Horse

Video Games Vs. Horse

Ahh, horse. Strong, graceful, the picture of elegance. Truly one of nature’s most majestic creatures, and a favorite mainstay of the that one medium I like a whole lot. Welcome to ‘Video Games Vs.’ where I analyze the dumbest stuff in video games I can think of which inexplicably follows a pattern of being almost consistently jank and bizarre. And there is no creature in the interactive medium’s menagerie more jank and bizarre than the horse, and riding animals in general. Let’s get right into it.

Simulating a Living Creature

When adding a feature to your game, you always have to ask yourself what it is you’re spending your resources on and why. What’s the goal of having a horse in your game? Does it enable combat? Is it merely for making the player go faster? Are horses just cool? Or, does it need to be immersive, and make the player feel like they really own a companion animal? The goal of the later comes up a lot in small ways, such that it separates the concept of riding animals from, say, a dune buggy. One is a tool, the other is a living thing. In a lot of games, horses are not meant to be mere vehicles.

With this consideration, it makes a lot of sense that often, in games, the movement of horses is not nearly so smooth or precision as the movement of your main playable character. Many games are concerned with just this sort of behavior. For example, the recent Zelda: Tears of The Kingdom, and it’s predecessor Breath of The Wild features horses that do not map perfectly to the player’s control stick, the way link does. The horse does not go slow on a slight tilt of the control, nor does it gallop at a full tilt. Rather, Link must gently heel the sides of the horse, much like a rider does to a real horse, to encourage it to pick up speed. In Tears of The Kingdom, there are several ‘levels’ of speed which the player accesses through a set of states that the ‘kick’ button rotates to, and holding back on the control stick encourages the horse to slow down.

Besides that, these horses do not start out friendly to Link. They’re wild, and must be tamed. They may back and panic before they are tamed. The method to calm them is to simply press a button, yet still the player must be attentive to, and respond to the horse’s needs. These things do not facilitate the gameplay of movement, combat, or puzzle-solving which otherwise dominates Zelda‘s play space. Their purpose to give the illusion of life to these horses – temperamental, disobedient, and willful life. On the flip side, the illusion of life can also be a boon to movement gameplay. The Zelda horses, if set on their course, can follow paths and avoid obstacles automatically, as though the horse has a will of its own, allowing the player to occupy themselves with other activity. In this way, the horse is not an extension of the player, but rather a partner.

Link from Ocarina of Time rides his horse, Epona, over the grasslands of Hyrule field. A meter represented by six carrots slowly drains as Link encourages Epona to speed up.

Zelda has long toyed with this sort of behavior.

However, as I alluded, these considerations can also be obstacles to gameplay. Particularly in early Zelda games, the horse Epona would often get stuck on strange geometry. She’d whinny and complain, and at times refuse to move if one attempted to guide her over large tree routes, cliffs, or rough terrain. Zelda horses can never be commanded to jump, for another instances. Epona and her descendants will only jump if approaching certain obstacles like fences. With such loose rules, divorced from player controls, they are prone to errors and discrepancies, like Epona getting stuck on a gate, because she did not approach it at quite the precise angle.

These sorts of bizarre terrain interactions are terribly common for video game mounts. Agro from Shadow of The Colossus is a lovable and friendly free-thinking horse. However, his AI is sensitive to shifts in terrain, and sometimes can get a little mixed up. Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is infamous for the ‘Skyrim Horse’. These otherwordly creatures are capable of scaling near-vertical inclines, and if you were around in Skyrim’s heyday you were no doubt subject to one or two horse-terrain interactions that were so bizarre as to totally shatter the fiction and immersion of the game, at least once or twice. It is, admittedly, rather funny.

A knight on a black and white horse stand on a cliffside in the mountains. The horse is standing nearly vertically on a cliff face.

Charming.

