A horse person’s highly detailed review of the horse of Elden Ring

Last year, I had the absolute pleasure to discover The Mane Search, a website devoted almost entirely to horses in video games. with elden ring Now out there and with horseback riding prominent, I wanted to check it out See if they gave some thought to the game’s mount. I was not disappointed.

The site-Run by game designer and horse lover Alice Ruppert– takes a light-hearted, if deeply practical, approach to the subject, and that elden ring review is no different. Instead of reviewing the game itself, it simply takes a look at Torrent – and some of the game’s other mounted creatures – and examines how “realistic” their animation and controls are.

In games like Red Dead Redemption 2

, their reporting obviously leans towards the really realistic side of things as these are real horses we are playing with and they can be directly compared. in the elden ringalthough they really aren’t horsesand so the rating is a little different.

Given the game’s magical underpinnings, most of it is fine:

Torrent’s neck is covered in enough shaggy fur to make one Jorvik Wild jealous, his long forelock and wide set ears give him that Highland Cattle look, fresh out of bed, and there’s a bunch of spots on his bum which are adorable although sadly mostly hidden by the bridle and luggage.

Mane Quests At some point, problems arise somewhere that I have never noticed before, but which I can no longer solve.see: torrent looks like a horse, but their legs bend like… well, like they shouldn’t, kinda like a goat, but not really either:

Now let’s get to the part I disagree with: Torrent’s joints. Unfortunately, our goat horse suffers from the two very common problems of excessively bent front legs and completely stiff pasterns. I feel like a record broken at this point because I’ve pointed this out in so many games, but a horse’s pastern joints should drop when carrying weight. Animating an additional joint is of course more work, but I’m still disappointed again and again that even a game accounts for the scope and resources there elden ring

doesn’t think this is necessary for his main character’s mount.

We can try to explain this by pretending that Torrent is more goat than horse, or at least a mixture of the two: if you look at goat gait footage, her lower legs actually stay pretty straight. Since Torrent’s legs look way more horse-like than uuh… goat

, I’m not really happy with this excuse. Especially there are In fact, other non-goat horses in this game are enemy mounts and they tend to have the same problem.

While aesthetically unnerving, it has at least one point: goat legs might look weird, but they do work.

…playing the game longer has made me realize that the choice is at least partially understandable from a gameplay perspective – in a game like elden ringwhere precision and timing are key against any opponent, your mount’s erratic movement can be enough to prevent you from using it in combat.

Meaning: I receive why smooth movement was prioritized over equine realism.

I imagine that too at some point Elden Rings design process someone said “MMaybe the player needs a horse,” and someone else said “Not shitty enough, it must be a horse with goat legs,‘ and everyone nodded.

You can and should read Mane Quests full torrent review here.