One of my favorite things from Arc Raiders’ second test was how you could fall from any height as long as you grabbed a ledge on the way down. This stopped any damage from falling. It led to times when I was stuck in a corner, and my only choice was a quick escape, jumping for some faraway handhold or falling backward off a building and hoping for the best.

I felt like this fit with the game’s way of thinking about risk and reward, since it just as often ended with me hitting the floor hard as it did with a heroic escape. But Embark, the company making the game, feels different now. It won’t work the same way when Arc Raiders comes out for PS5, Xbox and PC on October 30.

“It was a little bit too good, so we toned it down for the later releases,” executive producer Aleksander Grøndal explains. “We want a game where you feel like you’re making a choice about how you move around, and we want to make sure taking damage is part of your thinking. If there’s no result for what you do, that’s the opposite of where we want to be. We want there to be results to your actions, like using up your energy or losing health.

“But from the wild videos we saw from earlier tests of people jumping off big towers and just grabbing on, that was a mistake. That went a bit too far, so we fixed it, but we’re also looking into how people can get down from buildings like that in different ways, of course. So it’s part of what makes it fun, I think, to try new things and find new ways to move around. We don’t really want to put too many rules on the players, in that sense. We want to keep it a playground as much as possible.”

Now, you can still grab a ledge to stop damage up to a certain height, but once you fall too fast, you hit a falling pose where you start waving your arms around. Once in that pose, you’re going to take damage no matter what you do.

To make up for it, though, you can now shoot while falling.

“If you fall off a really tall building, you kind of get into this free fall state where you can actually move around and shoot and go down fighting,” Grøndal smiles.

Embark recently talked about their plans for voluntary wipes in Arc Raiders.

Try it out when Arc Raiders launches this Thursday.