The Witcher Books Prove That Fall Damage In 'The Witcher 3' Is Complete Bull
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Featured Image Credit: CD Projekt
If you've played The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, chances are you've discovered Geralt's one true weakness: small drops.
Despite being the roughest, toughest monster hunter on the Continent, our heroic witcher goes down like a sack of spuds after falling more than a few feet. The amount of times I've nudged Geralt off a small flight of stairs only to get a game over screen as he crashed to the ground is, frankly, utter bollocks.
Given that Geralt can cleave humans in two with one swing of his steel sword and cast all sorts of spells, you'd think he could take to the air with a little more skill than a baby horse that's stumbled off a cliff. As it turns out, witchers are totally supposed to be able to fall from great heights and come out totally unscathed.
One eagle-eyed fan has pointed out on Reddit (thanks, VG247), that there's an entire scene in one of the original Andrzej Sapkowski books that can be taken as concrete proof that Geralt is sturdier than the game gives him credit for. An excerpt from Time Of Contempt revolves around the fact that Geralt can land gracefully from heights that would break the legs of a normal man.
"They had been attacked by a white-haired fiend, who had fallen on them from a wall, from a height that would have broken a normal man's legs," the passage reads.
"It ought to have been impossible to land gently, whirl in an impossibly fast pirouette, and a split second later begin killing. But the white-haired fiend had done it. And the killing had begun."
You can't see me, but I've got chills from reading that. A real reminder that I need to carry on reading the books, because they're genuinely brilliant. And, to get back on track, canonical evidence that Geralt should be able to leap off of whatever he damn well pleases as explores in The Witcher 3.
I'll never understand quite why developer CD Projekt RED made him so breakable in that respect. It's not like restricting his ability to jump made the game any harder, it just looked really dumb when Geralt stepped off a wall that was about twice the height of him and immediately died. Now we know there was no good story reason for this strange decision, it makes even less sense.
Hopefully if we ever get The Witcher 4 starring Ciri, Geralt's adopted daughter can leap around with a little more recklessness. Open world games are way more fun when you don't really have to worry about fall damage, imo.