When The Horse Is Only Decorative

There is an inverse to this, where horses are not considered as companions in gameplay, or even as vehicles. It is customary in MMORPGS to collect lots of mounts, and usually, the mount is merely a visual flare. It increases your move speed, and nothing else. No new mechanics are imparted, nor does the mount behave in any way like a living thing outside of its animations. Perhaps the mount even allows you to ‘fly’, but generally the ‘flight’ is just a repurposed swimming mechanic, again with the animations switched out. The horse in this instance appears with a button press, and disappears just as easily. In Final Fantasy XIV, presumably to counteract this sense of one’s chocobo riding bird feeling like a prop, among other reasons, you are able to summon it as a companion in combat, aside from its utility in increasing moving speed. World of Warcraft, in its latest expansion as of August 2023 added in new draconic flying mounts whose motion is governed by a more interactive flight and movement system, to better characterized them as living things, and make travel more interesting.

A woman in blue with a white braid whistles, and a giant ostrich-like yellow bird appears suddenly, her now riding it.

I’m faster, and riding it, but I’m not really riding it, you know?

A Peek Behind The Curtain

In MMOs and games like them, mounts usually appear and disappear out of nowhere as needed. However, wherever a mount is introduced, you have to decide how it’s going to be conveyed to the player. The Horse Delivery System, if you will. For Zelda, traditionally Epona is called on some sort of instrument, but what then? The player can potentially leave Epona wherever they want, travel a few miles, and then… what? Do they have to wait for Epona to make their way all the way across the land? Well no, and in fact the game will sometimes not even bother to remember where Epona was. Rather, she will spawn in off-screen, somewhere nearby. The camera will dramatically swing around to give the impression that Epona did travel across the land at the sound of your call, but this is indeed just an illusion – a visual trick.

There is a danger to this, though. In Dragon Age: Inquisition, due to how free the camera is at all times, it is very very trivial to swing your camera around fast, just as your horse appears and see what’s really going on; your horse jarringly winks into existence just where the game thinks it’ll be off-camera. I think many a curious or intuitive player might do this, it may even happen by accident, and it is extremely jarring. It underscores the artificiality of Inquisition‘s horses so much that I never saw them as representations of living creatures again. Besides that, while I’m on the subject, the Inquisition horses are so slow, relatively speaking, so as to not even be worth the enormous amount of screen estate that they demand with their huge bodies. If including a mount in your game, consider the trade offs – especially if implementing life-like features that may hamper control.

A woodland ranger kneels down to pick a lock on a wooden door. Their nearby horse rears up, and slides along the front of the door, in glitchy fashion.

Procedural interaction with terrain is prone to uh… a lot of problems

Zelda: Tears of The Kingdom utilizes stables, which always, magically, are able to summon forth horses registered to the stable system, regardless of where in the world they are left. Otherwise, horses can only be called from a fairly short range, not universally, like the Eponas of old. This is more ‘realistic’ in a way, I suppose, but really just feels like a way to further justify the common use of the stables, and the previous solution was a lot smoother in my opinion. So what other ways are there to get a large quadruped into the play space as the player needs it that isn’t disruptive? Stables are a common solution, such as how chocobo traditionally work in the Final Fantasy games- visit a stable or chocobo farm or chocobo forest, and go off with your mount, which is returned to the stable when left behind. I think the most elegant version of a video game horse, would have a very inventive and elegant way to get the horse into the player’s hands, so to speak.

Gaming’s Most Powerful Horse

So I’ve discussed my love of the strongest apex predator of the mounting animal world before, so I won’t labor the point too much. Torrent from Elden Ring is a very satisfying and reliable game mechanic to use, which allows you to traverse vast distances, engage in mounted combat from the safety of a riding saddle, and engage in combat in entirely new and interesting paradigms as compared to Elden Ring‘s on-foot combat.

A woman with a spear rides a horned steed through shallow waters and over large castle ruins to avoid the breath of a fire-breathing dragon.

Mighty is He.

