Elden Ring: Why Getting Stuck In Mid-Air Is Killing You
Many Elden Ring players have likely ran into a strange issue where getting stuck floating in mid-air eventually results in death. It's a very odd bug, and there doesn't seem to be a fix for it, but it may actually be the game working as intended in an unforeseen circumstance. The delayed, seemingly unexplained death is a feature of the game's physics, and getting stuck in mid-air just kills players because of fall damage.
Elden Ring brought back Dark Souls' signature verticality, and built upon it with jump mechanics. Not only can the player jump, but their spectral steed, Torrent, also has a double jump that is incredibly useful for exploring the Lands Between. Aside from some rather troublesome performance issues - most noticeable on PC - Elden Ring has had a rather smooth launch, but players may have still experienced a strange occurrence in which their player becomes frozen in mid-air before unceremoniously dying a few seconds later.
Death is not an unusual occurrence in Elden Ring or FromSoftware's other action RPGs, but being killed for seemingly no reason is rather frustrating. The incident usually occurs when the player is trying to squeeze through two objects close together. The environmental hit boxes aren't always perfectly aligned with the terrain's textures, and the player has actually become wedged in an unintentionally sticky spot. Losing everything upon death in Elden Ring is just a part of the game, but getting killed through no fault of one's own in such a way is contrary to the usual tough-but-fair gameplay FromSoftware is known for.
Resulting death from getting stuck between sections of terrain seems to be a wacky consequence of the game's fall damage mechanics. Players can only fall so far before the impact will kill them, but for bottomless pits and other such fantastical tropes littered throughout Elden Ring, the game seems to just measure how long the player has been falling, and concludes that it's an unsurvivable drop. When the player gets stuck floating in mid-air, it appears the game registers this as a continuous fall, and kills the player once they've reached the threshold. This seems to be an unfortunate oversight in design, kind of like Dark Souls 2's weapon degradation being tied to frame rate.
Elden Ring's fall damage is difficult to guess already, and this is just another strange hiccup players will have to learn to play around (unless it's eventually patched out). There doesn't seem to be a great solution once someone has become stuck, but quickly fast traveling to a nearby Site of Grace will save on time retrieving dropped Runes. This will unfortunately still respawn enemies, and isn't possible if any mobs are around when the floating begins, but it takes at least a bit of the frustration out of the situation. Rainbow Stones and other items can help judging and negating fall damage, but there doesn't seem to be a way to avoid death when accidentally getting stuck between Elden Ring hit boxes.