i like the game and the concept

[horseymart]

BUT! some their very little indication of what the importance of the inside leg and the out side rein more on the corners or in the turns, as the bend of the horse is created by both inside and out aids. As to the canter the correct leg was depicted to ask for the correct lead in canter (out side leg asking the canter lead) but the out side rein plays a part in slowing down the transition into canter with HALF HALT witch is also a transition. i would like to see an better and deeper understanding of the correct use of aids in all transition up or down.

as to the walk and not able to use the riders leg alternate as the horses leg come back to maintain a better rhythm in the walk could be added to the game, and the change of the use of the leg using both legs at the same time to main the rhythm in the trot as this the correct way IRL, yes Im a qualified UKCC horse riding coach L2.

i hope more will be added as to the care, purchase of tack, livery fees, vet fees and so would be added and been able to build your own caricature MALE/FEMALE would be good

[pika]

There will be many more flatwork lessons, so these things will most likely be explained in the game at some point.

The game can't replicate real life to 100%, so things like maintaining roundness with the legs will most likely not be added, as using both legs already has a different purpose.

You won't be able to create your own character. The game is story-based, and you are following the story of Ava, a young, broke student. We know we'll be able to change her hair and clothing, but we don't know if there will be more options, most likely not. there will definitely be a care system and purchasing track/clothing. Maybe in the mid to late game, we'll be able to lease a horse, as the game heavily hints at it.

[pika]

The game's mechanics actually mirror real-life English riding techniques quite accurately. Using outside leg and inside rein for a sharp turn is one of the most fundamental skills in riding. Horses naturally move away from pressure, so applying outside leg encourages the horse to move inward. I’m not sure how this is frustrating for you as an equestrian; it’s literally one of the first things beginners learn in real life riding. Reversing the mouse inputs would be devoid of all logic.

[featherclaw]

The way the game mechanics work is exactly how I learned riding, controls came as natural to me as breathing.

And the reason why leg aids aren't used for transitions and rhythm is simply down to the limits of video games. No matter how realistic you want your game to be, it can never truly portrait real life fully, only "simulate" it. Judging a game badly based on that is simply unfair to the work that has gone into it.

[featherclaw]

I have over 10 years of riding experience and own a horse as well. If I put on pressure with the left leg my horse turns right because it was trained by me assisted by a professional horse trainer to do so. This is how we learn how to ride, this is how every single horse is trained. You can even see it in every big show event, just look at the Olympic dressage and check which leg puts pressure in which moments.

I'm sorry to shatter your world, but just because your opinion is different does not mean it is the only truth.
Maybe you learned differently, and your horses learn differently. But the dev of this game very obviously learned it in the way it is in the game. Instead of arguing about this and being all high and mighty about it you could reword it as constructive critisism.
Suggest an optional "switch riding style" button that adds the controls you would prefer.

That would at least show that you're not just hating on a game because it doesn't fit into your worldview. One single person is working on this, and obviously you don't know how much work that is.

[pika]

Originally posted by firewings86:

Get up on a trained horse, any horse, and start walking. Sit balanced, do not touch your reins. Put your left leg on. See which direction the horse bends in.

It doesn't matter if your horse is trained or not. Horses move away from pressure; this is the reason why negative reinforcement works so well on horses. It's basic biomechanics and the nature of horses. It's the starting point of any (good) training. If you get on a horse and give pressure with your left leg, your horse will move to the right. It might BEND to the left with its nose and body, but it will MOVE (aka the DIRECTION) to the right. Your horse can bend to one side and still move to the other (crucial for many movements and healthy posture).

Originally posted by firewings86:

your LEFT leg pushes hindquarters RIGHT, and the nose, aka the direction-picker....goes LEFT. The rest of the horse will follow.

The nose is NOT the "direction-picker" (WTF? That HURTS to read). Try riding your perfectly trained horses bridleless and have fun picking your direction then, lmao. What you are describing here most likely is riding a circle and framing a horse. Yeah, if you are riding on a left-handed circle, you guide the horse's nose to the left and keep your left leg on. This is to keep them framed and nicely bent around the left leg. But that doesn't have much to do with the direction.

You dictate the direction with a combination of weight distribution and outside leg. That's also how shoulder-ins work, as you should know as a self-proclaimed expert. You bend your horse's front to the inside, while keeping your inside leg (if you are on the outside track) on to keep them going forward and NOT change direction. By your "diReCtiOn-piKeR" and inside leg logic, that would be impossible.

