After watching the horse themed video update I would like to point out that the horse has four distinctive forms of movement. The video showed walking, trotting, and galloping but did not include cantering which is in-between trotting and galloping in speed and is much more comfortable than trotting. It would add a little more realism and make the transition from trotting to galloping much smoother. I’m sure Warhorse is paying lots of attention to horses and making them as realistic as possible though so I probably didn’t need to post this but just in-case.
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I just watched the video and I agree with @Paladin.
I also have a question to pose to the Devs (I was about to make a topic but noticed yours is a simular question): are the horse movement animations shown in the video final (not the textures or rider animation because you stated they weren’t finalised yet), or will you be using motion capture on real life horses as well to get a more natural animation? (is motion capture on animals a thing? It should be a thing, someone let me know if I’m wrong)
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That would be cool. I didn’t think of that.
It says in the video that the current animations are place holders and they are getting motion capture later for the horses.
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I’m a huge fan of the fact they’re using mocap for horses, hopefully for the rider aswell. I also think it would be good if they incorporated a weight to speed sort of ratio when mounting and riding the horse, and the ability to train your horse e.g. Increase it’s stamina or resistance to being frightened from pikes or flaming arrows.
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Sounds good, but let’s stay on the ground. This not gonna happen.
The video says motion capture will be used but It’s not entirely clear whether he was talking about just mounting the horse or horse movements as well. It sounds like he’s talking about the horse movements.
I am along the lines of really caring what the horses travel speeds are, I want the horses to look as realistic as possible. If anybody here has played Uncharted 3 the horses in that game looked pretty bad for being a Naughty Dog game. As long as I think this looks like a horse, I am happy. 
There is a good motion capture library available for license that should be considered instead of creating one from scratch.
wow, you weren’t kidding. and the gameplay associated with it was awfully executed as well. jump on wagon, knock out/kill soldier, jump off back to horse. rinse and repeat several more times.
naughty dog is so overrated
Yeah, the talk there is about mocapping the horse.
good observation, Paladin
and i really hope WARHORSE studio gets the HORSE part right! 
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I agree with that but it’s not something I actually didn’t register myself at first view even tho I have worked with horses some years back. What I did notice tho is the fact that the devs have clearly made the horses smaller and sturdier than what you usually see in games that takes place in a midieval setting. This is very historically correct and I take my hat off for that!. Also it thankfully don’t seem to be possible to just press a button to make the horse jump, instead it will jump over obstacles coming against them automatically. My hope is that the horses will have personality too, like Beeing more or less war-trained and easy/hard to control. I think everybody agrees in that the horse will be of extremely big importance in this game and also the players most valuable partner.
In the video updates they did say horses will jump over small obstacles (as you’d hoped) but in the livestream they were able to make the horse jump by button push as well. I’ve never ridden a horse before but I imagine it’s not that hard fetched to train a horse to spring on command. Then again, maybe not.
“Free jumping” with a horse is indeed something you can learn and train a horse for. There are a few different routines like the "Capriole"or the “Levade” amongst a few others. Some of these routines were developed to be used with warhorses to help the rider fend off close enemy infantry. But it was of course in my opinion extremely rare with horses that well trained. Also I have no idea if it even were practiced as early as 1403?. Maby there are any equestrian nerds here who can help me out on that one? hehe
Hi, only some short words (no time) from an eqestrian nerd:
Warhorses were extremely expensive according to many sources.
This can not only be explained with noble breeds. IMHO it was because of the many years of training that are necessary to train a good horse. I’ve tried it myselve. The official opinion is, that hig-school figures like Capriole and Levade are coming up 150 years later. But there are some clues (text and pictures), that something similar to this was in use long time before. But things like Carriere, collected canter, riding with curb-bit and nearly without hands in a full-sized battle, sideways canter etc. was definately in use. And, speaking as a eqestrian nerd, you can see it from the size and the form of the muscles, that those horses are very well trained. But I really dont’t think that this will be the case with all everyday-horses.