Gravity Barrier

"Steep Slope Barrier - You would know this was possible if you'd ever actually been outside."

— Comic Book Guy, The Simpsons Game

As video games become more sophisticated, their environments become bigger and more realistic ... but they still aren't as big as all outdoors. A developer can easily limit an indoor environment — buildings have walls. Outdoors, however, there's only so many fences a game-developer can put up before every forest looks like some kind of park. A gravity barrier is either a cliff or slope that's too tall to climb... or a drop that kills the player.

Gravity barriers have the potential advantage of looking realistic without being out of place. Sure, the real world has lots of sheer drops or rocky cliff-sides that might be nigh-impassible to the untrained outdoorsman. On the other hand, as graphics have improved, "mountain ranges" that are ridiculously steep yet not much higher than a three-story building randomly jutting out of the mostly-flat grasslands have come to look less like a plausible terrain feature and more like an Acceptable Break from Reality... especially when said ranges completely surround the map like a giant crater.

The best video-game map-makers can use gravity barriers to restrict player movement, in a way that's not blatant manipulation. A poor game design will use the insurmountable waist height fence — the obstacle that obviously restricts progress but that anyone could just climb over, given the steely determination of a video game hero. A really bad game design will use the Invisible Wall to prevent a character from progressing further.

Another version of this trope is the water barrier, where a player cannot proceed because a large body of water blocks their progress. Either they will drown if they try to cross it, or some form of Border Patrol (usually carnivorous fish) will stop them from swimming too far out, or the water will continue forever and they will eventually get bored and give up.

Gravity barriers can sometimes be temporary obstacles, until a character comes back with a power-up that provides Video Game Flight.

The gravity barrier may also be used to allow a player to move forward, but then restrict their backtracking. For example, a character may leap off a small cliff and fall into a new region, and the cliff behind them is unclimbable. The player knows they've both made forward progress and cannot retreat, because they crossed a gravity barrier.

But if a clever player finds a way to get down the cliff without dying, Sequence Breaking may ensue...

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Examples:

Action Adventure

• In inFAMOUS, in which the protagonist accidentally electrocutes himself in water more than a couple of inches deep.
• The Metroid Prime 3D games used this extensively: either there was an impassable ridge looming high above, insurmountable even by Samus' legendary jumping skills, or a precipice. There was some subtle manipulation as well, in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, where attempting to cross a boundary chasm using the Screw Attack would suddenly eliminate the technique's momentum and drop Samus like a stone. Of course, this is absent in the 2D games, where the Wall Jump and the infinite Space Jump allow Samus to leap over any vertical obstacle.
  • The 2D games have their gravity barriers as well, but years of Sequence Breaking have rendered them nearly meaningless. New players who aren't familiar with wall jumping will find plenty of unreachable ledges, often coupled with deep water that kills your mobility upgrades.
  • Metroid Fusion puts a twist on the water variant by making it horizontal as well: until you get the Gravity Suit, you can't use the Sprint Shoes you'll need to escape a flooded area late in the game.
• The Tomb Raider series uses these a lot, both to define the outer edges of outdoor levels (unclimbable cliffs) and occasionally to prevent backtracking (slides down really steep slopes).
• [PROTOTYPE] has a water barrier. However, while the hero is far too dense to be able to swim, he can jump off the bottom just fine. The game has to artificially force the player to jump in the direction of the shore to prevent him from going out of bounds.
• Spider-Man and The Incredible Hulk games in the 2000s have featured these, especially the island-city-and-incidentally-your-hero-can't-swim variety. The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction uses the Prototype solution in the city section. If Hulk falls into the water, he automatically jumps back towards shore. Unclimbable cliffs cordon off the desert section.
• In the LEGO Star Wars games, the only way of knowing you've encountered one of these, especially when there appears to be a ledge on the other side, is attempting to cross with an astromech droid.
• Spyro the Dragon uses invisible walls to prevent the player from exploring the wide expanse of Greenland surrounding the levels. Charging into them will cause Spyro to stumble back.
• The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past: Hyrule is a landlocked valley surrounded on all sides by impassable mountains. Makes you wonder where the ship Link was sailing in The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening set out from.
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild uses a variety of barriers. Right in the start of the game, you're on a high plateau with the rest of Hyrule right below you. Even if you tried to climb down, the game still treats it as a bottomless pit and dumps you back on high ground. Once you get the paraglider, the land below is accessible. While the world map is massive, you can't go beyond the boundaries of the map due to really tall cliffsides that you can't climb no matter how much stamina you have. Trying to go in the ocean beyond or past the desert to the west just has an Invisible Wall with the game telling you that you can't go any further.
• Axiom Verge has one otherwise unremarkable part of Zi that, for no obvious plot-related reason, is impossible to backtrack across from right to left before you get High Jump and Grapple.