One interesting thing to note, is that Torrent approaches a lot of the problems I’ve talked about so far by just… not engaging with them at all. For example, many games struggle with how and where the player can call upon their mount. Each game’s individual Horse Delivery System, so to speak. Several games, like Dragon Quest, and certain Zelda games, try to brute force this problem by simply teleporting the horse in on command, trying valiantly to hide the seams of this unnatural action, and mostly failing. Some games, like Zelda: Breath of The Wild and Zelda: Tears of The Kingdom try to smooth over this dissonance by having at least the required use of an in-game stable to summon your horse from anywhere. Torrent does not brute force this particular problem so much as he double-jumps over it. Torrent doesn’t have to appear from anywhere besides just under the player, immediately, whenever they want him, so long as they are outdoors. There’s no need for any transition from off-screen. Our only explanation needed, is that he is a magic horse.

This is reflective of FromSoft’s design philosophy as a whole, which favors gameplay usability over simulation. Which isn’t to say they don’t value immersiveness, but rather that they tend toward verisimilitude over realism. Thus why Torrent has the barest minimum of startup acceleration. The lightest touch of clearance needed for him to turn. Torrent has just the hint of a suggestion of more rigid movement, which creates the convincing illusion of riding a horse, which in this specific case is all that’s needed to sell the fantasy. That leaves a lot of leeway to make Torrent feel really satisfying to use, and create very exciting mounted-combat scenarios with a lot of precision movement. However, there are of course drawbacks – if you’re looking for a game that truly simulates the feel of riding an animal, you’ll not find it here.

A woman with a spear rides a horned steed through shallow water, staring down a fire breathing dragon. Just as it starts to spew flames, the woman and steed hop up a nearby stone, and jump up to run her weapon through the dragon's head, vanquishing it.

And yet, how many video game horses can do THAT!?

Plessie

Okay she’s not a horse, but she is a riding animal – it counts, and the lessons we can take from her implementation will be invaluable to our line of interrogation here. As we’ve been over, video game animals often struggle with the Horse Delivery System. Where and how does the horse appear? What space does the horse take up when not in use? For Torrent it’s ‘he doesn’t’ and ‘none’. Usually, it involves spawning the horse in just off-screen to hide them popping it, with the implication that the horse was totally nearby the whole time and just needed to hear the sound of your voice to come scampering in. Personally, I find this all kind of tedious and momentum-killing. Especially in exciting adventure-time games, which is where you’ll usually see horses, the need to drop everything to navigate a menu or perform some special action feels disruptive to me, which is probably why Torrent is my favorite on this list so far, despite his ‘avoiding the problem’ approach to ‘solving’ this problem. It makes Torrent feel less substantial, and more like a game mechanic than an animal, which is probably why they made him a ‘spirit steed’ in the story.

Mario, in a cat costume, standing on an ice pillar. The camera pans over to the nearby water, and a small, orange plesiosaur emerges from under the waves.

Plessie has no such issues.

Nintendo has proven this problem solvable, as far as I’m concerned. The 2021 re-released of Super Mario 3D World is actually Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury. The latter of which is a bundled open-concept mini-adventure in which Mario explores a vast lake or sea type area to stop the titular Bowser and his Fury from rampaging. The game is separated into a number of islands and shores that require navigating not insignificant portions of water. That’s where Plessie, your erstwhile amphibious companion comes in. Plessie’s movement is good, but pretty standard. She’s not as agile or high-jumping as mario, she can’t turn as hard as him, but she is faster, especially in water. What I find so fascinating about Plessie is how she slots into a Horse Delivery System.

The HDS in Bowser’s Fury has the goal of being as frictionless as possible to Mario’s adventuring. While playing this game, if you notice it, it is almost uncanny. Plessie is consistently, always, just where you need her to be. How does she always know? I suspect there is a number of robust processes happening under the hood, invisibly, to ensure that Plessie is constantly ‘aware’ of Mario and what he’s doing.