No matter how you look at it, your way is devoid of all logic. Sure, you can train your horses to be ridden this way and it's not inherently wrong. But you would be making it unnecessarily hard for the horse to learn, which is why 99% of equestrians don't do it this way. :)

Repeat it with me: Inside leg is for BENDING the horse, NOT the direction. And the nose isn't for that either. BUT this is a game, so it's fine that it's not one-to-one perfect realistic; it still captures the essence of horse riding 100% better and more realistic than literally any other game.

[firewings86]

If you don't think the rest of the horse follows the head, there's nothing else I can say here, lol. Enjoy your game!

Edit: Also, I did not claim to be an expert, I claimed to have ridden a WIDE variety of horses across a variety of disciplines and levels of training, for decades. I am not even remotely a riding instructor. I am however someone who knows how to reliably manipulate a horse's movement, I am a very experienced rider.

Perhaps this is a case of extrapolating different real-life pressure/motion equivalents out of what the game character is doing, and/or not explaining well. But the mechanics of the game were very awkward to me, that is all.

[featherclaw]

Originally posted by firewings86:

If you don't think the rest of the horse follows the head, there's nothing else I can say here, lol. Enjoy your game!

Did you know that in order to keep their balance young horses usually have their neck and thus their head bend towards the outside while turning inside so they don't fall? Many are actually purposefully trained like this at first so they learn to sort their feet before having to learn to carry themselves.

Answer me this: When you walk down the street, do you constantly look forwards and only ever turn your head if you want to turn your entire body direction? Because that is the logic you're trying to make us believe with that statement.
Have you never seen a horse look around while walking in a straight line? Tell me where a horse looks while doing a lateral movement, because it it were looking in the direction it's moving its posture would be wrong.

The horse's engine is the back legs, so that is the part that needs to be told to turn, which is why we move the outside leg just behind the girth and apply pressure to steer. It causes the horse to bend around the inside leg, which applies counter pressure so the horse doesn't just make a U-turn and keeps the tension so the horse continues walking forwards and not stop.

If I sit on my horse without reins and apply pressure with only a single leg my horse will turn on the spot in the opposite direction of the pressure, and that should work with any of your horses as well, whether you deleted your message or not ;)

[singingformoneh]

I don't want to poke fun at this, but this drama in the replies is very juicy

[featherclaw]

Originally posted by singingformoneh:

I don't want to poke fun at this, but this drama in the replies is very juicy

Horses are the most controversial topic on the internet after all lol, no matter what you do it's wrong xD

[firewings86]

I deleted my comments because I realized I'd been baited into a bad-faith internet argument with someone determined to misread everything I was saying concerning a game I don't even care about (but that everyone else here clearly very much does, which is fine). I was rude and condescending in my reply too and I regretted it afterwards because that's not the kind of energy I'm trying to put in my days. Life is too short to spend it being mad about pixels and I'm embarrassed that I let myself get there.

If you're actually an experienced rider then there's very little chance we are riding hundreds of horses COMPLETELY DIFFERENTLY while managing to get the same results, that just isn't how riding or physics works. The chances of us describing it differently, and attributing different actions to what a mouse click in a video game would logically mean, however, are very high.

Obviously horses move away from pressure, that was my point to begin with. If you block with your reins and ask for a turn on the forehand, you're using your LEFT leg to push the hindquarters RIGHT. If you move hindquarters off your leg in 1 direction pivoting the horse around a fulcrum where the rider is sitting, the head is going in the opposite direction. Horses are just not flexible enough for that to not be the case, a bit of bend through the body aside. If you expect the head to swing hard to the left, the hindquarters are necessarily going to need to swing right to get the horse straight again. You can see the same thing in spin on the haunches. That is what I would have assumed those mouse clicks were doing, stripping all of the complicated things we can do with weight shifts and hip tilts etc. to influence where a horse is moving down to 4 limbs = 4 buttons - in my mind, you would think that 2 of those buttons move the head and shoulders and the other 2 move/put pressure on the hindquarters (in the "rider as fulcrum" sense). Otherwise, I don't see a reason not to just use pressure input degrees and a joystick like every other game and be done with it.

