Dear everyone: I know Josh’s shenanigans are kind of funny. But please stop encouraging him. I really want to finish Skyrim before Elder Scrolls VI comes out sometime in 2017.
Man, screw the horse AI in this game. It’s idiotic to the point of grief. Your horse runs into battle, which makes no damn sense. But then you have situations where it runs off to fight things you don’t want to fight and you have to chase it down. Also, it’s a nominally useful character to the player, which means it’s mortal, which means you can blow 1,000 gold on a horse and have it stupidly get itself killed five minutes later. Bad guys can instantly recognize a player-owned horse and will try to kill it on sight.
You can’t tie up your horse anywhere, so if you’re trying to assault a bandit outpost with stealth then you might as well kill the horse before you start, because it’s going to run in the front door as soon as you pick someone off. Or I suppose you can ride the horse away from the gate and then walk there without the horse, which sort of defeats the purpose of owning one.
Despite their unbelievable stupidity with regards to combat, horses are somehow able to understand the concept of ownership, so if you steal one it knows it’s stolen and tries to walk home the moment you get off of it. And I guess they have an amazing GPS system installed, judging by the way stolen horses are able to navigate back to town from anywhere in the world.
And then there’s the bounty system, which charges to not for the act of stealing the horse, but for every time you get on the horse. Imagine if you stole a car, drove it to work for a couple of days, and were then charged with eight counts of auto theft because that’s how many times you drove it.
I never bother with horses. The entire system is a ridiculous, farcical, immersion-shattering joke.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
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