Having her be an amphibious aquatic creature is a good hack to start with. She can reposition herself by submerging, and popping up in a new location without the player seeing an discontinuity between the two actions. Secondly, the game is very veeery careful to never allow you to see Plessie pop up out of nowhere. She always emerges from the water, giving the illusion of a plausible physicality to her. Sure, she may literally be teleporting, but it never seems that way – merely that she swims very fast underwater without a mountee. Frequently however, the transition is simply hidden, and Plessie is already in her designated location when the player gets there. There? How does Plessie always know where to be, seemingly in the perfect spot for whenever the player would want to make use of her?

Mario, in a cat costume, checks his map near a shoreline. The map obscures the screen. When the map fades, an orange plesiosaur is waiting at the shoreline to pick up Mario for a ride.

Planning to travel to a new island? Plessie is way ahead of you.

I have a couple of theories on this. Firstly, Nintendo is extremely good at crafting specific player experiences. They will playtest a game into the ground until they know every iteration of every kind of action a player may want to do. Based on the large datasets I’m sure they have, alongside decades of sharpened design instincts, I think they were able to narrow down the likely places players would want to use Plessie. The game will detect when Mario is in proximity to one of these, and have Plessie spawn there, always ready to go. This system is very robust, too! Once, while escaping the very scary Fury Bowser’s fire breath, I jumped Mario over a waterfall – woah! What I didn’t expect was that, in perfect action-movie style, Plessie would appear at the foot of the waterfall, just beneath me, and catch Mario in the nick of time for us to make our daring escape from Bowser. Wild! All without any input from me.

The result of having Plessie out and about on her own in the world, showing up only when needed, gives the impression of an intelligent, loyal animal. Plessie feels so much more like a character with agency because she is making ‘decisions’ alongside you, ‘deciding’ where and when to pop up, as though she is protective of Mario. I think the game may even take Mario’s currently situation into account. Plessie could theoretically emerge anywhere from the water, but during some challenges will not, soas to not be disruptive to the flow of gameplay. I would not be surprised if things like active nearby collectibles, whether Fury Bowser is active, what direction Mario is running, are all tracked and fed into Plessie’s spawn system to determine the most ideal time and place to appear. The result is that you don’t have to think about Plessie until she’s needed, but she still feels like a real animal and not just a game mechanic.

A cat-shaped medallion appears atop a waterfall lined with large block-platforms. Mario, in a cat costume, scampers up the blocks. Suddenly, an orange plesiosaur is at the top of the waterfall waiting, as Mario arrives.

HOW DOES SHE ALWAYS KNOW!?

I don’t think my ideal land horse has yet appeared in a game. Torrent is my favorite video game horse to play with – his mechanics and movement are the most refined, in my opinion. Plessie is also pretty close, and she can run on land. She will not frequently, however, traverse land without Mario. I do think some of the methods employed to make Plessie feel so loyal and convenient could work on a regular old horse. Given the challenges of placing a horse on land-based geometry though, it would requires some finagling, and perhaps some compromises. A combination of methods could be used. Some horses like Agro from Shadow of The Colossus spawn in from off-screen and appear when called, which is less seamless. I think a combination of the approaches could make something that feel extremely smooth to play, but also reinforces the fantasy of having a living animal companion. If a horse were to appear automatically as the situation demands though, it would require a lot of considerations to avoid having its appearance be disruptive or inappropriate to the flow of gameplay, without Plessie’s advantage of being aquatic.

A creature of contradictions, the video game horse is. An animal companion, but also a gameplay vehicle. Made for ease of traversal over vast distances, but also temperamental, and prone to disruptive interactions with the environment. Often controlled by artificial intelligence, but rarely intelligent. I think my ideal land horse is possible in games. A creature as loyal seamless, and frictionless as plessie, but as strong and fun to use as Torrent, yet also with its own personality and sense of presence like Agro. I’m of the opinion that getting to greater heights such as this, in any area of design, requires learning not just from the best, but also from valiant attempts that didn’t quite succeed – It’s a bit of an ongoing struggle in that sense, a conflict, or a versus, if you will. One day, if we should all be so lucky, we will master the concept of Horse. See you next time.

