I hate horse riding with passion

[ZingFreelancer]

I hate horse riding with passion

Horse riding in Witcher 3 is like pouring salt into the wounds after you wrestled for a while with Geralts poor manoeuvring abilities. I try riding Roach through a forest or a swamp and bloody horse would stop every 5 meters or steer into complete opposite direction of where I want it to go.

So frustrating.

 

[mannygt]

Melitele bless horses! Since I can only fast travel when you're at signpost, I use Roach to run to the nearest one.

 

[Millian]

Horses don't generally like holes in the ground or direct obstacles.
And Geralt maneuvers quite well, at least with a controller.

 

[White_Wolf77]

It's a little annoying when Roach suddenly sways to either left or right but not annoying enough that I'm frustrated about it. I even enjoy riding on Roach so much so that I refuse to use fast travel unless going to another region

 

[schallmau3r]

Compared to red dead redemption the riding is the worst thing to do in W3. The horse stops at almost every obstacle even when it's a 5 inch high fence, even i mash the jump button. It could use some tweaking honestly. I usually just run instead of using the horse.

 

[Dubya75]

Geralt manoeuvres just fine, be it a little sluggish at times. Roach....apart from steering a little bit like a war tank, I find it quite enjoyable to ride around on.

There is definitely room for improvement.

 

[Wroarg]

I agree. I'm loving the game and this is being one of the mistakes I'm hating the most, even over stuttering or frame rate drops, which don't really bother me much. I hate when I'm on the road and there's two options: Keep going straight or turn right/left. Straight seems like the obvious choice so I inmediatly suppose Geralt will continue on that way unless I steer otherwise, yet A LOT of times he does the awkward turn left/right on his own.

And on races, maybe you get to a bridge and the horse stops running. I lost a few races because of that bullshit.

 

[jj284b]

you know you can jump over those obstacles,right? i like riding.. but i would not ride Roach in swamp or other horse "unfriendly terrain...

 

[Mohasz]

Thank Melitele...:
1. ...that I've only played games that had worse horse riding.
2. ...that I'm playing with mouse and keyboard and the controls feel fine.

 

[Ravici]

The trick with riding is to ignore the path-finding stuff. Although it seems that 'some' riding can be done by just pressing the go button, you need to keep control with the direction also or the horse will randomly stop/go off on a different direction.

Manually giving a forward direction stops (in most cases) that from happening, but it makes the auto path-finding non-functioning.

 

[PrinceParadox.372]

It's not so bad. I've sure gotten' used to Roach running away from me when I call for em' jeje

 

[bobbie424242]

I hate horse riding too. Thus my Geralt is 100% on foot. I never ever summon Roach, the magic teleporting horse.
Poor Roach is a disgrace to all living horses.

 

[Marilith01]

I played only 3 games whit usable horses. One was Skyrim - awful, forget it.
One was the very old game Two Worlds (1, not 2). This was the first ridable horse, it felt realistic and you could fight from the horse. Very nice.

And the best game regarding horses is Witcher 3. Horse feels realistic. Some say it navigates bad. A horse is quite big and heavy. You cannot turn it i a moment. Also its a crime to make a horse canter over rough terrain, rocks an so on - the horse will break something, and then you have no horse. No real rider will do that. So the game is not overly realistic anyway.

Only thing I would like to do: Make the horse walk backward. This is standard in riding for a good rider to be able to make the horse walk back a few steps.
There are lots of places where e real horse would not go, or become stuck. So it is optimized anyway.

I play it with mouse an keyboard. In the beginning I tried to steer with the keyboard, but this is awful, while possible. Now I just hold 'W' to make it walk, press SHIFT to make it canter and double tap SHIFT for gallop. Steering is simple with mouse, you can steer very exact and smooth.

 

[Amioran]

I instead actually enjoy horse riding. The only thing that bothers me a little are small obstacles that completely stop Roach even when at full speed (when imo he should be able to jump over them automatically, especially if galloping; horses aren't stupid, they avoid and jump over obstacles by themselves. they don't need constant input from a jockey to do it), but apart this I like strolling around. Maybe with a controller is different but with K+M Roach is easy to control and enjoy.

Of the games I played that have horse riding as a mechanic W3 is one of the better at it. Skyrim completely sucks, in Inquisition the horse is practically useless and after trying it once I saw no point whatsoever on it being there, Mount and Blade is not badly done but the context is too different to make a proper comparison, Red Dead Redemption is very good and the only one of these that's better than W3.

So, all in all, I find W3 horse riding well done. Red Dead Redemption is better but given the context of that game horse riding is a primary factor, much more so than in W3, so it is obvious that the devs dedicated a lot of focus on having the mechanic work as good as possible. Apart some little awkwardness here and there (that I'm sure CDPR will adjust by and by) W3 is not so much inferior to RDR as far as horse riding goes; the feeling is there so it's only a matter of making some slight changes.

 

[Sethanor]

roach should auto-jump imo ... thats what annoying me about the horse

 

[Tuco]

I'd get the complaint if horse riding was some particularly relevant part of the game, but it isn't, so meh.
It's serviceable enough, it always gets me where I want, which is all I ask.

Oh, and I'm also just smart enough to grasp that maybe when I'm mounting the horse it's better to stick to roads and plain terrain instead of trying extreme trekking on mountains, swamps and dense bushes.

roach should auto-jump imo ... thats what annoying me about the horse

Not sure about the "auto"-part, but yes, jumping for how it works right now is quite terrible.

 

[Siven80]

I think the manoeuvring is because of the seemingly large turning circle and slow animations they used. Both on and off horse.

Also its a terrain thing too, some places you just cant go.

 

[Garrison72]

Horse riding in Witcher 3 is like pouring salt into the wounds after you wrestled for a while with Geralts poor manoeuvring abilities. I try riding Roach through a forest or a swamp and bloody horse would stop every 5 meters or steer into complete opposite direction of where I want it to go.

So frustrating.

Try not running directly into objects in your path.

 

[Sethanor]

Try not running directly into objects in your path.

sadly, thats not the problem most of the time... its the random stops and turns for no appearent reason on a straight road that always give me a "wtf" look

 

[Amioran]

I think the manoeuvring is because of the seemingly large turning circle and slow animations they used. Both on and off horse.

Horses are not cars with power steering and traction, they take time to turn, even more when they are going fast with the mass propelling them in the former direction. Horse riding should take ample curves on turns, elsewhere more than horse riding it would be car racing masked by galloping. It would look completely fake. Actually as it is the horse is too much responsive in comparison to reality (even master jockeys cannot have 100% control on an horse, especially when on the run).