The first episode of Elden Ring Dissected is here to explain how fall damage works. It has the appearance of looking random or inconsistent, but asides from one particular issue with Torrent it generally follows some pretty strict rules.
https://patreon.com/illusorywall
0:00 Introduction
1:06 Fall Damage Breakpoints
3:20 Fall Damage Amounts
7:13 Dexterity & Fall Damage
9:38 Equip Load & Fall Damage
13:25 Time Spent Falling
17:06 Torrent & Fall Damage
23:10 Killboxes & the Death Cam
25:47 Scripted Locations / Misc
27:20 Closing Words
Here’s the wiki page I made on fall damage-
https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Fall+Damage
source
For spirit springs, what if it's not that the landing is what matters, but being directly over it at some point during your fall? For your first jump, you look like you were over it before you strayed, and maybe you weren't over it at any point during the second fall.
I’m pretty sure that if a enemy knocks you down and you then also fall of a cliff or wall you take no fall damage this happened to me on top of a castle in caelid pretty sure the fall would have killed me otherwise
So that's why the long-tail talisman feel so worthless. If the damage worked the same as the DS series, its effect would be much more noticeable and/or useful.
I'm really curious about your thoughts on the 50 hit illusory wall.
I was doing some horse-parkour with Torrent yesterday, and it seems like Torrent needs stable ground to register the end of a fall/jump. He does a ton of sliding around on cliff faces if you have any X/Y directional inputs when you land and Torrent starts behaving like he's standing on ice. Something related to that behavior has to be where the issue with the apparent inconsistencies in Torrent's fall damage comes from.
You gotta love all the m0r0ns who are going to tell you that they love the way FS games are 'cryptic' and don't 'hold the player's hand' only to rush to videos like this one so they can understand mechanics. Lmao
If something as simple as fall damage require people to watch a video to understand it then it's a badly designed mechanic.
i would love to see more videos like this loved it
Given the seeming uselessness of things like the cat ring and dex bonus I imagine earlier builds of this game probably had way wider damage windows. They must have decided players were taking too much chip damage from normal navigation and changed it to this as a quick fix. Defo feels like a very imperfect solution though…
I do feel like simply widening the damage amount taken would make it way more intuitive though. I'd honestly rather be taking 90% health damage when I'm inches away from a death fall than 50%… that alone was definitely completely throwing off any intuition I had for fall damage.
I wish the reviewers on here would stop issuing “spoiler warnings” it seems counter intuitive for somebody that’s clicking on one of these videos to assume the footage won’t “spoil” something. People who are hyper sensitive to boss reveals and locales shouldn’t be looking up these tidbits until they’ve beaten the game. In short; you don’t have to warn people that your videos might contain spoilers because anybody who’s that insecure about seeing something they want to find on their own won’t be watching these to begin with. So please, enough with the disclaimers and stop trying to appease idiots who are scared of spoilers.
Just a thought but at 22:30 you dropped on top of the root, so maybe it's just ground that makes you invincible?
Excellent work. Not easy work either. You've earned your success in the community for sure.
I fell down the pit impalers catacombs and lost all my runes, so went down again and put down a sign :3
Really? Because falling from player height and dying in an area the character can get to normally feels pretty random 💀
Fall damage is still pretty dumb if we look at all the attacks we tank from bosses or monsters, while a bit of a fall can kill us 😂
Nice I found that very same death plane elevator shaft. It looked like there was nothing down there but the Rainbow Stone survived so I felt like I had to check
@TimTheTatman
Excellent work as usual! I had a recent strange fall that I can't explain and does not match the standard criteria presented here. Spoilers ahead: If one of the abductors transports you underneath the Volcano Manor, you can look out into a section of the Manor that is supposed to be accessible from another entrance only. Some speedrunners are making a jump and landing on a ledge to enter that area. But me? I can't make that jump for the life of me. Instead, I noticed that on one of my attempts, I just didn't hit the button to jump. I fell… and didn't die. Landed in the lava and took 0 fall damage. Usually, I straight died. My assumption was that it hit the 20m threshold, but I started experimenting. At the very corner, where the ledge meets the wall, the rock dips down centimeters. If I walk off it there, I always live and take 0 damage. No fall damage whatsoever from that spot. I'm curious if it's actually less than 16m but a kill plane is coded in the surrounding area. But, if so, why did I survive a couple jumps from further out in previous attempts? Baffling.
How do you measure distance in game environment? Do you just assume speed of fall matches real world?
Doom Eternal had a really awkward moment in the Doom Hunter level. It was the first time the platforming elements were really front-and-center in the game, introducing climbable walls that would drop if you waited too long and falls that would kill you.
After fighting and killing the first Doom Hunter, I was confused about what to do next. The boss was dead yet the music was still going and the level wasn't over. That's when I realized I was supposed to jump down the hole in the center of the arena. A hole that looked exactly like the infinite falls from before. The game never clearly communicated that this particular drop to the ruined city miles below the flying base wouldn't kill me like the other ones would.
