Why game developers spent decades learning to make ladders not terrible

Ladders are one of gaming's most deceptively complicated design problems — and the story of how developers learned to handle them is equal parts funny and genuinely illuminating. Arkane Austin had it right on the wall: "Fuck ladders."

Harvey Smith, former studio head at Arkane, traces the motto back to early conversations with founder Raphael Colantonio, long before Dishonored existed and while the studio was still trying to get Thief or Blade Runner off the ground. Smith eventually turned the team's shared design philosophies into motivational-poster printouts and stuck them around the office. When Dishonored finally came together, Arkane sidestepped the problem entirely by replacing ladders with hanging chains — which Colantonio believed would be less work to implement. They were not less work. But the sentiment stuck.

The reason ladders are such a headache comes down to how many design and animation questions a single climbable object forces you to answer. Do players see their hands and feet on the rungs? Then you need polished climbing animations. Can they draw a weapon mid-climb? New animation set. Can they slide down, jump off, or get knocked off by an explosion? Each answer spawns another question. Can the AI do everything the player can? The complexity compounds fast, and that's before you account for players approaching from the wrong side — something modern third-person games handle with subtle character-shuffling logic that took years of iteration to get right. Liz England, former lead designer at Ubisoft and Insomniac, points to the core issue: putting players into a different move state opens up a cascade of edge-case bugs, from getting stuck mid-climb to collision errors that are hard to predict and harder to fix.

The history of bad ladder implementation is a graveyard of memorable failures. Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six on the original PlayStation had ladders more dangerous than the enemy combatants — hostages would follow the player down and immediately ragdoll to their deaths. Source Engine games replaced physical ladder interaction with a face-magnetising wall-walk that required precise head angle to maintain, and punished any deviation with an instant fall. Valve eventually published an entire whitepaper on how to build functional ladders in their engine, which tells you everything about how seriously the problem had to be taken. The industry has quietly solved most of this over the past two decades — sticky ladders, contextual animations, AI parity — but the solution required asking, and answering, dozens of questions that players never see.