In this method you bounce off the near left ledge from the top of the V, then get cushioned by a sloping part of the Shade plateau base near a bush. Suitable only for PAL.

Full description

Fall or jump off the left of the start of the bridge to land on the top of the V. Stand on the edge near the sharp corner where the flat part of the V starts, and look down towards the ledge.

What you're going to do now is bounce off the ledge and get cushioned by a nicely sloping part of the Shade plateau base, near where there's a small bush - crouching as you hit. It requires some fairly careful technique to actually reach that slope however. A casual bounce off the ledge would tend to send you too far out, so you'll need to do all you can to try and kill the outwards bounce yet still get enough distance to reach the slope.

The key to this is to hit the correct part of the ledge and to use a lot of drift. In the plateau base rock method there was mention of a smiley clown face on the ledge. A bit closer to you than the left of the mouth, there are a couple of dark spots, the largest of which you could perhaps think of as a mole on his chin. Imagine a thick strip which starts at the lesser of those spots and runs towards you along the ledge for a few metres, tapering off as it goes. That's the general area to bounce off, and I've made a rough indication of it in the picture. It's actually part of a triangular panel which slopes steeply enough not to kill you on impact. You'll die if you instead hit lower down on the ledge.

There are different patterns of falling and drifting you could use to get things to work, and the exact bounce point to go for would depend on how you're approaching things, but the specific technique I suggest is as follows. Ease sideways off the edge, then the instant you've started falling, snap your direction more diagonally left and start trying to drift into the bounce area. Hit near the middle then continue to use drift in an effort to reach the plateau slope. The drift joystick doesn't necessarily need to be adjusted after leaving the ledge. It can potentially remain in the same position throughout, until arriving at the plateau. You can see the technique in BCM61 (starting at 3:24), along with a few others to demonstrate some possibilities.

Do a crouch as you hit the base of the plateau, to soften the landing. It's possible to survive with full health, but more usually you'll take significant health damage. Survival is also possible without a crouch, but is far less likely.

Checkpoint advice

To make things as easy as possible for repeat attempts, get a delayed checkpoint when ready to fall from the V. The considerations for this are just the same as I mentioned for the plateau base rock method, namely that you might want to first eliminate the patrolling Elite and any Banshee (but especially the Banshee, as it's otherwise likely to attack and could easily cause health loss).

Difficulty and system differences

This method needs some fairly tricky manoeuvring work to reach the target slope of the plateau base, but once you've got the knack of that, your success rate can be pretty high. From a checkpoint on the edge, I got mine up to 35% with the specific technique I suggested, and on occasion I've managed four or five landings in a row. As such, it seems way more reliable than the related plateau base rock method.

With NTSC or PC the game will probably kill you before you reach the ledge, making the method suitable only for PAL.

History and links

When Sligfantry showed his plateau base rock method, he also linked to an image showing part of the plateau side where by chance he'd once managed to survive a landing. That's the origin of this alternative version of exploiting the plateau. He wasn't sure exactly how it happened, but I experimented and found a recipe for trying to hit the desired area, documenting it here and demonstrating it in BCM61, released on December 19th 2012. So perhaps we can count this method as a team effort.

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