Why would we be only attacking boars and wolves in a world where there are trolls, goblins, ogres, bandits/highwaymen/etc, dragons, spriggans, land dreughs and tons of other beasties. Not to mention other people on horse back, and yeah in fact there was a type of sword specifically for hunting in the event that your spear was damaged and no you wouldn't generally use it from horse back.

First, I'd like to compliment you on your knowledge of medieval combat, I wasn't expecting that.

Second, our characters may actually break this rule. Simply because, this is for a conscript, or maybe an average militia person. Our characters are wealthy, strong, independent adventurers. We may have lances, longswords, and full-plate. Ah the Cataphracts...

I just had an amazing idea!!!

JOUSTS!!!

If we can fight from horsebacks, wouldn't this be awesome? I'm so starting a poll...

jousting tournaments would be pretty cool B)

So apparently if something seems "a logical development" nobody cares about "logical" limitations of software, hardware and gameplay. And a half dead old as dirt bay horse you bought with a discount comes fully equipped with all skills needed for it to be a military stallion or a jousting one and will charge into a horde of monsters instead of dropping you to the ground and running away. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SomewhereAnEquestrianIsCrying

That's actually what happened in the middle ages. You just don't see it anymore because horses have slowly gotten dumber because of global warming. Which, as everybody knows is caused by the decline of pirates. Does anybody like spaghetti?

I'm just a big nerd. And Cataphracts rock!

Nope, they actually had a special trained horse that was used only for battles. Unless you count kicking peasants in the face with a boot as a "mounted combat".

If they do not have mounted combat hopefully they have at the very least an "action" animation where you can jump and or quickly dismount while in gallop in order to be ready to fight.

Yeah and you had to have a lot of money to afford a warhorse. They could add stuff like that if they wanted I mean crap horses could have low stamina, the playstation article mentioned they'll be able to sprint. So you could have cheap horses that are easily spooked and can't run very long and ones that cost as much as a house that can kick ass.

Lol, I was kidding. I edited my post so it was more obvious.

You're right. Mounted combat is way too difficult for the current hardware to handle. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTUVfmE2ViQ Ever. Especially Bethesda.

Well, maybe that last part may not be entirely inaccurate.


Where the hell are you getting this? No one here's saying that all horses should be trained war steeds (in fact, having different type of horses of various skills would be pretty cool), just that mounted combat should be possible (as opposed to...being completely nonexistent).

It'd be a great addition, but I highly doubt it'll be in.

Your mistake here is assuming that for Bethesda, horses done "right" is the same as what you would consider to be done "right". Todd never specified what he means by "doing them right", exactly, it's a pretty vague term and the only thing we can say for certain about it is that if horses are included, they must be better than in Oblivion, since Todd said Oblivion's basic implementation is no longer good enough and for Skyrim, they want to make sure they can do them right. Thus, the fact that Bethesda chose to do horses seems to indicate that we can expect something better than Oblivion, but how much of an improvement will it be? I don't know. In any case, it doesn't guarentee mounted combat, now, well done mounted combat would be nice to see, because it avoids the annoyance of needing to dismount every time your attacked while riding a horse through the wilderness, but I'm not going to automatically assume it's in just because we have horses.



And I always end up having a lot of money by the end of the game in past games, so I don't think that's any reason not to include a feature, we could have horses with different abilities, how suited they are for combat included, and with war horses being especially expensive and hard to find.



Curse you global warming! First we get exploding killer birds, and now you're also responsible for the decline in equine intelligence over the ages? When will your evils ever end?

I want to be a horse back archer. *Looks towards the horizon, turns around and sees Todds face, hopes crushed*

Medium rare skirt-steaks is doing them right I tell you what.

The only standard I know of that Todd has spoken of was something close to Red Dead Redemption, other than that who knows. And I agree about having a variety of horses with different prices and stats much like Red Dead.

The feeling I got from Todd talking about him playing Red Dead and the Horse Animations in that game, I have a hard time seeing him approve anything less or equal to the level of animation.

Everybody says that but it's absolutely 100% FALSE! He NEVER says RDR is their standard AT ALL! I wish people would stop misquoting him.

I hope mounted magic is in. That's what's most important to me, I don't care much about the combat part. The most annoying part of Oblivion's horse riding was that you couldn't, for example, heal yourself while doing so, and that you couldn't heal the horse when you're running away from attacking wolves or something.


Then quote him correctly, and better come up with some decent arguments for why that statement is 100% false, because it surely isn't.
Whatever he said, it included RDR's horses in a laudatory way, and his desire to make better horses than those in Oblivion, so it seems the statement is already 50% correct.

Mount & Blade, a game by a small developer with very poor graphics and animations does it fairly well. Bethesda could pull it off if they wanted to.




You seemed to have wrote it off fairly quickly without putting in much thought.

There are many ways it could be balanced among the various archetypes. A warrior would be limited to attacking enemies near the horse and would still have to deal with timing issues when at high speeds. Archers would have to try to land an arrow, yes, but they also have the perk that slows time. Same deal with the mage. He has to try to land a spell but most spells are nowhere near as tiny as thin as an arrow and wouldn't require incredible aim.

Other perks could balance and adjust things. Remember, not all perks have to be tied to the 18 skills. All sorts of perks were awarded from achieving various things in Fallout 3. The same could be applied to horseback riding.

Because for that a spear might come in handy...

:)

A archer would have a huge benefit of a horse as he can shoot and run away easy. A melee character has to get in striking distance from the enemy to hurt them.
As this is a single player game balance is less important and the lack of basic mounted combat in Oblivion actually made horses dangerous, far too easy to gather an tail of enemies who would attack you then you stopped, yes you could usually outride most of them but you might have to run past the target location.
I guess some basic mounted combat is in, bows, single hand spells, single hand weapons.

Mounted combat would be awesome. Imagine hunting mammoth with a bow and arrow whilst mounted, oh how my expectations are, how disappointed I will be.

Much as I am normally all for balance, IMHO not including mounted combat on these grounds would be a huge mistake that would negate most of the benefits of the horse inclusion in the first place. Sad waste of resources like in Oblivion. At the very least, ranged attacks with bows and magic should be possible. In ideal case,, use of one-handed weapons too .
But what about the warriors using two-handed, you say? Well, didn't they already say that ranged attacks of some sort will be needed to bring down a dragon? So, maybe give 2-handed weapons a bit more oomph in recompense for not being able to use them from horseback and leave it at that. The horse itself could also have a couple of basic attacks, like forward and backard kick, so that disposal of annoying trash mobs would be possible even without the use of weapons.
When all is said and done, horses can only be used outside and when terrain is not too rugged, so even if some characters would get more advantage from them, it wouldn't be significant enough to not include mounted combat on the balance grounds. TES games had much bigger imbalances in the past anyway, so it would be a very lame excuse for denying us this feature that many of TESans have been begging for since MW.

BTW, is there a decent mounted combat mod for OBlivion? I am getting a hunkering to reinstall it.