First Person Shooters

• Borderlands has this in many areas. Falling off a cliff results in instant death, even though you can survive the fall most likely. Jakob's Cove also kills your character if you try to jump off a cliff to get down to the docks as a shortcut, and going too far out in the water also kills you.
• Halo:
  • Even though in various cutscenes you witness Master Chief surviving jumps and falls from the outer atmosphere... fall 50 feet or so in-game and you're dead. Oddly enough, you die in mid-air rather than on landing. Even worse, many supposedly harmless drops are guarded by instant-kill barriers, usually to prevent players from short-cutting. Notoriously prevalent in Halo 2. For example, on the Arbiter mission "The Oracle", even if you try to shortcut down the shaft by running around the narrow ledges, you will still be foiled by the death barrier (unless you get lucky and somehow avoid it). And then there are the water barriers, where MC suddenly acquires Super Drowning Skills.
  • Somewhat averted in multiplayer in Halo 2, where super jumping (due to a patch gone right on Xbox Live) DOESN'T kill the player, even though they may fall in excess of 50 metres. Comes in handy with how easy it is to get on the outside of the maps and fall off.
• Half-Life 2 has a rooftop chase sequence near the beginning. Even if you manage to slow your descent or jump down from ledge to ledge, if your feet touch the ground you're instantly killed (as if from a fatal fall). Episode Two adds lush outdoor environments with mountain vistas and sprawling forests... but you will often find your progress restrained by unclimbable cliffs that surround the valleys you traverse.
• Left 4 Dead:
  • The game has monsters appearing by climbing over barriers that players simply can't cross... or by leaping from open windows or rooftops that are unreachable from ground level. The implication is that more of the city would be reachable, if the players just had the right tools to climb it. Also, there are city streets visible from building rooftops, but these regions are unreachable because the only way to get to them would be a fatal fall. In the event that a player manages to survive a fall to the street below, but are not supposed to go there, they are incapacitated and then killed within one second. Gravity barriers also block the players from entering some of the monsters' spawn points — infinite zombies "blink" into existence in an unseen, unreachable third-story room, then they jump out an open window to spill into the playing field.
  • However, in "Versus" mode, the players take turns playing as the Special Infected, and they can explore these areas. There's not much to see, and the Infected-only areas are in turn blocked off by walls, sometimes of the invisible variety.
  • On several maps in both games, gravity barriers are used as a point of no return. These are all very popular ambush spots in versus mode, as most can result in a guaranteed kill if the survivors aren't paying attention and fail to cross the barrier all at once.
• Marathon had numerous gravity barriers, where the player would fall off a ledge and be unable to backtrack. Since the game took place on a space station, these barriers only impeded movement because the artificial gravity was turned on.
• Averted in Serious Sam The First Encounter with levels placed in the middle of vast, traversable deserts. Some such massive plains have secrets at the far end, if you deign to cross, usually not without a monster encounter mid journey.
• Portal 2 has these towards the end. Normally, Chell takes no damage from falling, since she's wearing the long-fall boots (Chell even falls over 4 km and survives at one point.) However, the last set of puzzles has a bunch of pits which kill you if you fall in them. Oddly, earlier puzzles had similar pits that killed you, but with a plausible and more immediate explanation (there's toxic waste in the pits), but the pits in chapter 8 onwards are empty.
  • The implication is actually that Chell survives the later level pits too, but is then killed by the reactor meltdown. Obviously the developers aren't going to make you wait 20 minutes in a pit for that to happen.
• MechWarrior Living Legends typically hems in the maps with mountain ranges, though it's almost always possible to walk around them in a mech, drive over the mountains in a Hover Tank or simply fly over in an aircraft, where you will be confronted with a prompt to return to mission boundaries within 10 seconds or die. On the Space Zone map 'Extremity' if you somehow manage to reach the end of the spinning asteroid before the border patrol kills you, you'll tumble off the map into interplanetary space. Community maps like 'Carbon' can ring the map with deep, nigh-inescapable oceans.

