Move over, Olympics - I did horse dressage in Red Dead Online
Canter strike.
Emma's Adventures was a monthly column created for Eurogamer Supporters that ran throughout 2023. In it, Emma Kent explored online virtual worlds in a way that's become uniquely her own - usually involving an obscure pursuit in a hostile environment. She opened a fashion boutique in the radiated wasteland of Fallout 76, started a crab delivery food service in Elden Ring, and ran a real-estate business in Valheim, to name but a few. We're now slowly opening these articles up.
And there's one of her adventures ideally suited to the present day - to the Olympics specifically. Emma's self-imposed challenge is simple: can she recreate a dressage routine in a game with realistic horse riding? Can she bring the spirit of the Olympics to Red Dead Online?
Until recently, I knew very little about the world of dressage. My main exposure to the sport was through the Olympics, which would roll around every four years and briefly mesmerise me with horses dancing to The Lion King soundtrack. It didn't hurt, too, that Team GB would typically rake in a cluster of medals each time. Yet beyond this, I knew very little of the sport: how it worked, how it was judged, or how demanding it could be.
In the past couple of weeks, however, all that has changed. You might have figured that out from the headline.
I had long been fascinated by Red Dead Online's 'horse girl community' - groups of equine enthusiasts drawn to the game by its detailed horse models and animations, rather than all the gun-toting cowboy violence. Groups such as The Rift Trails became known for their massive organised trail rides, with dozens of players joining up to explore the wilderness on their favourite horses. As I saw one player describe it, these groups essentially turned the game into "Barbie Horse Adventures with guns" - a playstyle I imagine Rockstar never truly intended.
There are plenty of recordings of these trail rides on YouTube, but alongside these clips, I had noticed a few videos on YouTube showing dressage moves in-game. Some players were taking things a step further, and organising their own dressage competitions. Firstly, I found it pretty surprising that dressage was possible at all in Red Dead Online, as the sport requires some very specific mechanics. The notion that players were clubbing together to host competitions also intrigued me. I felt the whole thing warranted further investigation, so I set about trying to enter myself in a Red Dead Online dressage competition.
The first step was, importantly, acquiring a horse. I already owned a few horses in Red Dead Online, but I felt it was important to buy a horse solely for the purpose of the contest. I wanted to 'train one up', and bond with them in the process. So I did a little research, and discovered a specific breed that's particularly favoured in elite-level dressage competitions: the Dutch Warmblood. According to Horse and Hound, this breed was created after World War 2 specifically for competition riding, with the horses known for being "intelligent, friendly, and supremely athletic". Handily, it's also a breed that's available in Red Dead Online.
The historians among you may have noticed a slight problem here, in that Dutch Warmbloods didn't exist until the mid-20th century, while Red Dead Online is set in 1898. Hmm. The in-game version of the Dutch Warmblood also has fairly standard stats and handling, so it doesn't completely reflect the breed's dominance in equestrian sports. Despite all this, for roleplaying purposes I went ahead and purchased a Dutch Warmblood stallion, who I named Allegro. It's a musical term that means lively, cheerful and quick - all of which I hoped would apply to our performance.
With the horse sorted, it was time to buy some clothes. I managed to recreate a 'westernised' version of a dressage outfit, but by golly, did all of this gear come at a price. The horse costs alone were eye-watering, with Allegro setting me back $150, another $125 required for horse insurance, and the stall itself costing several hundred dollars. My dressage coat alone was $192.50. On top of that, I needed a new set of tack to make Allegro look smart. To fund all of this, I was forced to spend a couple of hours grinding out bounty hunter and trader missions to earn some money. Disclaimer: many digital people and animals were hurt in the making of this dressage routine.
The upside of this grind was that I was able to spend plenty of time bonding with Allegro. Soon enough, we were at a level four bond - meaning we now had access to all of Red Dead Online's dressage moves. The next stage, of course, was actually choreographing and practising a dressage routine: a daunting prospect for someone with no knowledge of the sport.