Link from Zelda: Breath of The Wild plummets to his death, comically tumbling over the side of a cliff with a horse.

How did you tame that wild horse right under my nose?!

Torrent of Elden Ring: Gaming’s Most Powerful Horse

My god, so that Elden Ring huh? Certainly has given me a lot to chew on. There are any number of topics I want to write about on that game eventually, from the new approach to boss design, to the integration of more summoned NPCs, the nuances of the tweaked melee combat, the expanded magic toolset, to how the open world has changed the way enemy encounters are designed. So I had to narrow it down, and I want to talk about one of the game’s most prominent new features and a major marketing point of the game – the presence of a horse and mounted combat.

I’ve wanted to, for a while now, do a write up on game design’s strange and somewhat hilarious history with mounted riding animals in a broader sense, but Elden Ring‘s local speedy boy Torrent has given me cause to talk about the ways Fromsoft has distinguished mounted combat and movement specifically. There are a lot of really cool design choices I’ve noticed that went into making Torrent a beast on the battlefield, with combat that feels as good as any of Fromsoft’s previous unmounted offerings. Here are just a few.

Don’t Forget, We’re Playing a Video Game

When I say ‘we’re playing a video game’ I don’t mean to say that player immersion and realism needs to go out the window. Kind of the opposite, actually. I feel like the tendency in some games is to put a lot of physics and terrain based restrictions on how player characters move. Maybe in the name of realism, maybe in the name of feeling cinematic, but often this approach leads to characters that control like tanks, ultimately creating more friction between the player and the experience, not less. My preference is to make the character controlling process as smooth as possible.

Torrent is a horse, and the design makes considerations to make his control feel more like a horse. He doesn’t stop on a dime. He’s got some acceleration and deceleration to him. He can’t turn on a dime, he needs space to swivel his rear around when you about face. Thing is, he doesn’t need that much space, and he doesn’t take that long to reach full speed or come to a stop. Torrent has movement limitations, but only barely enough to convince you he’s moving a like a horse. Fromsoft put the utmost priority into making sure he just moves smoothly, minimizing friction. Even given the very minor limitations placed on mounted movement to give the impression of riding a horse, enough to reinforce verisimilitude, these are somewhat circumvented by the presence of a double jump!

A warrior astride a horned horse leaps over brush and rocks as they ride across a field. To jump over a tree, the horse gains additional height with a spectral magic circle in midair. — Imagine animals actually being able to navigate their environment. Incredible.

Yes, the horse can double-jump, completely redirecting his momentum in midair, enhancing the length and height of his jump in the process. Torrent doesn’t turn as hard as the player can on foot, but he can totally reorient himself by jumping. This mechanic is in place for several very important reasons. First, Torrent is an exploration tool and Elden Ring is filled with very precarious drops and complex terrain geometry. Something a lot of other games featuring horses have stumbled on is how damn incompatible the mounts are with their own game world. Lots of video game horses can move fast, but can’t go anywhere. A glut of limitations on mounted movement can make it too specialized and niche, not versatile enough to be used often.

Torrent doesn’t feel like a second entity your player is fighting to control, but rather an extension of themselves. In that way Torrent is treated more like a vehicle. It’s a compromise, in that this perhaps distances the design from the realism of riding a horse, but for the design goals they were trying to meet, it makes a lot of sense. Those design goals being, that riding Torrent needs to serve as a distinct combat style that feels as seamless and satisfying as grounded combat, an extension of Elden Ring‘s primary gameplay mode.

A Horse Is Much Faster Than You

This is a weird one to see not fulfilled so many times. Part of what makes Torrent so successful as a mount is that he is just a lot more maneuverable than you, the human player. He’s a horse; he can move at like double your top speed. I’ve played an astounding number of games with mounts that don’t feel all that much faster than just walking. The double jump plays into this too. Torrent has horns as well, kind of giving him the impression of a mountain goat, which communicates his exquisite climbing ability. Mountains, cliffs, and ravines are common obstacles in Elden Ring‘s world of the Lands Between. Distinguishing Torrent with his much more robust set of movements for dealing with such obstacles proves his worth to the player, and was very important in cementing his place in the game.

