Could The Witcher 4’s Kelpie be the best video game horse yet? We asked an expert

If you caught The Witcher 4’s tech demo at yesterday’s Unreal showcase, you likely spent an above-average amount of time for a Tuesday being impressed by horse muscles. Still, however excited you were about that horse, I’d wager you weren’t quite as happy as Alice Ruppert – consultant on the upcoming Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori, and owner of the very best website about video game horses on the internet. Ruppert’s initial reaction? “Tears of joy in my eyes when they showed the slow mo horse movement”.

“I’m a big fan of the of the Witcher books, and so I knew that Ciri has a horse named Kelpie in the books,” Ruppert tells me over a call, “so, that’s part of it”. But it’s also the care that’s been put in. “Like: here’s our gorgeous horse. We care about it, and we know you care about it. And that made me feel very seen. I think that’s what brought the tears to my eyes. Of course, I am so profoundly a horse girl that you can, depending on my mood of the day, you can show me a slow mo footage of a horse galloping and I will cry in any case. That’s just my horse appreciation brain rot.”

While it might not be noticeable if you don’t already look out for the details, says Ruppert, “just the fact that all of the joints bend the right way and don’t bend when they’re not supposed to is weirdly rare. Just representing horse movement in a way that’s not immediately noticeable as incorrect like that is an achievement in itself. Which sounds like faint praise, but like, horses get get done dirty so often.”

Why is it important that game developers get horses right? “It’s a very prominent element even if you feature it in gameplay in a relatively simplistic way”. The complicated parts are things like collisions and movement. Once that’s sorted, she says, you may as well add some character to the animals. “A petting animation is just one example of a simple thing to make the horse feel a little bit more alive than if it’s just a bicycle. There’s a lot of low hanging fruit for how to make the animal feel more alive, and in turn make your whole game world feel more alive, without completely redesigning your game to be about the horse.”

The audience for good video games horses is also a lot bigger than the market assumes, says Ruppert. “Games targeting them tend to be not very good, and not have very high production values. Which means there’s tons of horse girls (I use that as a gender inclusive term. Anyone can be a horse girl) who will pick a game just because it has a cute horse in it. For whom that is a major deciding factor.”

Do not fear: deep horse anatomy analysis is coming. But first, I need to know: could Windstorm’s horses beat Ciri’s Kelpie in a race?

“In an endurance race? Probably, because like Kelpie looks like a Friesian horse,” Ruppert says. “She’s probably not like, gonna be called a Friesian in game, but that’s obviously what she’s inspired by. They’re a light draft horse. They’re often referred to as war horses, but the evidence for that is actually kind of thin.”

Friesians come from the Netherlands and have been around since the Middle Ages, Ruppert tells me, but are “horribly overused” in movies and settings where they don’t belong. “For example, ancient Greek settings. They just look good on film because they’re pretty and fancy and black. But I do think that The Witcher’s setting isn’t a bad place for a Friesian. We don’t know what the actual horse would have looked like around that time, so it’s not like we have a better reference to take.”

Friesians are mostly used for things like leisure riding and dressage nowadays, whereas the Mongolian horses in Windstorm are “bred for survival. They’re not as fancy or pretty, but they will survive a winter on the Steppes without getting additional food. And they’re what Genghis Khan and his armies travelled the world and conquered on. They’re very hardy, very sturdy. So, the beauty contest goes to the Friesian, but an endurance race goes to the Mongolian horses.”

Majestic looks aside, Kelpie’s name has its own storied roots, both in the Witcher novels and in folklore. “They’re kind of evil horses, which is a nice change of pace from the virginal and pure unicorn. Kelpie’s main thing in mythology is that they’re these flesh eating water horses. They offer you a ride across the river that they live in, but then when you accept, they drag you under the water and eat you.”

Ciri meets and names Kelpie in the book The Tower of Swallows. “You’re as black and agile as a sea-kelpie,” she says. “You’re as magical as a kelpie. So you’ll be Kelpie. And I don’t care if that’s pretentious or not”. Geralt and Ciri are “certified horse girls in the books,” says Ruppert, “and nobody can tell me otherwise.”

She also says you can tell from the novels that author Andrzej Sapkowski has met and spent time with horses, though Roach is “a little bit underused in The Witcher 3, very much a means of transportation and a bit of a meme.”

“Many games that have horse companions underuse them as characters. Horses react to things around them; noises and sense and changes in the environment”. This is rarely done in games, Ruppert says, though it’s easy to imagine why. “It’s additional polish work that might not be noticeable to a lot of people. But I do think that even people outside of my horse nerd bubble would profit from horses that are actually treated as characters by the narrative”. She gives the example of Agro from Shadow Of The Colossus, and Zelda’s Epona. “The horse is involved in the plot, and the whole game profits from it.”

As for all that shiny Unreal movement tech? “There’s some oddities about the hind legs,” says Ruppert. She gives the example of the hock – “the middle joint on the hind leg” – almost bending downwards when it moves forward. “That’s really strange, and I think the hind fetlock – so that’s the lowest joint – also moves a bit oddly. So that sort of, to me, breaks that illusion a little bit of this being a completely realistic horse.” But, she says, “this is complaining on a very, very high level of fidelity. On other horses in games, we’re usually pointing out: legs don’t work that way.”

Still, even Ruppert says she only noticed these things on re-watches. “Also, I have a Discord server full of horse nerds who talk about these things, who also point out additional things that I didn’t notice. It’s not literally perfect in every way, but I would say it is state of the art. I don’t think we’ve gotten any animated horses in video games that look better.”

Even Red Dead Redemption 2 (“the current holder of the crown”) gets “some things wonky that look better in this demo. Whether that applies to the game as a whole is to be seen. But Red Dead has its share of, like, the forelegs being bent in situations where they shouldn’t be. And I don’t like the faces of the Red Dead horses.”

If the tech demo is anything to go by, it sounds like The Witcher 4 has the horse girl audience locked down, anyway. “They went and showed the horse in slow motion,” Ruppert says. “Like, they knew what they were doing. They were like, here’s our horse. We’re very proud of it. That’s a degree of visibility that I don’t see that often. Many games still like, very casually include their horse on the side and don’t treat it as a reveal worthy part of the game. Ciri calls the horse’s name. The horse reacts. The horse has a little bit of characterisation. It makes me hope for more things to come, that Kelpie will be more of a character than just a bicycle.”

Following our chat this morning, Alice shot right past me in getting an article of her own up on Mane Quest which you should read also. However, due to her previously established access to horses, I consider this cheating.