![]() ![]() Eager to help.īut perhaps the real special sauce is that Torrent is also going to be a tremendous aid in combat. That alone is going to make traversal fun as you gallop around the Lands Between trying to reach the top of its enormous ruins or looking for a way to scale a seemingly insurmountable mountain face, you know Torrent is always there. The developers have probably tucked away rare items, only reachable by horse, or even smuggled in a way to sequence-skip using Torrent. It is simply made to allow you to reach places that would otherwise be impossible. Elden Ring may not be going for Breath of the Wild-levels of being able to go absolutely anywhere, but that double jump is a statement of intent. It speeds over the terrain deftly, without pause, whilst other videogame horses would fail at the first hurdle. This is a steed who laughs (neighs?) in the face of obstacles. No nonsense with whether a fence can be galloped over or not, but instead you can leap and bound with the same dedicated jump button that your character has.Īnd what’s better than a horse that can jump? A horse that can double-jump. Sure, it looks cool using air currents to make Torrent leap up cliffs, but the real special thing is he can jump at all. The spectral steed doesn’t have to stay grounded like real horses, and I mean that literally. Movement feels responsive because Torrent is just being controlled by the player – you don't have to wrestle with the reins or anything more finicky or advanced. ![]() To that end, there’s a lot of licence the game takes with what you can do. Not waiting around to find him stuck in the scenery, he just appears instantly and you can hop off just as quickly, no messing around. Mate, he’s a frigging ghost horse with horns who immediately materialises out of thin air with you on his saddle at the blow of a whistle. The reason why Torrent is such a good horse is that he’s not, at all, a simulation of a real horse. After all, movement in FromSoft games have a typically, and deliberately, clunky feeling – so wouldn’t this also be the case for mounts triple-fold? You needn’t worry though, as it appears that the devs have studied riding in other open world games and just gone, “nah, screw it, let’s have some actual fun with this.” Of course, there’s reason to be wary about how horse-riding would work. This is the first time you can ride a mount in one of their games, which does make sense for getting around conveniently in Elden Ring’s massive open world, moreso than it would in the tighter, more labyrinthine maps of Dark Souls. So what makes me so excited about horse riding in Elden Ring after sinking hours into the Closed Network Test last November? While that beta only allowed me to run wild in a small fraction of its open world in Limgrave, the player’s steed – known as Torrent – wasn’t just a huge highlight, but it’s clearly going to be an important part of the core gameplay.įromSoftware have, of course, included horses in their past games like in Bloodborne and Sekiro – but only as part of enemy design. In the end, the most pleasant virtual riding experiences boils down to those bits in Uncharted 3 and The Last of Us (being Naughty Dog games, you’re just pushing up anyway) or the mounts you can unlock in Final Fantasy 14, which is more an extension of yourself and barely faster than sprinting. It’s probably going to be sacrilege to have a go at the horse in Shadow of the Colossus given that finale, but even with all the supposed realism put into its behaviour, there’s probably a reason why Fumito Ueda named your steed Agro. Remember all of Rockstar’s talk about realistic horse testicles in Red Dead Redemption 2? I didn’t really spend much of my time examining that detail myself, instead I remember trying to use its cinematic camera intended to make you feel like you were in a sweeping epic Western only for it to turn into a slapstick as your inability to control your mount had you crashing or pratfalling face-first into the dirt. Unless you were willing to let the system auto-pilot you on an established – but long and winding route – you were better off just hoofing it or using fast travel, the latter usually a telltale sign that your open world has failed. It may have more to do with its environments, but my memories of traversing Velen and Novigrad mostly involved Roach getting caught in trees or coming at a standstill over a rocky incline. I have my fair share of issues with CD Projekt Red’s overrated RPG (don’t get me started on the combat) but riding around in that game was a pain. ![]()
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