Torrent Isn’t Made of Paper

For a number of reasons, video game horses are often not equipped for combat. Perhaps the game simply does not have a design for mounted combat. Perhaps the design does not account for a constant companion that would throw off the game’s design. Maybe they just thought it’d be awkward if you constantly had a horse following you, biting and kicking goblins. Whatever the reason, horses in games often wind up very weak. Ride them off a two-foot-high outcropping and they crumple like they’re made of paper mache. Get jumped by a dragon, and you’re never seeing that horse again.

First of all, Torrent can fall very very far without issue. He needs to navigate complex environments with a lot of versatility and if he was constantly dying from underneath the player, it just would not be workable. Torrent has knees of steel, and can bound off of cliffs with ease.

A warrior astride a horned horse jump off of a cliff from grassland into a shallow lake. The horse lands gracefully and harmlessly. — Oh no no NO NOT OFF THE CLIFF oh- oh never mind, we’re fine.

What’s more, Torrent is meant to be used in combat, and thus can take a hit or two. In fact, he’s quite a bit more sturdy than even the player. Riding Torrent is a very safe place to be, gameplay wise. He can even take hits for you, depending on the angle of attack. To counteract this big advantage, riding Torrent is given a specific risk. You can take a lot of hits, but if you are knocked off of Torrent, either by losing your balance, or if Torrent dies, you are sprawled onto the ground and left very vulnerable. Re-summoning Torrent will require taking a moment and possibly sacrificing some healing resources.

A warrior astride a horned horse pass in front of a gray dragon, which angrily bites at the duo, drawing blood. The horse stumbles, but quickly composes itself and rides on, warrior still in tow. — Good God this horse is built different.

We’re Just Not Bothering With The Idle Problem

This one is funny to me, but I respect it. If you’ve played a video game with a horse you’ve seen it. The world’s jankiest implementation of entity spawning known to man. I’ve legitimately played a AAA game where I’ve seen a horse pop into existence upon use of the ‘horse summon’ button. The problem is, what do you do with mounted animals when they’re idling, not being ridden? Do they just run off somewhere? What’s the visual of that? How is the horse summoned and where does it come from? Does the horse exist in real-time, meaning it stays where you leave it until you come to pick it up? Torrent kind of just… double-jumps over this problem entirely. When summoned, he appears underneath your player in an instant, and disappears just as instantly when dismissed. Sometimes, the realism of a thing isn’t worth the headache. Torrent works better if his presence is never in question, so it just isn’t.

The side-benefit of this is that Elden Ring can switch between its two combat modes, mounted and on-foot on the fly and seamlessly. Torrent is always available outdoors if you need him. You can even ride Torrent into battle and jump off for a cool dismounting attack.

In a shallow lake dotted with dead trees, a lone warrior whistles on her fingers, summoning a horse that phases out of spectral energy beneath her as she mounts up, and rides toward a large gray dragon in the distance. — Man, I love not even having to think about what stupid stuff Torrent’s Horse AI would get up to.

As Above So Below

This is a straightforward idea, but one that implies a lot of extra work in creating game assets. While mounted, the player is allowed to use basically any attack they can use while unmounted. Making the mounted combat feel seamless and parallel to unmounted combat was very important for Elden Ring, so a lot of extra animation and frame data was created to ensure the player’s preferred weapon and spells were available to them while mounted on Torrent as well.

Combat As a Spatial Problem

As I’ve said before, action combat is mostly all about relative spatial relationships between player and hazard. Where a player is standing when an enemy attacks determines if damage is dealt, etc. A friend of mine pointed out that video games are and have always been, very very good at mapping spatial problems, and with this in mind, real-time combat can often be boiled down to very elaborate spatial problem. Elden Ring‘s mounted combat leans hard into this concept. Normally, combat in Elden Ring and other action RPGs from Fromsoft centers majorly around the dodge roll mechanic, in which well timed button pressed can impart a moment of invincibility that can be used to circumvent damage regardless of positioning, although positioning remains important due to the invincibility window’s briefness.