Its demon's Souls Fall damage
You either take minimal to no damage
Or it fucking kills you.
spirit spring inconsistency should be reported as a bug, tFROM might fix it
15:49 this is unreasonably funny to me
Please make a video about the difference between light and medium armor status.
I think the SpiritSpring is more a column that gives a hidden buff, meaning it might be more about passing through the column on Torrent.
if you get stuck in terrain and dont touch the ground in 12s you just die floating in mid air, died like that 3 times really annoying
Wait what about jumping off of Torrent in the middle of a fall?!
Damn, that was quick
God I love the souls community. I just watched a 30 minute academic essay on the rules governing artificial gravity in a video game. You're the man Illusory! 👊
when you're going down to the bottom of the divine tower of caelid you fall like 40 meters and take no damage
Idk if anyone else experienced this but sometimes when I fall far enough to get that long landing animation and roll immediately, most of the time I spend more stamina than usual but not always.
It doesn't matter if I press my roll once or mash, I just sometimes get it. But to be fair, for context I don't really roll after falling only in situations where someone's waiting for me down there or I'm trying to cheap shot someone from above hence why it sticks out so much. It's not annoying or anything, just pretty random. I thought it might be part of this video since it stems from falling / falling related, though not necessarily from fall damage. But that might be on a separate video for stamina.
Thing is, judging distance on a screen is hard because you don't really have any depth perception, it's as if we only had a single eye. That's why games need to make it obvious when something in the distance is 16m or 20m away, because it all kinda looks the same.
I died from the "scripted surviveable" falls in caelid divine tower more than once, was so confused on how i was expected to get down. I want to say it's an inconsistent case, but its been a while so i dont remember if i did a plunging attack or not.
It's terrible. They make edges as slippery as ice for no reason, and yet they won't allow you to slide down and semi-safely land. It's like those rocks you fall on doesn't exist. They need to check for the terrain touched in the calculation, because it's ridiculous.
Once you proc the spirit spring fall damage reduction by hitting the proper x and z coordinates, it stays with you until you hit the ground. You procced it and then double jumped away in the footage here. I'm pretty sure that's the only reason you were able to land so far away from it.
Gosh. This game is even more broken than I thought!
The double jump with Torrent while falling would save you in other games, which is why I think so many of us thought it would save us from a particular fall.
Amazing analysis. Thank you!
Spoiler-free:
I actually died to the fall shown at 25:48 after the 1.03 patch, without attacking, after making contact with the breakable floor. I was taking this route a few times (guess why..) and was getting comfortable with the jumps, so instead of carefully tip-toeing of each cliff, i was mostly sprinting off them. On one try, i was sprinting off the cliff, landed briefly on the breakable floor (my character startet the "taking a knee" animation), dropped down as always. It looked like i was going to land in the same position as always, but a couple of metres before landing in the bushes, i died. I can't remember if i got a death cam.
It was unexpected (and i lost my runes), but not as much as i thought. When i sprinted off the cliff, i just barely touched the breakable platform. I nearly thought i overshot it while sprinting, but was relieved when i saw the animation, but then disappointed when i died anyways.
Unfortunately don't have any footage (at the time i wasn't recording and i didn't think to shadowplay it).
Maybe someone got something similar.
Not complaining btw. My own fault for being reckless and sprinting down, just a nice addition for these in-depth dissection videos. Keep up the good work!
Fall damage in elden ring is broken you can drop from a lethal distance then save yourself by finding a ledge to land on then drop the rest of the perfectly safe distance and then will Still kill you? 💁♂️🤔
I found a killbox spot in the Divine Tower of Limgrave Bridge during my RL1! It was hilarious, actually. I didn't realize how broken the controls get on those cameras
i was under the impression that spirit springs were like a column that negates fall damage if you pass through it on torrent
The way this works is very stupid imho
I wish you went into more detail, but this was helpful.
I died like four times for fall damage while watching this video
Thanks makes a lot more sense now
I have a story about the survivable fall you displayed in the video. It killed me once, offline, and I don't get it why, especially after watching the video and how the fall is supposed to work.
I was in a hurry to get down here because SOMETHING killed me repeatedly and my patience was wearing thin, so I started to spam the roll button – I am aware it's pointless in Elden Ring, but it's an old habit I have that won't die from the previous games -, and when I landed on the breakable surface, I rolled, and it didn't give in. I jumped once, and it did break when I landed, triggering the scripted fall, but it killed me. I don't remember if the cam followed me down there or not, I kinda have a doubt about that.
Does this also apply in the Divine Tower of Caelid where you touch the walkway and it breaks under you? Because there's two of those and one feels reasonable but the other feels WAYYYYY further…
Edit: Dumb dumb, I see now it's clearly a scripted fall.
1.03 has also made the cinquenda Dagger and +0 steel ring unobtainable bc they're behind a death barrier