To get some help with this, I got in touch with Alice Ruppert, who's a video game horse consultant and creative producer at Aesir Interactive (Bertie interviewed Ruppert for a podcast and learned all about horses in games). She's also the creator of The Mane Quest: a website dedicated to discussing horses in games, highlighting ways developers can improve their horse depictions. When I started researching this piece, I immediately found her article on Red Dead Online dressage moves and their real-life counterparts, which is full of useful observations. In the article she concludes that many of the dressage moves in the game have been implemented in a fairly realistic way - even if Rockstar didn't get a few of the details right.
Over the phone, Ruppert gave me some useful background context about the sport of dressage, and its place in Red Dead Online.
"The thing with a Red Dead dressage event is that it's emergent gameplay - Red Dead doesn't really let you do dressage in a meaningful way," Ruppert said. "It does have the handful of moves I featured in my article that can be considered dressage moves, but at the same time, what we call dressage in real life literally means 'training'. Dressage is basically just training your horse to move in a way that is beneficial for itself - for its muscles, for its anatomy."
So because Red Dead Online only unlocks the dressage moves through 'bonding', it's missing a significant part of the dressage experience: actually training the horse to do the moves. Despite this incomplete experience, Ruppert suggested that the reason players are using Red Dead Online for dressage could be due to a lack of horse games currently offering dressage. Back in the 2000s, games like the Pippa Funnell series and Lucinda Green's Equestrian Challenge offered meaningful dressage mechanics, but few new releases have managed to hit the mark.
"There's been a lot of attempts at doing dressage in games, but not many of them have been that good," Ruppert adds. "That is why people do this emergent gameplay stuff, where they do it instead in Red Dead, Star Stable and Second Life - basically wherever you have a horse and can do something like that."
"It is interesting that Red Dead - as a Western game and primarily an action-adventure game - does offer these special moves like the leg-yielding and basically the piaffe," Ruppert added. "It's very unique… I don't think any other games with horses offer that sort of lateral movement, so it gets closer to some of the things you do in real-life dressage than many horse games."
Ruppert then pointed me towards the official dressage tests on the International Federation for Equestrian Sports' website, suggesting that it might be an idea to attempt one of these routines in-game, and see how much I could do. I settled on the 2022 Short Grand Prix dressage test from the senior section, which to my surprise, offered a varied selection of moves I would actually be able to perform (aside from flying changes, a mechanic sadly not available in Red Dead Online.) Finally, Ruppert gave me some parting words of wisdom to help with my performance.
"What I think is nice to look at is if you're very precise about the movement - that's also something that matters in real dressage. So if it says halt at letter A, halt at letter A, not a metre before or after."
With the routine selected, I went back into Red Dead Online to do some location scouting. Ideally, I needed a place that would resemble the rectangle of a dressage arena. I settled on MacFarlane's Ranch: a massive cattle farm with a large circular pen. Close enough. It still had its challenges - the ranch was located next to a busy train station, which would frequently spook the horse. As would the random NPC who sometimes spawned in the yard, normally when I was practising my pirouettes. We had a couple of close calls there.
Next I had to practise the routine, and boy was this a steep learning curve. I spent a great deal of time on YouTube just learning the names of all the moves. YouTube now thinks I'm a horse girl, and my home page is full of equestrian videos. I then had to figure out how to perform all of these in-game. I initially struggled with simple things such as changing gaits, or coming to a halt quickly. But the real thorn in my side was the half-pass: a sideways move that is ridiculously tricky to perform in-game. The horse's trajectory is based on the direction of the camera, so I found myself having to do a weird crab-claw on the controller to prevent the horse from turning. Ultimately, I realised the only way I was going to get any accuracy on this move was by using a mouse and keyboard, so I had to switch control systems and re-learn everything.
I slowly worked my way through the routine, breaking it down into chunks that I could memorise in sections, before putting the whole thing together. There was a surprising amount to remember: when to transition between gaits, where I should be in the rectangle, and the order of all the moves. Much like learning a piece on the piano, I identified 'problem' areas and gave them extra practice time. The cantering sections were particularly tricky to learn, simply because everything was happening at high speed, while the tricky mechanics of the half-pass meant these segments could easily go wrong.