Torrent does not have a dodge with invincibility frames, this seems to have been the main thrust of distinguishing mounted combat in Eldren Ring from its on-foot counterpart. There are other key differences, of course, but they all seem to revolve around this one major change. Having no iframes on Torrent changes the way one approaches combat immensely. ‘Rolling into’ attacks, so to speak, such that when a dodge roll ends, the enemy’s attack has already moved past the player’s position, is a fundamental strategy normally. But now, keeping your distance is a player’s best method for not getting hit. Since Torrent can’t dodge in the way the player can unmounted, dodging attacks becomes entirely a matter of positioning. In place of a dodge, Torrent has a dash which gives him a quick burst of speed, useful for getting player-seeking projectiles off your tail or outmaneuvering other mounted combatants. So you’re encouraged to always disengage after riding up to an enemy to hit them.

Dead serious, fighting this dragon is an all time great achievement of experiential design

The result of this simple change is that combat much more resembles a series of ride-bys where the player rides up to their foe, hits them quickly, then circles behind or gets out of their reach in some way. There’s a lot of two horses riding past each other in a sort of joust… kind of like how mounted combat actually works, or at least how one might imagine it works! There’s that verisimilitude again! Dang. By removing this seemingly essential tool, Fromsoft has reinforced a method of gameplay that resembles what they are trying to simulate, brilliant! When you can’t dodge with invincibility, you have to outmaneuver danger, and that means riding around and past enemies like you’re an actual mounted cavalry, you can’t just stand squared up to your foe and hit them without expecting to get hit back, and thus you are encourage to be constantly on the move, kind of like you’re on a riding animal. Dang. It just keeps fitting together, doesn’t it?

A warrior astride a horned horse gallop in the foreground as brush and trees rush by, a dragon in the background flies across the sky raining down fire narrowly outpaced by the mounted warrior and his companion. — No amount of rigid unresponsive tank controls would have made this moment feel more cinematic

So this is all well and good, but Elden Ring is an extremely three-dimensional game with a lot of danger happening, left, right, center, up, and down all the time. Torrent needed another tool to avoid damage. Dang, he already has one we’ve talked about, doesn’t he? The damn horse can double-jump. Torrent’s extreme level of vertical maneuverability makes awareness of enemy attacks even more essential, and some can be completely circumvented with well placed and timed jumps. Very little in this, or any video game feels as instantly exhilarating as jumping over a dragon’s flaming gullet, the camera pulled way out to capture the action. Forget harshly limited controls that make characters feel more ‘realistic’ or ‘cinematic’. No, good gameplay can do that just as well.

A warrior astride a horned horse runs up on a large gray dragon in a shallow lake as it begins to breath fire, the horse runs up a large rock and bounds into the air, over the dragon's head. The warrior skewers it with a spear, cutting off the fire breathe and felling the beast. The two ride out, then come to a stop as the words "GREAT ENEMY FELLED" appear. — WOW! Someone get this horse an apple and some sugar cubes.

So yeah. Elden Ring impresses on a number of fronts, but it’s easily got the best mounted combat I’ve ever played. Not that I’ve played a huge number of mounted combat games, but riding Torrent is just as engaging as fighting enemies on foot, which is kind of impressive. The riding in and out to swipe enemies in the side as I pass, jumping over dragons, and covering great distances as I bound over cliffs, it’s all very exciting. Rarely have I had just a smooth experience with mounted animals in games. Fighting that dragon? Almost indescribable how elated I was, to fight a dragon that felt like it had an appropriate sense of danger, scale, and gravitas. Couldn’t have done it without you Torrent, here’s to many more adventures in the Lands Between.

Torrent has chosen you. Treat him with respect…