Back in the day when I used to main Call of Duty’s extraction mode, DMZ, any time my plans to play sniper boss on a tall tower went awry and I had to skedaddle, I’d just leap off of a building and, without much thought or concern, hit the ground and run and hide somewhere. It was cheap. But also, there was an infinite parachute on my back. It was a part of the game. Am I supposed to not use it?
Well, as we’ve now seen for a little bit, you can kinda sorta do the same thing in Arc Raiders. But instead of an infinite parachute, you can exploit how the game handles characters grabbing onto ledges to fall from incredible heights with basically no harm to your character. It’s not right. I don’t agree with it. You should stop doing it. Camp the extraction point? Fine. But if I see you do this ledge thing from somewhere ridiculous like the skyscraper-sized launch tower in Spaceport, I don’t care if you’re fighting a Leaper or are running from a Rocketeer. I’m hopping on the mic to have a conversation with you about unsportsmanlike conduct.
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I first caught sight of this little exploit back when I wrote up a montage of all the hijinks that unfolded during Arc Raiders’ first weekend. I’d hoped that, amusing as it was to watch, it would be a little too tricky to pull off reliably. Well, no. As Morgan Park over at PC Gamer has documented, folks have figured out how to do this reliably. But unlike my colleague, I don’t find it amusing.
It essentially works like this: Fall from a great height but be sure there’s a ledge to grab waiting far below. Hold down the jump key or button while you’re falling and you’ll grab the ledge, your character’s arm sockets apparently absorbing the impact of falling from terminal velocity to cancel out all of the fall damage you right earned.
Kotaku has reached out to Embark Studios for comment on this “movement tech.”
Don’t get me wrong. I do enjoy a good movement exploit when it feels like it requires a bit of mastery to pull off. “Curb sliding” in Halo Infinite (RIP) was one such thing. After sprinting, you could slide off a ledge to get a boost in speed. It was tricky to do, especially amidst the chaos of a good Halo match.
But I don’t see that kind of skill in this ledge grab trick in Arc Raiders. Being able to bail from a high vantage point without consequence feels a little too easy, and antithetical to the fairly grounded approach to combat Arc Raiders seems to be going for.
Ledges and climbing are quite important in Arc Raiders, so much so that the game sometimes reminds me a little bit of Uncharted. As some folks have commented in a Reddit post documenting the ledge-grab exploit, grabbing onto a ledge from a great height is fine, but it shouldn’t cancel out fall damage. Especially when you’re jumping off something as tall as a skyscraper. Such silliness.
