History Main / LadderPhysics

* ''VideoGame/{{Hitman}} 2: Silent Assassin'' takes this to ludicrous extremes: Climbing a ladder forces the camera in to 3rd person perspective, and it doesn't restrict your firing capabilities at all, meaning you can and are ''forced'' to watch Agent 47 run up a ladder in third person while contorting his body so much that he can fire a shotgun directly below and behind him.

* ''MirrorsEdge'' noticeably restricts your ability to turn and look while climbing a ladder. Also, while you can still grab a ladder while falling, it will do a fair bit of damage, and it is possible to die by falling onto a ladder from high enough.

* Ladders in ''{{Minecraft}}'' are subject to all kinds of weirdness. They seem to simply slow your fall when you occupy the same square as them, and move you upwards at the same rate when you move against them. This means, among other things, moving into a ladder square while falling at terminal velocity will instantly slow you, and it's possible to mine a block while facing away from the ladder you're on. This reaches ridiculous levels when you realize, with a bit of luck, you can place a ladder segment while in freefall, and instantly cancel your momentum with it.

* In ''MetalGearSolid3'', Naked Snake has to climb a [[MemeticMutation looooooooooooooooooooooooong ladder]]. The only exhaustion experienced is on the part of the player.

* ''GodHand'' has a few ladders sprinkled throughout the game, but Gene never actually climbs them, he instead just jumps up and down to where they begin and end.

* In ''CallOfDuty 4'', you cannot fire weapons or do anything else that requires the use of your hands (except throw grenades) while climbing a ladder. You can't see your hands, but you only have hands during one cutscene and while you're actually holding a weapon.

* ''[[{{Myst}} Uru]]'' had fairly realistic ladders - it's a puzzle adventure, not an FPS - though with the obnoxious tendency to shunt you into third-person when you get on or off. There's also the quirk that, to avoid making multiple "climbing" animations, all the rungs on all the ladders in ''every universe'' are the same distance apart - even the ones you improvised by breaking a rope bridge.

* VideoGame/{{Okami}} avoids the issue entirely; ladders are treated like doors, automatically cutting to the next room whenever the wolf protagonist would need to climb a ladder to exit (as in Susano's room).

-->-- '''[[Webcomic/PennyArcade Gabe]]''', ''Podcast/AcquisitionsIncorporated'' (the [[http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/4pod/20090304 D&D podcast]])

->"[[WebOriginal/AcquisitionsIncorporated Can he cast spells hanging by his feet from the ladder?]]"
--> -- '''Gabe''', ''WebComic/PennyArcade'', the [[http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/4pod/20090304 D&D podcast]]

* ''VideoGame/{{Stalker}}'' is a funny one: you can't use anything that isn't a pistol or a knife while climbing, but if you do equip a pistol (sometimes it's necessary to deal with whatever nasties may be at the top), you hold it in a two-handed grip. [[MemeticMutation Such is life in the Zone.]]

* The Game Boy Advance game based on ''FutariWaPrettyCure Max Heart'' uses an especially lazy implementation. Grabbing onto ladders is ''automatic'' if you're in position to do so and not still moving up from a jump, and there's no way to let go other than jumping or reaching one end. On the positive (if unrealistic) side, you can jump at full height on ladders, so you can move up super-quickly by mashing the jump button.

* ''VideoGame/DeusExHumanRevolution'' switched to a third person view whenever Adam started climbing a ladder, accurately showing him grabbing each next step while being unable to do anything except climb. In fact, he can't even ''let go'' except when he comes to a ladder's end (even when he has the aug that negates fall damage), which means for instance putting a box at the end of a ladder prevents climbing down it.

->"[[PennyArcadeDungeonsAndDragonsPodcast Can he cast spells hanging by his feet from the ladder?]]"

** This looks ridiculously stupid in multi-player games, watching players ''walk'' up ladders - even siller if they're crouching, because the player appears to be levitating up the ladder from a kneeling position. Egregious in supposedly realistic settings like ''VideoGame/CounterStrike'', though at least climbing the ladder makes your gun horribly inaccurate.

** Also, in ''VideoGame/HalfLife1: Opposing Force'', the LadderPhysics become even more absurd when they get applied to rope climbing. Cpl Adrian Shepard must be one hell of an acrobat.

* ''Return to CastleWolfenstein'' takes the above example a little further: it's possible to not only reload and fire your weapon (even the minigun!) but also ''kick'' while climbing the ladder. This presumably means that your character is attached to the ladder by one foot.

* In games like ''{{Quake}} 3'' that lack actual ladder behavior, some maps attempt to get around this by just launching the player upwards when they approach the ladder.

* ''RedFaction'' is bad with this. Ladders work like no-gravity areas where you can move almost freely: you can move off a ladder a bit and still hang on... You can also grab onto and climb girders, climbing up and even shimmying across them, and you can, with small difficulty, climb from the bottom of a girder to the side, and then onto the top! Jumping towards a ladder near-instantly halts your momentum, and can be a life-saver when you're falling to your death but notice a ladder next to you. You can also look anywhere and shoot while climbing ladders.

* In the original ''FarCry'', you couldn't use weapons on ladders, but the controls on the ladder are relative to how you got on the ladder. So it was possible to go down a ladder facing away from it, which also made it possible to run ''off'' the ladder to varying degrees of pain or death depending from how high you fell off.

* ''[[VideoGame/{{Stalker}} S.T.A.L.K.E.R.]]'' is a funny one: you can't use anything that isn't a pistol while climbing, but if you do equip one (sometimes it's necessary to deal with whatever nasties may be at the top), you hold it in a two-handed grip. [[MemeticMutation Such is life in the Zone.]]

