Elden Ring's Horse Combat Is Totally Unrealistic (& Better That Way)
In FromSoftware's new RPG Elden Ring, players can swiftly explore the game's open world by blowing a Spectral Steed Whistle and summoning a magical horse named Torrent, who can be used for the game's rather unrealistic mounted combat - which turns out to be a good thing. There are many parts of Elden Ring's horse-mounted exploration and combat system that ring surprisingly true to real, historical mounted combat and modern equestrianism, and there are just as many misconceptions and misrepresentations about how horses were used in pre-modern war. Some of these faulty depictions of horse-riding stem from pop-culture takes on medieval combat or a lack of proper research, but mostly they serve to keep the overall experience and flow of mounted combat of Elden Ring fun for players.
One of the big challenges of simulating horse-mounted combat in video games, be they action RPGs or historical strategy simulations, is that barely anyone rides horses into battle any more. As horses steadily vanished from the front-lines of industrial battlefields during the 20th century, people's understanding of how to handle, care for, and cultivate battle-ready horses also greatly diminished. As a result, its very easy for fantasy authors, screenwriters, and video game developers of RPGs like Elden Ring to grossly misrepresent horses and their riders in fictional scenes of battle – placing certain cavalry warriors atop stallions when they should be atop mares (a common goof in video games with horses like Read Dead Redemption 2), ignoring the calorie requirements of bred war-horses, forgetting to give knights and mounted archers sets of spare horses, and so on.
Most of the unrealistic aspects of riding horses in Elden Ring can be justified through the magical fantasy tropes of the FromSoftware RPG's setting. Torrent, the Spectral Steed players can summon and ride, is clearly a supernatural equine with goat-like horns, the ability to jump twice in the air, and the capacity to be re-summoned if they die. Much like the Tarnished player character, specifically described in Elden Ring's opening cinematics as one of the "dead who yet live," Torrent can gallop unceasingly through the Lands Between without needing to rest or ingest food (though the player can feed them Rowa Rasins to restore their health). Outside of these supernatural plot conveniences, there are still a few inaccuracies when it comes to mounted combat and horse riding in Elden Ring – most of them justifiable compromises for the sake of creating a fun-to-play open world RPG.
When players mount up on Torrent in one of Elden Ring's open world sandbox areas, they gain faster movement speed, the ability to double-jump, and access to special sweeping and charging attacks depending on what weapons they wield. As a trade-off, they can only wield one weapon or spell-casting tool while mounted, and lose the ability to block with the shield they've equipped (though an equipped shield can be held and swung as a blunt weapon while on Torrent).
In historic battles of the ancient and medieval world, knights, cataphracts, and other types of cavalry used shields all the time as a defense against ranged projectiles and other mounted warriors; indeed, the great-shields wielded by the Tree Sentinel bosses in Elden Ring testifies to the utility of shields in the hands of heavy cavalry. That said, the work needed to create balanced, intuitive shield mechanics for use on horseback was probably too much of a hassle for Elden Ring's already busy developers; the absence of blocking on horseback also incentivizes Elden Ring players to alternate between mounted and on-foot fighting during open-world combat encounters.
Magical spells and bows in FromSoftware's new RPG both need to be "charged up" before their projectiles can be shot at foes, making aspiring archers and wielders of Incantations or Glintstone Sorcery in Elden Ring vulnerable to enemies who close the distance. On horseback, however, Elden Ring archers and spell-casters gain access to vastly increased mobility, giving them the ability to attack foes from a distance and elegantly dart out of range to escape retaliation – a powerful combat tactic used by chariot riders and horse archers to devastating effect throughout recorded history.
There is one horse archer tactic Elden Ring players lack access to – specifically, a maneuver called the "Parthian Shot" where light cavalry ride away from their opponents and shoot arrows backwards over their horse's flanks. Elden Ring PCs fighting on horseback can only shoot arrows or spells straight ahead and to the side, forcing players to circle and close with their foes while on horseback. Aside from keeping mounted combat from being overpowered, this gameplay limitation perhaps reflects the limited horse-riding experience of Elden Ring's Tarnished protagonist; the control and precision needed to accurately shoot arrows backwards atop a galloping horse, after all, was historically mastered only by elite warrior-aristocrats or steppe nomads raised on horseback.
Not every horse can support the weight of an Arthurian-style knight RPG protagonist; wild horses and ponies, smaller in size and capable of subsisting primarily on grass and hay, are generally too small to carry heavily armored warriors into battle, which inspired people breed larger horses with a stouter frame and greater calorie requirements. Even the largest of "destriers," however, will get worn out from prolonged gallops and the chaos of combat, a reality very much not implemented in Elden Ring's gameplay. The spectral steed Torrent, being a shaggy, goat-horned creature of magic, can gallop around the open world of the Lands Between indefinitely, and more pertinently, can maintain this fast speed even when the player is wearing the heaviest armor and wielding the heaviest weapons. The mobility Torrent grants lets Elden Ring players break its Poise mechanics, allowing them to equip the heaviest, most encumbering armor and weapons while still moving quickly around the open world.
For the most part, FromSoftware made the right call when they chose to stylize and streamline the horse-riding combat mechanics in Elden Ring; the goal of the game's designers was to let players swiftly traverse the open world and give them a useful new option for surviving combat, and realistic details such as encumbrance or spare horses would make horse-riding needlessly frustrating. All the same, players who know the difference between Elden Ring's horses and real-world horses will have a better understanding of the history of warfare and role horses continue to play in the modern human world.