to travel distances in the game.
I agree that it’s cruddy when fall damage combines with an enemy charge to kill you in one shot. You could remove fall damage (and all its positive effects listed above) or you could replace it with something that doesn’t involve the HP system. It puts the player into jeopardy in a more orthogonal way.
I jumped down two blocks and got 1k dmg yesterday.
When hit by wildstock or knock back bomb effect in a tight space (maybe standing against a chiseled block) I got a few thousands dmg quite a few times in the past. The largest I saw was 8k.
Oortbirds die running into blocks. They only means of defence is their means of dying. So sad.
Flat numbers must not work from the devs’ perspective. It means fall damage has no consequence to higher level characters who bought HP boosts in the skill tree. I see the decision to make it percentage based as an admission that every player regardless of level should fear fall damage.
I’ll add it in OP to the list of dev constraints.
I like the way some games make fall damage not kill you. It could take you to 1 hp but never kill u. I could see that in boundless because taking a big drop and landing on a spitter that could finish you when you only have 1 hp left still is a risk. Especially considering how slow we regen hp without potions.