After a few evenings of practice, things suddenly clicked - and I found I had the whole five-minute test memorised in my head. To reinforce this I physically re-enacted the routine in my back garden, trotting and dancing around to mimic the actions of my horse. It's actually a very tough workout, I'll have you know.
At last, I was finally ready to perform the routine - but alas, disaster struck. I had arranged to join The Rift Trails in one of their semi-regular dressage competitions, but one of the main organisers fell ill, and the event had to be postponed. Not to be deterred, I thought of an alternative idea, and recruited Bertie to help me record the routine. It was an audience of one, but even this was enough to make me feel nervous; I was already sweating just thinking about the half-pass sections. I can only imagine what I would be like to perform in a real-life dressage competition, in front of hundreds of people, where anything could go wrong.
Our initial recording suffered from a technical problem, something I was actually quite thankful for, as in this attempt I accidentally dismounted mid-way through the routine ("I did wonder what was happening there," Bertie later told me). I wanted to treat the second attempt like a real performance, so I decided to stick with the result no matter what. Thankfully, things went pretty well, aside from a slightly pacey entry into the half-pass diagonals (that nearly took Bertie out). There were also a couple of transitions that I felt could have gone a little smoother. Given the number of ways it could have gone catastrophically wrong with a single button-press, however, it was a huge relief just to complete the performance.
With the performance complete, I sent the video off to The Rift Trails founder Chelsea Farace (known as 'chelsealiz' online), who happens to be a real-life equine photographer. She then diligently watched the performance and marked it, giving me detailed feedback on every movement and transition. "I used to run a local saddle club back in the day so this brought back a lot of memories," she said. "I had a lot of fun judging your dressage test and you did so well!"
I managed to score 330 out of 380, a percentage of 86.84, which is a fabulously high mark - particularly for Allegro's and my first ever dressage test. (For reference, the highest Grand Prix score at the 2020 Olympics was 84.379 per cent.) Farace generally had a lot of praise for our transitions, although it seems our rhythm and tempo could do with some work. It's some very fair feedback - even I knew that I'd overdone the rein-back as soon as it happened (darnit!) But overall, she was impressed by our effort, giving us a full 10/10 for general impression. "I was amazed at how you did all that without a real dressage ring, let alone remember everything," she added.
Another member of The Rift Trails called Kasper, who also has real-life dressage experience, had the following to add:
"Her transitions were relatively smooth overall. Each move was precise with little error. Collection was well done as well, using the slower trots in the game's animations to show that. The half-pass was executed really well considering I know a number of players who struggle to get it on the first try. Even though it was in-game, the routine was impressive and kept me interested with how well performed it was. Dressage in real life can be very challenging, and it can be in-game too with picking the right pace and making turns look smooth rather than sharp. She did really well making it look effortless. Every move I would rate between 8-10."
Personally, I'm pretty ecstatic about all this positive feedback - and frankly, that I was able to memorise a routine at all. I may not know how to do dressage on a real horse, but for all intents and purposes, I now have a real-life Grand Prix test in my noggin, which feels like a significant achievement. I've learned a lot about dressage in a short space of time, and I now have even greater respect for the riders who do this on real horses, which are less predictable and actually need training.
Weirdly enough, the process meant I formed an extremely strong emotional attachment to my digital horse. In my head it feels like Allegro and I trained for a competition together, and developed a unique bond in doing so. I normally feel quite fond of my Red Dead horses, but this is something special. A partnership forged in the dustbowl of MacFarlane's yard. The experience has also vastly improved my horse control within Red Dead Online: where before I would crash into wagons, I can now coolly slow down to a trot, and neatly avoid any problems.
Perhaps strangest of all, I've now developed a thirst for dressage. The process of refining movements to perfection, and the incessant struggle to achieve complete accuracy, is absolutely compelling. So if you ever hop on to Red Dead Online and see a horse and rider doing circles around MacFarlane's Ranch, you know who that will be. And as for the mystery of why Red Dead Online has dressage mechanics in the first place? I still have no idea. Some equestrians are best left unanswered.