And what they could do about it.
Alice Ruppert has been speaking out about how horses are represented in games ever sinceAssassin’s Creed 3.
The game didn’t even keep your horse choice through loading screens.
She’s been speaking out about horses in games ever since.
So how bad are horses in games today?
Read on, dear reader.
“I know he’s half goat.
I know he can double jump.
That’s fine with me.
I’m not going to point the realism finger at that.
This applies to goats too, by the way, so that excuse doesn’t even apply.
“It just looks very wobbly,” she goes on.
“He walks like a spider over uneven ground.
And it doesn’t give you a very horsey feeling and not a very goat feeling either.”
It’s something that a lot of games don’t let you do, feed the horses.
“The feeding animations are so cute,” she says.
It’s one such detail that I think is super, super cute.”
“There’s definitely some stuff that I like,” she tells me.
I like that."
And again, she doesn’t particularly care about how Roach was infamously buggy.
“Bugs happen,” she says.
So I don’t care that Roach does push ups - sometimes that’s fine."
But she does think The Witcher 3 missed a trick.
And with that, she laughs.
You definitely need to play it.'
“It moves so weird.
The animation is so strange.
“And I know it’s hard.
“That’s why they keep saying, like, ‘this is a really good horse’.
I realise I’m nitpicking.
But yeah, a lot of people don’t see what’s anatomically wrong with so many digital horses.
“This happens in animation too, by the way.
I’ve taken screenshots of animated series where joints bend the wrong way and all that stuff.
People, on the whole, do not know how horses work.”
“And that just always ends up giving me too little control.
And I think more games could benefit from that.”
They ask if they can pet it.
Why isn’t it the same with horses?
“Even something like the popularity of things like ‘can you pet the dog?’
Give me interactions with the horses, even if they’re simple.
“There’s a lot of opportunity,” she adds.
“It starts with the soundscape as well,” she adds.
“Horses don’t constantly neigh.
There are people who can help
Alice Ruppert is one of them.
She’s a horses-in-games consultant as well as a creative producer at Aesir Interactive.
She’s open to enquiries throughthe email address on her website.