Massively Multiplayer Online Games

• World of Warcraft:
  • The game used mountains as gravity barriers when it was released. Unfortunately, they underestimated player ingenuity and it was possible to climb over most of them and reach empty lands with unfinished graphics. This was later fixed. It also uses water barriers, in the form of "fatigue" which quickly kills you when you're above sufficiently deep water, regardless of your situation (swimming, walking on water with magic, flying above the water, even as a ghost).
  • You can try to fly from Northern to Eastern Kingdoms only to discover that it doesn't exist there. The map says that the PC is over Eastern Kingdoms land, but it dies anyway.
  • The expansion made gravity barriers temporary in the new content by adding flying mounts that could be obtained at high levels. This did not apply retroactively to old content, where flying is restricted because the landscape isn't designed for it. There is no Hand Wave.
  • They're adding flying to the original maps in the new expansion. This time providing a Hand Wave: You have to purchase a "flight master's license" - presumably the same one that the griffon/etc handlers already have in order to sell you flights.
• Defiance has this, in the form of large hills. Initially, there is no way to scale the steeper ones, but with the right vehicle, enough booster, and a skilled player, you can scale nearly all of them. Unfortunately, that's when you will often run into the Invisible Wall if you're near a yellow line on your map.
• Star Wars: The Old Republic, in keeping with the grand Star Wars tradition, features many, many areas with No OSHA Compliance in the cities and spaceships. Rural areas tend to be surrounded by mountains and/or oceans.

Miscellaneous Games

• In the Glider series, where Vent Physics substitutes for Jump Physics, gravity barriers are usually just a matter of vents that don't rise quite high enough. Since helium in Glider PRO allows Video Game Flight, outdoor areas have to use downward-blowing lift areas at the top to prevent players from flying out of bounds. Regarding the opposite direction, since falling speed is constant, narrow vertical passages can be protected by floor vents that need to be switched off.

Platformers

• The Super Mario Bros. and Wario Land platformers will often have secret items on high platforms unreachable unless the character comes back with the special feather, leaf, or other item that allows them to fly.
  • When outdoor areas in Super Mario Sunshine aren't surrounded by Invisible Walls or Bottomless Pits, they're blocked by cliffs and steep hills.
• Sly Cooper levels tend to be bounded by mountains and water.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Sonic the Hedgehog had gravity barriers. There is a hill in the Marble Zone (part one) that you can run down but cannot run back up. It also had others that you could only go back up very slowly. So, gravity-impatience barriers. Now, the latest games have entire levels SURROUNDED by these, which, due to the inexplicable insistence on extremely linear paths, winds up with long stretches of road over Bottomless Pits.
  • Occasionally used in Sonic Adventure 2, usually on the treasure hunting stages. Mad Space and Meteor Herd have these surrounding the level, forcing the player to turn back should they stray too far from the path. Barriers are also used in Chao World, preventing Chao and the player from stumbling off the cliff edge.

Racing Games

• Averted by virtue of sheer incompetence in Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing where it's entirely possible to drive right over the cliffs surrounding the track and head into the infinite grey void.
• Some racing games (typically of the 'kart'-style) have these as part of the atmosphere, but it also does prevent turning around and driving back. And then there's the ones where the cliff version of the barrier is in effect, where if you leave the track you really leave the track; in Mario Kart Wii, do this on Rainbow Road and you get to watch yourself do a re-entry burn.
• On that note, the Jet Moto games for the Playstation would often prevent backtracking with huge one-way jumps and large drops off unscalable cliffs. And, of course, half of each game's tracks were loaded with Bottomless Pits.
• Motocross Madness has a tall cliff around the arena that can actually be scaled, allowing you to face the second safeguard: the Invisible Cannon.

Role Playing Games

• The Elder Scrolls:
  • The series first attempted this in Morrowind, bracketing many paths with tall hills that cannot be climbed. However, the Levitation spell gets you right over, which is a big reason why that spell was dropped from future installments. In addition, the game's setting is an island surrounded by infinite ocean. (Though, canonically, there is only a narrow strip of sea on three of the sides.)
  • Oblivion:
    • Once again attempted with the use of mountains surrounding the playable area which are intended to be insurmountable. Just in case the player does make it to the end of the line, the game pops in with an Invisible Wall for good measure.
    • Several Game Mods remove the invisible walls and make whole provinces like Elsweyr and part of Morrowind reachable, with player-made but canon-friendly places to visit.
  • Skyrim makes it a hat trick for the series. However, the super-tall mountains can be scaled fairly easily with a horse, leading to the "Physics? Bitch, I'm a horse"◊ meme.
• Fallout 3 uses this on most of the edges of its large map — nuclear war seems to have kicked up a box-shaped range of mountains around Washington DC. If one tries to swim off the south edge through the Potomac, or walk to an unblocked map edge elsewhere, however, you are simply stopped by a pop-up telling you you can't go any further. Fallout: New Vegas prefers to block the gaps in the surrounding hills with insurmountable waist-height obstacles such as wrecked vehicles. Both games also have a few barriers of the lethal variety, where falling off a precipice results in mid-air death and a Fade to Black as if it were a Bottomless Pit. Most notable in the Lonesome Road DLC.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 1 has these around many of its incredibly huge and detailed environments, where the characters will fall to their doom if they cross them. Justified, as most of the game takes place across the bodies of two continent-sized giants.