You're talking about things like counterbending and leg yields and sidepassing, I was literally just talking about the moment in the first 5-10 minutes where the game asks you to *make the horse turn sharper* which would require more bend and more pivot on the as-sharp-as-controls-would-allow inside turn I was already doing. Considering that when I clicked the mouse buttons and the avatar's legs THUMPED on the horse's sides, and she's riding dressage style (so legs behind the girth), I took it to mean strong leg going on (if not active bumping/thumping) behind the girth. If I have one of my horses on a left circle and I have my right rein closed, left rein somewhat open, and I put my right leg on behind the girth, he probably is going to correctly assume I'm asking him to step under with his RH in preparation for left-lead canter depart. So if that's my read on what the game is doing when you click right mouse, why would I expect a hard left turn at a walk? Considering that this is a game and the goal is just *move the horse*, it was literally a tutorial explaining things like turning and stopping, I would not even remotely expect the weird(-to-me) pseudo leg yield in the opposite direction effect I got.

So sure, if you are just tilting your hips, shifting your weight, putting right leg on on the girth in a way that makes it clear you want a leg yield, yeah, you'll get a leg yield to the left. A horse that's already on a left turn, with left (inside) rein open, right rein closed, and you want to ask that horse for more bend to the inside, IME you ask for that by increasing pressure on the inside leg. You support with your outside leg, of course we all want our horses straight and balanced through turns. In real life if you want a really clean pivot maybe you'll half halt and tilt your hips and use your outside leg to ask for a really strong step-under, and maybe that's what you were envisioning when you clicked your right mouse. But that sort of thing literally just cannot be replicated in game mechanics without a lot more control than just 4 buttons (in my mind, one for each quadrant of the horse), so it's definitely not what I saw or expected to see when I clicked my mouse. My interpretation, and the only one that made sense to me for a video game, was this one:

https://i.imgur.com/Lyi3HiH.jpeg

Yes, I know, I am Michelangelo with a mouse, please admire my amazing art skills

The fact that both leg yields and pivots on the forehand exist mean that we're both "right" in what we're talking about, we're just saying completely different things. I'm saying that on a straight, normal horse, just doing basic turning and stopping, no complex bending exercises, no leg yield or half pass, no sidepassing, etc., just "go in a direction, turn, stop," if the horse's head is in quadrant 1, its butt is going to be in quadrant 4. If its head is in quadrant 2, its butt is going to be in quadrant 3. If the game is asking me to take the head from quadrant 2 to quadrant 1 faster, I expect to need more pressure/energy to get the hindquarters from quadrant 3 to quadrant 4, again, based on MY interpretation of what is the *most likely* reduction of 390894875489375 different riding aids down to 4 buttons.

Here's another rough representation of what I thought might logically occur in game from left rein + "right leg" (right mouse) vs what I feel like I got. I could see a leg yield sideways but it just did not make sense to me for that to be the way to get more of a pivot.

https://i.imgur.com/5sujRYH.jpeg

Based on that, I was just expressing my opinion, in my original comment, that the existing inputs are counterintuitive and make gameplay frustrating. I would expect something different than what you would, clearly. You can say "I don't see it that way, I disagree" but you can't say "and if you don't see it my way, you must be riding weirdly, every instructor you've ever had must have been teaching wrong and every horse you've ever ridden must have been trained wrong, all of them, across multiple states/disciplines and even countries, for 30 years."

I'm sure your interpretation will also be different if you are a tiny person normally riding an enormous warmblood with a back 1000 miles long, in a very forward seat and short stirrups, vs. using a long stirrup (or no stirrups; I ride bareback a lot) sitting well back on a horse who naturally has a short back. It's all ponies, Arabs, and AQHA/stock horses here. And you're right that I did grow up riding Western, and we don't need or use legs to turn at all, they neck rein, you just lay the right rein on the horse's neck and voila you get a turn left; a light touch gets a slight turn, lay the rein on more strongly and you get a sharper turn. However, I started lessons at a hunter barn as a teenager and continued with H/J and dressage through adulthood (mostly in the US but briefly on visits to Europe too) before eventually switching back to Western. I still take the occasional dressage lesson just to stay sharp, because I think it's good for you (I also just rode in a dressage clinic last year because a dressage friend was going and I tagged along, also). So I'm comfortable riding English too even though it's not my "home base."

I'm guessing if you put both of us on horses in a ring in person and had us ride around for a while and then switch horses, we'd probably do fine on both of them. I assumed you were a beginner based on the tone + no personal experience included in your original response and I should have asked first before being insulting, that was on me, that was bad behavior and I am sorry for it. You ALSO shouldn't assume I ride differently from "99%" of other equestrians on the planet because I'm not getting my view of complicated physical mechanics across very well in text on the internet, when the crux of this entire thread is "complicated physical mechanics aren't easily reduced to 4 buttons." The internet is so depersonalizing, I love it but also hate how it encourages this sort of thing.