* In ''AmericasArmy'', the player loses the ability to brandish any weapons while touching a ladder.

** A heavy downside in ''Battlefield 2'' and 2142 is that a soldier who gets killed while holding on to a ladder is always instantly eliminated without any hope of being revived by a medic.

* In ''{{Killzone}}'', your character puts their weapon away and you actually see their hands grip the rungs of the ladder from the first person view. When going down you grab the side of the ladder and slide down. Both are activated with a use key.
* In ''ShadowWarrior'', while climbing a ladder you cannot use weapons, or even look around.
* ''OperationFlashpoint'' and ''{{ARMA}}'', being heavily-realistic shooters, require you to put your weapon away before climbing ladders. Oddly enough, at least in ''ARMA II'', your hands and feet never line up with the rungs.

* Ladders in ''VideoGame/CommandAndConquerRenegade'' force the player to hit the use key to get on them, at which point the viewpoint [[CameraPerspectiveSwitch shifts to third-person]] (if the player wasn't already playing in third-person) so the player can watch Havoc climb the ladder. This actually makes guard towers somewhat dangerous, as Nod Officers tend to hide in them, and it's usually difficult to take them out without going into the tower yourself.

* The recent ''Franchise/TombRaider'' games have pretty good LadderPhysics, probably because the game's about 80% LeParkour and 20% gunplay.
** The original games also have relatively realistic LadderPhysics, although graphic limitations meant that Lara generally climbed on flat surfaces and therefore did not always hold on the "rung" aspects of the textures.

* The guards in ''{{Thief}}: Deadly Shadows'' are completely incapable of dealing with ladders. If you ascend one, any guards chasing you will stand at the bottom, shaking their fists at you and shouting "[[WhatAnIdiot How did you get up there?]]". Unless they're armed with a bow, in which case you're in ([[AnnoyingArrows minor]]) trouble.

Much like JumpPhysics, characters in video games don't usually tend to interact with ladders the way people in real life do. These things range from climbing ladders without use of arms (and the ability to fire large weapons such as the {{BFG}}), to [[NotTheFallThatKillsYou completely breaking one's fall]] simply by grabbing them. Also, in many cases you'll be able to rotate the full 360 degrees while attached to the ladder, with no physical restraints. Sometimes, it's even possible to jump up the ladder, or climb up backwards.

* The earlier ''{{Castlevania}}'' games, while lacking in ladders, had stairs that behaved rather frustratingly: you couldn't jump on or off of them (until the SNES ones), and often you were attacked by GoddamnedBats as soon as you were situated atop them (though they at least couldn't [[LedgeBats make you fall to your doom]] while you were "glued" to the stairs). Even in the SNES games, it's still possible to fall ''through'' the stairs if you don't explicitly press Up or Down to climb them; this often results in death.
** ''VisualNovel/{{Snatcher}}'' on the Sega CD firmly lampshades this with a conversation between the main characters about teenage suicide rates in regards to Castlevania's stairs.

* Oh, dear sweet ''VideoGame/DonkeyKong''. You're quite vulnerable to a barrel to the brainpan if you forget to finish climbing not only the ladder, but getting up once you're on the higher platform. And no grabbing the ladder as you run by and jump, either. Granted, you've also got the broken ladders hanging out (tho they may just be missing rungs).

* ''VideoGame/SuperSmashBros Brawl'' uses and averts this. Obviously, every character has limbs--but you'd think Ivysaur(the only true quadraped) would have a bit of a tough time getting up each rung. Avoiding spikes and long pits in the Swamp stage requires jumping from ladder to ladder.

->"Can he cast spells hanging by his feet from the ladder?"

* ''VideoGame/FirstEncounterAssaultRecon'' takes the most realistic approach to the ladders in its thirst for averting FirstPersonGhost: your character is shown mounting the ladder from either up or down, you can see your arms and legs gripping it as you climb. As you might expect, even looking any further than 60º away from the ladder's vertical axis is essentially impossible.

* ''[[VideoGame/FirstEncounterAssaultRecon FEAR]]'' not only features realistic ladders, but actually a) requires you to crouch down or jump up to get them, b) allows you to see your hands, arms and feet as you're moving up or down the ladder, and c) only allows you to look about 45 degrees to either side while you're on them.

* Similar to the ''VideoGame/HalfLife'' example, in ''Franchise/{{Halo}}'', Master Chief and the Arbiter run up ladders, not climb them. Which means not only can you climb and shoot, you can let go and climb back up, so long as your character's looking up.
** The developers realized the inherent silliness of this trope, but have no real way of fixing the ladders without breaking the pace. Solution? They've replaced practically every ladder in the game with gravity lifts.
*** The ladders make a reappearance in the ''Halo 3'' campaign.

* ''Left4Dead'' averts any kind of ladder related weapon using nonsense despite running on the newest version of the Source engine. The fact that a survivor character can still hold onto a ladder with a couple dozen common infected standing on their head is another story.
** Ladders are still major deathtraps in ''Left4Dead'' anyway, though - especially when you have to do anything beyond reach the top of the "ladder," which is common when playing as the Infected.

* ''{{Gothic}}'' ladders tend to interrupt long falls safely but otherwise behave correctly. Your character can't do anything but climb or let go while on the ladder and getting hurt while climbing will knock him off of it for good.

** Also, in the ''VideoGame/HalfLife1'' expansion ''Opposing Force'', the LadderPhysics become even more absurd when they get applied to rope climbing. Cpl Adrian Shepard must be one hell of an acrobat.

* Similar to the ''HalfLife'' example, in ''Franchise/{{Halo}}'', Master Chief and the Arbiter run up ladders, not climb them. Which means not only can you climb and shoot, you can let go and climb back up, so long as your character's looking up.