It's not the fall that kills you

I've been thinking about Tomb Raider recently, and not just because of my surroundings.

I've mentioned before that one of the reasons I like MMOs is that they remind me of 90s action-adventure games like Tomb Raider and Deathtrap Dungeon, only with the far greater scope that I always wanted those games to have

I've carried a couple of things over from those games to MMOs, like my preference – other than in some group content - for a fairly zoomed in camera, and for the fact that I'm always alert to the prospect of fall damage. Overly alert perhaps, because fall damage as such is often not really a thing in MMOs.

I'll use the three games I've played so far in this latest rotation as examples of what I mean. Lord of the Rings Online has no fall damage at all, just a wince-inducing cracking sound and a short movement debuff... unless you fall a very long way in which case it's an insta-kill. In City of Heroes you can jump from the top of a skyscraper and while you'll take damage you won't die – you'll always be left with 1HP.

And now Secret World Legends, where I've noticed during this run that I take no damage when I drop down from high places. I don't recall this from my last two runs of this game and that surprises me, though thinking about it I suppose Solomon Island was relatively flat, whereas the main hub in Scorched Desert is surrounded by cliffs and there's been far more opportunity for me to take vertical shortcuts. It's quite likely that I've been unconsciously playing SWL as if there is fall damage because in the games it reminds me of there always was.

Why then is fall damage so rare in MMOs? I think there's a couple of reasons.

In Tomb Raider especially you didn't take damage from intentionally dropping down from heights so much as you took it from missing jumps, and since Lara had no health regeneration this mattered. In MMOs health regeneration is standard* and it's usually very quick, so even if you did take damage from a fall you'd walk it off fast. Interestingly, City of Heroes, which does have fall damage, also has noticeably slower out of combat health regeneration than most of the other MMOs I've played. It does seem to be that the older the game the slower the health recovery.

*Except for Dungeons & Dragons Online, which doesn't have any.

The inexact nature of platforming in MMOs is something that some of these games have a problem with. Games like Tomb Raider were platformers, and precision platformers at that, whereas in MMOs platforming – if there is any – tends to be anything but precise. Star Wars The Old Republic in particular has a tendency to feature lengthy platforming challenges which call for a degree of exactitude that the game's controls just don't provide. As always there's a difference between 'this is a challenge by design' and 'this is a challenge because the controls are clumsy and unresponsive' and SWTOR often crosses that line.

Secret World Legends has somewhat better jumping controls, though it's still far from the precision of old school platformers. This game does have a nasty habit of combining jumping sections with insta-kill booby traps though, and these missions tend to be noticeably more lethal than regular ones.