Now that's all I'm going to say about that, I've wasted enough time typing this just because I don't want to look like a jerkwad on my online ~*permanent record*~, I am not generally a rude and condescending person (or at least I certainly TRY not to be) and don't like that I stooped to behaving that way, even digitally, and don't want anyone to think I don't see a problem with it. I stand by my opinions based on my experience with real horses vs my experience with the game's mechanics, it's completely subjective so not really up for debate anyway, and in my mind I was essentially defending my right to my own opinion which had come 'under fire'. I do regret the tone I took doing it, though, I definitely sprinkled some gasoline on a fire I didn't want in the first place + then went "crap, now the room is on fire 🙄"

[featherclaw]

Nah you're good, even taking the time to write a novel explaining and apologizing shows you're not "one of those internet people" we both know what I mean xD

You're right, it's very easy to start beef on the internet because there are no repercussions for it, and you know, I get what you were trying to say now why to you the steering felt off.

I think you're right, that we are both talking about the same thing, and I admit that you have more experience than me. After reading your detailed explanation it made perfect sense to me too that you had issues with the controls, and honestly, I'd chalk it up to the fact that I have less experience. Because these controls make sense to someone who knows how to ride a horse leisurely, but not neccecarily on a higher level than that.

One of the first things I learned about riding was how to steer with just my legs and weight, we had to put our hands on our hips, leave the reins laying on the horse's neck, and steer with the outside leg while shifting weight to the inside. This is why it made perfect sense to me to make sharp turns with the leg aids.

As you already said, and so did I, a game can never represent everything going on in real life accurately, epsecially when it comes to the very intricate art that is horse riding. I haven't been the nicest in my replies too, throwing attitude is something I don't like doing either, so I'm sorry as well for my behaviour.

[firewings86]

❤️❤️❤️ Sending digital hugs, friend. Thanks for being kind and trying to see where I'm coming from and meet in the middle, I REALLY appreciate that. And yes, when I realized you might be seeing the right mouse click as a right hip shift forward based on some of the things you were saying, I was like, ahhh, ok, I could see it if you look at it that way; it just would not have occurred to me TO look at it that way lol, because in my mind, that's a function of that exact weight shift/shift of the inside hip in the direction you want to turn that you're talking about.

My brain just goes to inside first, I guess a sort of mental "look where you want to go" 😁 One of my horses (my rock solid worth-his-weight-in-gold old guy) goes bridleless and while I normally use a cordeo if I'm doing any "real" work, I very often just hop on him in the pasture with nothing and steer that way, just kind of use his hind end like a boat rudder 😅😂 I can poke at his neck if he needs input on the front end but usually just legs and seat is enough. On a good day ;P

I definitely would not consider myself a particularly sophisticated rider, I'm certainly no Olympic contender or anything, but just logging a lot of hours on a lot of different horses (and spending a lot of time bareback and feral 😅😅😅) will make you at least a pretty effective rider IME! I've gotten really lucky in that respect; I was born into a horse family and I'm aware that's a big privilege in a way, though it can definitely leave you with some gaps and blind spots on what you're doing (because you've been doing it that way literally since before you can even remember) vs. why you're doing it and how to explain it.

And 10 years is definitely nothing to sneeze at!!!!! I run into soooo many people who are like "I took lessons for 1 summer so I definitely know how to ride!", I'm sure you know the type lol, but a decade is legitimately a long time! That's something to be really proud of. I also don't know how old you were when you started, but whenever I encounter people who only got up on a horse for the first time AFTER their sense of mortality had already developed :P, I'm always so impressed. I'm such a chicken, I feel like there's no way I'd have stuck with it or ever been a confident rider if I hadn't started until I was older. I really admire people who CHOSE to do it and pushed through the "wtf, this is so dangerous, you are so wobbly and unbalanced up here and if you fall you could LITERALLY DIE" that I feel like I got to mostly skip during the learning phase 😅🤣 That's real courage right there 😁❤️❤️❤️

[singingformoneh]

HAPPY ENDING YEWPIEEEE

[Aileen]

lol this drama was so long i skipped most of it, but i'm pretty sure we are not gonna see a way to bend the horse correctly in th egame because its simply to complicated for the game mechanics to replicate, its way easier to implement the 'beginner' way of steering instead of outside reign steering in game. i dont think we are gonna get a significant change in this since its been like this since the first demo.