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.
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u/ElegantEchoes Mar 31 '25
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.