Survival Horror

• Alan Wake does this, being set in the mountains of Washington State. There are plenty of areas where gravity barriers stop you from travelling off the beaten path, and yet it works really well. Good level design, thy name is Alan Wake....
• This is what traps victims in the town of Silent Hill. More specifically, the colossal, bottomless chasms that spontaneously appear and turn the town into a mist-shrouded plateau. And you can fall into the Bottomless Pits in later games. Though this one actually makes a lot of sense. Since Silent Hill is a malevolent, probably-sentient Eldritch Location, of course it'd go out of its way to trap people inside.
• In Survivor: The Living Dead, you can't drop from the second floor to the ground as 'Jumping off will snap my skinny legs for sure'. You can throw bombs from the balcony, however, though there was a glitch in some versions that caused them to bounce back up.

Third Person Shooter

• Crackdown's Pacific City is surrounded by water. Swim too far away from the city — a good distance, surprisingly — and you'll run across an invisible wall.
• Red Dead Redemption has insurmountable cliffs surrounding the map.
• The Syphon Filter series is somewhat inconsistent with these, a fall height that may be harmless in one situation or game will be fatal in another.
• Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain: The Afghanistan area of operations, which mostly consists of valleys surrounded by towering cliffs, uses gravity barriers quite extensively. However, it's usually not at all apparent which parts are barriers and which parts you're supposed to be able to hike up, thanks to the game's dynamic mounting system, which can sometimes impede your progress on a shin-high rock if the angle is too steep. Unless you're riding your horse, of course, in which case you can climb seventy or eighty degree slopes with no problem.

Wide Open Sandboxes

• The town in the first three Animal Crossing games has huge cliffs to the west and east of the square town. The second and third games also has a cliff at the north, where the first has a fence. In addition, the first and third games have cliffs across the middle of the town that (along with the river) separate the town into four quadrants. In the fourth game, your town has a cliff to one side and a path leading to the commercial district on the north side, with the other two sides being bordered by ocean.
• The world of Brütal Legend is surrounded by tall cliffs. Take so much as a single step out of bounds and you get flung into oblivion.
• All the Grand Theft Auto games have water barriers.
  • San Andreas is an exception since there are no barriers to physically hold your character back, although the longer you go away from the mainland, it will take just as long to go back - and realistically, if you just swim off the coast trying to reach the edge you'll run out of energy before long and drown (no such problem with planes, though). And if you go into other towns when you are not allowed yet, you get an unshakeable wanted rating, justified by the plot.
• Subverted in Minecraft: sheer face cliffs exist that are impossible to traverse...that is, until you mine some steps in them, or use a water bucket to make an impromptu elevator out of a waterfall.
  • Beyond 30,000,000 meters, a force field prevents you from progressing.
• Myst IV has a one age with sheer cliffs. Myst V: End of Ages also has some.
• Both Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption II make use of this. Interestingly, the ones in IIreveal interesting things about the map's development history, mainly because A) they appear in places you can't reach in the final game but would technically be reachable if some other, newer prevention mechanism weren't in place^note With the exception of Mexico, all shorelines on the opposite side of map boundary rivers/lakes have them, but in the final game the game sinks your boat and auto-drowns you if you get too close. B) some of them are extremely sloppy examples of blocking off former playable map, to the point where they look like normal hills and traces of cut routes and areas can still be found on top of them.^note West Ambarino has a long, mapborder hill to the south of Adler Ranch that when scaled with glitches/mods, still has visible traces of a road that used to be there when the area was bigger.

Non video game examples

Tabletop Games

• Ironclaw: In the middle of the map are the Walls of Calabria: a v-shaped cliff formation leagues long and a mile and a half high. Of course, they're not as much of an obstacle for the flying races, and the second edition reveals that a Noble House of Bats claim the caves riddling it as their domain.

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