During playback Assassin’s Creed 3 recently I first entered the Frontier as Connor and decided to “borrow” a horse from a nearby farm. Suddenly the world seemed to spread out and open up before me, and I was struck by the innate desire to get off the beaten track and see what was beyond.
Up until that point, I’d jumped from one main mission to another, wanting to see the story as quickly as possible, but that all changed once I started driving. I took my time, slowed things down and set out to see what I could discover. I hunted, met new NPCs and completed side missions that I would have skipped otherwise. I eventually wandered back to the main trail and finished the story, but was happy with the distraction; it made my experience of revisiting that game all the richer.
Open worlds are big. And they just keep getting bigger. As developers try to stuff them with things to do to inflate playtime and keep players coming back for more, these worlds can feel a bit overwhelming. So without anything to lure them into these distractions, many players will choose to ignore them in favor of the main story. This is where horses come into play.
Remove a player’s ability to travel fast and they’ll be forced to make their own way around the world and, hopefully, deal with whatever they encounter along the way. But if the distance between targets is too great, most players will stick to the beaten track and do everything they can to minimize that journey. Give the player a horse, however, and suddenly that daunting expanse between them and their next target is no longer so daunting. Suddenly the whole world opens up.
Riding on horseback allows a player to move freely and quickly through a digital landscape, gallop across mighty plains, and jump over rocks and crevices, to reach their destination ten times faster than walking or running. This also means that anything that catches the player’s attention – that crumbling tower on the hill, that dimly lit cabin in the woods – becomes a detour that they can reach and check out in seconds rather than something to ignore for now and try to find it later.
Horses bring a sense of speed and freedom to the player, giving the idea that they can really go everywhere.
The Spirit of Adventure and Animation
Despite their prevalence in video games through the generations, horses are tricky to get right. But why do so many games get it wrong? Simply put, horses are foreign. They are complex creatures with peculiar joints and muscles.
Horses are a huge weight supported by four shockingly slender legs. These legs have surprisingly little muscle for a creature That heavy, and he can walk That fast. The upper legs contain all the muscles, while the lower half of the leg is supported and moved by a series of incredibly tense and strong tendons. These act like rubber bands, stretching and stretching back in different ways for each of a horse’s different gaits.
This makes horses difficult to animate correctly – much more so than other four-legged animals, which can be quite tricky to animate realistically. Horse’s legs have many joints that must bend down and spring up perfectly to allow the leg to advance with every step and not just collapse under its own weight (Elden RingFor example, ‘s Torrent would collapse in a broken heap if his legs bent like that in real life). This gives horses an almost jovial spring in their steps, but it’s a springiness that many animators choose to leave out.
Why? Because it’s a lot of work to get it right. Humans and other bipeds only need a few moving joints on each leg of a character model to move semi-realistically, while horses take about four per leg. This results in a lot of finicky programming and animation time that for the most part will go largely unnoticed by all but the most horse-obsessed players. And if the majority of players start looking at and interacting with the enemies and the world around them rather than focusing on the horse below them, will all that extra time spent on animation be worth it?
For most games, the answer is no. And that’s okay. Most developers don’t want to create an ultra-realistic sim, they know which part of their game players will focus on the most and that’s where they spend most of their time and resources. In most games, horses are simply glorified vehicles for getting from A to B.
Those games that take the time to get it right like Breath of the Wild and Red Dead Redemption-can create horses that are breathtaking to watch in motion and really capture that wild spirit.
Horses as more than just a hairy vehicle
In games like Assassin’s Creed ValhallaDriving through the woods and moors of England, building up speed and watching the Roman ruins speed by can be an exhilarating experience. But once you reach your destination and dismount, Eivor’s horse ceases to exist. Yes, the model will stay in the game (for a while) but now it’s at best just another NPC and at worst just another obstacle or piece of landscape to be avoided. The next time Eivor whistles for a ride, a completely different model will heed their call.
But what happens if a horse is not treated as another object or NPC, but as a character? Then you get games like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Games in which horses are not only living, breathing characters in these digital worlds, but also your friends.
The ability to name and care for a horse radically changes the way a player interacts with him. In the Assassin’s Creed series, if the player’s mount is killed in a frantic chase, it hardly matters as the player can just jump around the rooftops until they find another horse and continue the chase as if nothing happened. If the same happened in Red Dead Redemption 2the player would be devastated.
The power of names
It’s amazing how much difference a name can make. The Witcher 3‘s Roach may be a buggy and difficult-to-manage mess, constantly getting stuck in the landscape at the least suitable moments, but when the credits roll and players walk away from Geralt’s story for the last time, they’ll remember her fondly. . In fact, the bugs and glitches that plagued Roach at launch became part of her personality, one that developers CD Project Red really took to heart.
Agro, Wander’s horse in Shadow of the Colossus, on the other hand, behaves and controls wonderfully. What sets him apart is the fact that he is the player’s only companion in an empty and desolate world. Sometimes he is the only other living creature for miles. As the player progresses and takes down the ancient Colossi one by one, they begin to rely on Agro. Without him, who would they cross the vast plains and sun-drenched deserts, or build up enough speed to launch Wander to the side of the enraged Colossus? And they begin to bond. A band that only helps twist the blade when the bridge collapses and Agro falls to his apparent death, adding real emotion to the scene when he returns.
Binding time
But it’s choosing a horse’s name for yourself that cements that bond more than anything else. Likewise, the fact that you have to break a wild horse before you can claim it as your own serves to further strengthen that bond.
Red Dead Redemption 2 and Breath of the Wild do this spectacularly. In both, the player can find wild horses roaming the vast open worlds and, if they are fast, quiet or agile enough, they can jump on the back of a stallion and try to break them. The better the horse, the harder the minigame to break into, but the more the player feels that he has earned the right to call this horse his own.
After successfully breaking into a wild horse, players of both games can return them to a nearby stable to name them, purchase a saddle, and properly claim that steed as their own. For both games you have to deepen that first bond by searching and driving together, but red death goes one step further with the possibility (or rather: necessity) to care for your horse. Taking the time to really care for this virtual animal: brush the dirt from its fur and remove the saddle after returning to camp after a long day of riding, petting its flanks and praising it when it goes well, feeding it and keeping it happy – not only increases the bonding meter in the game, but also the attachment level of the player in real life.
Horses inside Red Dead Redemption are not left alone when the objective destination is reached, they are lovingly tied to a pulling pole, brushed and patted before the player leaves to start the next mission. And when the problems start, there’s no one else they’d rather have by their side to get them out.
But as exciting as it can be to head into battle on a horse you’ve tamed yourself, hit the mark in a breathtaking backdrop, it can also really raise the stakes. A stray bullet can hit you, yes, but that’s okay, you can just restart at the checkpoint, but you can also hit your horse. When tragedy strikes a horse you’ve trained and named, it suddenly becomes much more than a network of polygons and pixels. In this way, the death of a horse can have just as big or even greater impact than the death of a main character (I will never forget you, Athena, RIP your beautiful horse).
So, the next time you’re riding a horse in a video game, take a moment to thank the developers for all the effort and hard work they’ve put into getting it to this point. Stop thinking of your horse as a means of transportation and start thinking of it as your companion on the long and winding road. And let the spirit of adventure take you to places you didn’t even know existed.
0 Comments