I’ve never been on a real horse, but I must have ridden dozens, if not hundreds of virtual steeds. FromShadow of the ColossustoObliviontoThe Witcher 3, I’ve had many worthy equine comrades. Horses in video games have always had my back, and I, and many other gamers, have many fond memories of them. I think some of us have evengotten over the Oblivion horse armour debacle.
Things have been a little bit different whereDiablo 4is concerned. It’s a great game, but my experience with the horses on offer has been somewhat underwhelming. I don’t know where Sanctuary’s stable masters are sourcing their stallions, but it certainly isn’t wherever my horse inSkyrimcame from. Secretariat, as he came to be known, could run from Riften to Solitude without stopping, could beat a troll to death, and could ascend almost vertical inclines. He was the only companion I ever needed.
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I never came to feel this way about my horse in Diablo 4 and there are a plethora of reasons why. It takes far too long to even get a horse, for one thing. Before the game lets you purchase mounts, you have to play all the way up to Act IV, which takes 10 hours minimum if you rush it. Making this even more frustrating, you encounter the stable master in the game’s very first town, Kyovashad. You can even interact with him early on, but he point-blank refuses to give you a horse, despite the fact that demons are swarming the land and the end of days is approaching. The first few hours of the campaign are spent chasing down Lilith, the primary antagonist, but she’s always one step ahead and the whole endeavor starts to feel like a wild goose chase. A horse would probably have been pretty handy to have given time was of the essence, but apparently, there’s a law against hunting down demons on horseback.
Having said all that, once I was given access to a mount, I started to suspect it wouldn’t have been that much help anyway. Overjoyed at the prospect of galloping across the map, laughing at the skeletons who could only shake their fists in fury as I sped by, I took my new horse out for a spin. It was going alright for the first few minutes, but then my horse suddenly stopped dead. As it turned out, there was a small pile of rubble in the road, which my horse was having trouble navigating. So I backed up a little and gave the rubble a wide berth, chalking it up as an anomaly. How wrong I was. As it turns out, the mounts in Diablo 4 have a hard time with pebbles, plants, and just about anything else that isn’t totally level terrain. It’s so bad that it gives horse riding a weird stop-start feel, and it makes a lot of areas easier to navigate on foot.
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I was also annoyed by how the boost is on a cooldown, even out on the open road. I can see why an infinite boost might be a little overpowered when trying to escape a monstrous horde, but at all other times, it’s just a nuisance. It makes my horse feel slow, and to make matters worse, the transition between the two speeds is incredibly janky. There’s no sense of momentum, so your horse goes from 0 to 60 and back again without feeling like it ever had to build up speed or slow down. It just doesn’t feel right.
There are also a lot of gaps and other obstacles that can be traversed on foot but which horses will often refuse to jump across. Sometimes it’s actually faster to get off and walk, which makes the whole mount system feel a little redundant.
The controls aren’t great either. The farther your mouse pointer is from your character, the faster the horse moves. Sounds ok in theory, but in practice, it means you can move much faster horizontally than you can vertically (unless you have a really weird monitor set-up) and the UI will get in the way when you’re trying to move at top speed. It also meansmounts are just straight up faster on PC than they are on consolesdue to their lack of mouse controls.
Given how hard Blizzard ispushing horse armour DLC, it’s kind of baffling how awkward the mounts are to use. Hopefully, some of these issues are addressed, because right now, I think I’d rather walk.
