Must-Read: Polygon Analyzes Assassin's Creed Horses with an Expert of Equine History
Polygon writer Simone de Rochefort and Horse Historian Professor Donna Landry take a close look at the horses in the Assassin’s Creed games: The recent titles Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla all use the same horse model regardless of their vastly different settings and cultural context.
De Rochefort and Landry draw comparisons between this horse type and modern breeds, and go through the games’ Viking, Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece settings to discuss how horses in those regions and time periods might have looked.
I absolutely love this deep dive and am incredibly happy that for once, I am not alone in reporting on video game horse accuracy. The article is an absolute must-read for TMQ fans, horse history enthusiasts and equestrian gamers. Go read it, and let Polygon know if analytical horse content is something you want to see more of!
Click right here: Polygon: A horse expert weighs in on the Assassin’s Creed pony debate (that we started)
Sign up to the TMQ Contact List for Horse Game Influencers so developers can reach you when they have new games to play or content to show.
A brand new version of Rival Stars Horse Racing is coming to Meta Quest, SteamVR and Apple Vision Pro. During my recent call with PikPok’s CEO Mario Wynands, he was able to give me a bit of advance insights into what to expect from this new version of the game.
My First Horse: Adventures on Seahorse Island is a brand new casual adventure game released on Steam for PC on April 8th 2024. The game promises an adventure about a young girl called Olivia that lets you explore the titular Seahorse Island, take care of and bond with your horse, take pictures and find hidden treasures.
Moon Channel, a YouTube creator of gaming video essays, has released a fantastic video tackling the history and market of so-called “girl games” – video games deliberately marketed to and targeted at young female players.
Noa Leibson is an art historian, life-long rider and writer of equestrian fiction and non-fiction. I finally managed to take her up on her offer to give us all some fascinating insight into ancient historical chariot racing, the men and women (!) who participated in it, and how video games like Assassin’s Creed: Origins succeed and fail in their representations of this fascinating sport.
We sometimes about “horse games” as if that term described a specific genre. In reality, while many classic horse games do fit into the farm buildup and simulation genre, the concept of “game that features horses prominently and has lots of mechanics relating to them” is not tied to that setup at all. In this article and the two previous volumes in this series, I try to broaden people’s horizons a little as to what could be cool horse games.
As a surprise to literally no one, I have a lot of thoughts on what the creators of games with horses in them could be doing better. Every horse game player has dreams and ideas and could start listing all the features that their ideal horse game would have in an instant. Let’s ignore the dream projects today and focus on a handful of fairly basic, relatively easily fixable* mistakes that horse game developers should really stop making.
Aesir Interactive and Mindscape announce a horse game of unprecedented caliber today: Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori is an open world adventure game set in the Mongolian wilderness.