Understanding Fall Damage in Elden Ring & How I got into Souls Mechanics Research

Unsurprisingly, Elden Ring is has caught the bulk of my attention as of late. I recently created a list that details how Runes are awarded in PvP, which can be found at the bottom of this page:
https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/PvP 

There's just a couple more perspectives that need confirming, but everything I've added so far has been tested and verified. Tangentially to this, I've spent the last couple days doing some random PvP and logging the levels of the hosts I defeat in order to help start crafting a hypothesis for the invasion ranges (this will only help confirm the level range, weapon level ranges will need a different process).

Dangitjm has made solving the level ranges a priority and he's already done enough to craft some solid hypotheses that seem likely to be accurate. I intend to keep up with those random invasions to help with some independent verification. The downwards range he found matched what I was already suspecting before we traded notes, so we're off to a good start there! I've had some funny invasions along the way and I'll be sharing my favorite encounters here soon.

Though as much as I've been thinking about rune rewards, level range testing, and wanting to redo the group passwords video, I found myself settling on a new primary focus: Fall Damage! The more I played the more I wanted to know exactly what was happening. That's going to be the subject of my next video and I'll be writing the script tomorrow (I haven't forgotten about the Iron Keep episode)!

Fall Damage captured my interest because of how it can feel a bit unintuitive and unpredictable. Why is it that some falls surprise you by allowing you to fall really far without taking damage? And others feel like they should've been safe, but they wind up killing you?

Thankfully, I have answers to all of this now. Knowing how these games often iterate on previous mechanics, I approached this with the mindset of "what's the same, and what's different." And as it turns out, this was an incredibly efficient way of dissecting its mechanics because it's a LOT more similar to Dark Souls 1 than I think anyone realizes.

With their most recent game having been Sekiro, which did a lot of reconsidering of jumping & falling, and the prospect of Elden Ring being an open world game that also has jumping, it wouldn't have been a bad guess if you expected something like fall damage to have been heavily reworked. But that didn't actually happen; they didn't come close to reinventing that wheel and they iterated quite closely from Dark Souls 1, surprisingly.

The first question that needed to be addressed is whether or not it's even consistent. A lot of people suspect that it might change in different locations (eg. overworld vs legacy dungeons), but this wound up not being the case. Fall Damage simply occurs at falls of 16+ meters, and guaranteed death occurs at 20+ meters. This is basically always true, though of course you do have some exceptions like killboxes that work independently of this, some scripted, falls, etc.

There's also lot more to talk about than just that, I've also researched how much damage is taken, the effect dexterity has on fall damage, the impact of equip load, fallout timers, and a few others things. But I think what excites the most about this topic is how it's going to break a lot of general expectations.

After mentioning that I was starting to explore Elden Ring fall damage on twitter, I've had a lot of people tell me how they think it works and it's pretty fascinating. There's a lot of replies and DMs asserting that the amount of time spent falling impacts your fall damage. An idea I saw mentioned a few times closer to launch seems to have snowballed and won the starting word-of-mouth battle, and now we have a situation where the most popular ideas out there are incorrect. And to be perfectly honest, I'm kind of totally into this. :p

This reminds me of when I first started getting involved in Souls testing. For those who are unfamiliar of when/how I got into Souls mechanics stuff; I was a big fan of the original Demon's Souls when it was contemporary, but I wasn't involved in any research or testing with it. I wasn't an early adopter/ importer and I wasn't coming in with any familiarity or appreciation for From Software (I've never played King's Field, Armored Core, etc). So doing something like contributing to a wiki didn't even cross my mind, I just assumed everything on there was accurate.

Demon's Souls quickly became one of my all time favorite games so when Dark Souls was announced, I was incredibly excited and made it a release date purchase. But having played Dark Souls 1 from launch, I got a very different perspective on how the wikis worked and how the community shared information. There was SO much confusion in the early days of Dark Souls, so many conflicting ideas and opinions, and a lot of wrong or speculative stuff getting posted to wikis.

So as a tangential thing to just enjoying the game normally, I began wondering if the kinds of questions we'd see about level ranges, vagrants, miracle resonance, etc, had definitive answers we could find. When I started finding stuff on the wikis that ranged from slightly wrong to holy-crap-you-really-just-blindly-guessed, and how people on reddit would cite that info, it became a fun project in a weird way. Not only do I want to learn more about these things and have accurate info, but I also wanted to see if I could steer the community away from believing popular misconceptions.

So while inaccurate information isn't preferable, a lot of the discourse surrounding Fall Damage in Elden Ring is bringing me right back to the olden days where it's not just about doing random deep dives, but there's this sort of meta goal of changing minds. And I look forward to it!