Friendly fire
Damage dealt to allies counts and hurts them, meaning careless shooting, explosions, or area effects can injure or kill teammates. ARMA 3's punishing full-lethality friendly fire enforces disciplined, communication-heavy squad play, while Rainbow Six Siege uses it to make grenade and shotgun use in close quarters genuinely risky. Designers use friendly fire to raise the stakes of imprecise play, to reward communication and positioning awareness in team-based games, and to add a layer of tension to area-effect and explosive weapons that would otherwise be consequence-free against teammates. Key decisions: whether it's toggleable per-mode (competitive on, casual off is common), damage scaling (reduced versus full damage to allies), whether it can be turned off entirely for accessibility, and how it interacts with accidental versus intentional (griefing) damage. Pitfall: friendly fire without griefer mitigation (kick/ban systems, damage caps) becomes a vector for toxic play in public matches — competitive integrity and anti-grief tooling need to ship together.
- Dev effort: Small
- Timing: Real-time
- Common in: shooter, milsim
Seen in
- ARMA 3
- Rainbow Six Siege