R* had a whole department working on the horses for years. It took lots of work and time to get right. They really wanted them to feel like an animal with its own inertial physics and wanted to portray some of the different ways horses can behave. The different techniques you'd learn when bonding with the horse and the whole confidence system was quite cool.
Exactly. If people run into things on their horse, it's because they are actively steering into them. I never had that issue, as I let the horse dodge on its own.
The issue is that the horse's own dodging doesn't turn off when you're actively steering. That way, you'll try and make one maneuver, but the horse will go a different direction instead, often directly into the thing you were trying to steer around.
A horse will not generally speed head first into their own death. There are many funny videos of RDR2 horses doing just that, so steering into them is also not realistic.
Otherwise, I'd say the horses do behave pretty realistically in the game, and outside of maybe getting into a wonky camera angle, I never really had a problem running into stuff like that.
I agree that it’s almost always avoidable but a couple times I had my horse running full speed with my finger off the stick, and the horse would just run full speed into a rock or a tree, usually a rock that would trip it and send me flying, once sending me right off a cliff
Mu horse tends to jump over things at a weird angle if i happen to be running alongside something. It almost always ends with her landing on the fence she tried to jump and knocking us down.
It looking better in AC makes sense given it's come out 7 years after Red Dead 2 but RDR2 definetely has a lot more depth to it. Rockstar goes hard on the details
I mean, RDR2 kinda has to get horses mostly right, considering the setting.
In the other games, the setting has a different focus, horses may not be immediately conducive to it.
I feel like the difference could be similar to GTA5 and something like Forza Horizon 5 or Burnout Paradise, where the setting focus is on the vehicles and driving.
I legit formed a bond with my horse in RDR2, so much so that I ran cross country for like 10 minutes to buy medicine to revive him after he was shot out from underneath me. There are other horses in that game but that was my horse.
I once got ambushed by the Neo Confederate gang and they killed my horse with a rattling gun. I immediately turned off my PS4 so that it wouldn’t save.
I had mine for most of the game. Then got attacked by wolves and tried to shoot one and accidentally shot him in the head and then I got mauled to death. I was legitimately sad. RIP Mike D.
Basically, like, graphical fidelity is definitely better since ac shadows is brand new, but rdr definitely spent a long time perfecting the art of horse
That horse isn't from RDR2, what I said else where;
I debunked this on Tik Tok as fake.
The RDR2 horse ISN'T from the game, the mane is on the wrong side and the background isn't from the game. It looks like outside blackwater but there is no scenery in the background which is impossible as no matter the angle you always get some sort of scenery.
Also the horse is a low res picture compared to what is seen in RDR2, there is more shading and angles if you look at it in the game.
Yeah, no competition here really. Every other horse I’ve used in a game either stays exactly where you leave it, or if it’s stolen, tries to go home immediately. RDR2 horses act like horses though. Which is great but also sometimes infuriating. Like a real horse.
True, I like slick almost robotic animations in AC:S reminds me of phantom pain. But man RDR realism is unbeatable and the relationship between you and the BOY is peak cinema.
That was more for the people that were wondering why people are saying RDR2 over AC. Its more than just looks and even then it doesn’t look much better by a large margin there’s just more a bit more detail in the face in AC.
The horses are a lot more expressive in Red Dead I can’t say the same AC.
I will go out of my way to say the AC shadows horse is the single worst controlling shit ass horse in any video game, ever. It doesn't follow/catch up to you if you whistle while running, it constantly gets stuck on terrain. It actively wants to run into trees or twigs on the ground and get stuck and just lose all momentum. Etc. it's so insanely bad to use
Part of that I believe is made even worse by the map. It never felt this bad in previous AC games because they generally had wider open areas to traverse. Shadows map by comparison is pretty dense and narrow; makes the terrible horse controls stand out even more
Eh, that part I give a little more to intentional portrayal of how actual horses would work. Turning a horse is not always a simple matter.
But the getting stuck on terrain bit is a problem, sure. I haven’t noticed it too bad yet, but maybe I’m not daring enough with where I try to take the horse.
After RDR2 I was looking for an open world game. Picked up AC Origins. It was going quite well. Then I picked up the horse and immediately deleted the game.
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u/Zxar99 Mar 31 '25
AC’s horse looks better, but RDR2 horses feel and act more like real horses. Giving it to RDR2