RE4 remake has no fall damage to the surprise of some players

Many players of the Resident Evil 4 remake have taken notice of the fact that protagonist Leon does not take any damage when he falls, a concept that is conventional to the series. Some hope that it may be useful for speedrunning the game.

Resident Evil 4 is a remake of the 2005 survival horror title of the same name. Taking place six years after the Racoon City Incident, Leon S. Kennedy, now a US government agent, heads to a rural village in Europe in order to rescue the president’s daughter, Ashley Graham, after she was kidnapped.

The remake, just like the original Resident Evil 4, features a rather large number of areas with a lot of verticality when compared to most of the other games in the series. There are times when a fall, whether from a collapsing bridge or being thrust away by a boss’ attack, will result in Leon’s demise. But although Leon can die from a fall, he can’t actually take fall damage itself.

This discovery has drawn attention from users of the Resident Evil subreddit. The video in the thread above shows a battle that takes place during the first half of the game in a surrounding area of the lake. Leon is being ferociously pursued by a group of villagers atop some rickety scaffolding built into the cliff face. After avoiding his attackers, Leon attempts to drop down to another section of scaffolding below him, but he overshoots his jump and ends up falling down the cliff. As soon as you begin to mourn the tragic death of our hero, you suddenly realize that he has somehow landed safely.

Even though Leon has dropped down to what appears to be an off-limits area of the cliff where players aren’t expected to go, he is perfectly unharmed. He continues to run downward and reaches a lake. However, this lake doesn’t seem to have a bottom, and he inadvertently falls through the map.

Around one week prior to that Reddit post, another player also discovered the falling phenomenon in the exact same location. Again, Leon does not take any fall damage, but the difference is that this player does not fall through the map and instead is lucky enough to end up in an area that contains treasure.

Although the Resident Evil series features set pieces where you can be injured or killed from a fall, generally speaking, falling from a high location does not result in any fall damage. As an example, at the beginning of the original version of Resident Evil 4, Leon takes absolutely no damage when leaping off a tower from a height where an ordinary person would definitely end up with a broken bone or two.

It is also customary for games in the series to not have a jump, so there are actually very few places that you can fall to begin with. Any places where you can fall are likely to be designed that way by the developers. The fact that there is no fall damage even when dropping from an excessive height is likely because there is no need for such a system due to the way stages are designed.

The spectacle of Leon coming out unscathed after falling off a cliff may be the result of series conventions becoming intertwined with the vertical stage design in the Resident Evil 4 remake, which leads players to make unexpected jumps.

In the first Reddit thread we introduced in this article, the original poster commented on how the lack of fall damage could potentially aid those who are trying to improve their speedrun times. The fall spot posted by the user leads Leon to a dead end, but the discovery of other spots where you can fall could lead to new shortcuts being developed.

As it happens, a different glitch called the “door skip glitch” has already been discovered in the remake and is being utilized in speedruns. The leaderboards for the game on speedrun record site speedrun.com are expected to be opened “no later than April 14.”

Written by. Marco Farinaccia based on the original Japanese article (original article’s publication date: 2023-04-06 16:51 JST)