Eight compelling reasons to make better video game horses

There are two reasons why I post about this list titled “8 Common Horse Mistakes I Want Game Developers To Stop Making”. Number one is a good list. Number two it comes from a video game horse-themed website called The quest for the mane.

But really, it’s a good list! Most people in the 21st century don’t have anything to do with horses and wouldn’t know anything about them, so when we see and use one in a video game, we usually think “yes, it’s a horse, it’s like a car but sometimes I can feed it ”. It turns out that this is also how a lot of video game developers (aside from the author, since they are actually developers themselves) check them out too, because games still make a lot of mistakes when it comes to portraying our biggest four-legged friends.

People who know horses, however, can see past that and realize, damn it, these video game horses have some issues! Like the legs that bend (or don’t bend) when they’re supposed to, or the horse’s mouth that stays open for no reason, because unlike people, horses can’t breathe through them and therefore usually keep them. closed.

Another problem: It turns out that horses are more like cats when it comes to brushing and petting them than, well, what we think of horses, and therefore basing things like statistics on. confidence on this is a bit of a failure. And perhaps the most important:

… the only thing as frustrating as a poorly animated horse is a well animated horse that I can’t fucking watch. Let me rotate my camera please.

You can read the full list here, which, if you’re not a horse lover, you probably should. We’re all so committed to making sure people are recreated perfectly in our video games that it can’t hurt to read up on ways to make sure horses are recreated perfectly as well. Or if it’s not perfectly, then at least better.