Diablo 4 makes you wait a painfully long time before it allows you to start trekking across Sanctua🐼ry on horseback. Before you get your first mount, you must travel to the four corners of the map on foot and complete roughly half of the campaign. Every time you leave town to set out on a lengthy hike across the monster-infested wasteland, you’ll see NPCs coming and going on horseback, just to rub it in. Diablo 4 makes exploring on foot as tedious and time consuming as possible so that when you eventually do get a horse, you’ll be grateful for it.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t take long to realize that controlling the horse is kind of terrible, and a lot of times you’ll actually be better off just wandering arಌound without it. I have a laundry list of complaints about the way mounts work in Diablo 4, and I hope fixing them 💙is high up on Blizzard’s list of priorities.
Where to even begin. I think the most glaring issue is the way that mounts stop dead in their tracks if they encounter any ki💫nd of obstacle. You can, and will, get stuck on the most imperceptibly small pebbles in the road, 🔥plant matter in the swamps, and bits of castle rubble in the countryside. Because of the way that horses pivot when they move, sometimes you can’t free yourself from geography without fully turning around and changing direction. Such collision issues might be difficult to solve, given how fast the map is and how many tiny obstructions exist. This is one of the most frustrating things about mounts, but it may be the one we just have to get used to.
I’m more concerned with the small annoyances that all add up to make mounted travel feel terrible. For instance, there’s an awkward lack of momentum after using a boost that makes horses feel like they ജhave two speeds. Instead of gradually slowing down when the boost expires, the horse will instantly revert back to its normal speed. It gives traversal a jerky, uncomfortable rhythm that could easily be fixed if the boost momentum was just feathered a little bit better.
Did you know that the speed of your horse ไis tied to the distance of your cursor from your character? I don’t know why this is, but the further out you drag your mouse, the faster you go. This means that playing in ultrawide can make your horse run faster. This also goes for the range of certain skills as well, like the sorcerer’s teleport. It seems like a compromise made for controllers, whi༺ch allow you to slow down and speed up by adjusting how much your tilt the left thumbsticks.
The problem is that this means you can run faster east and west ve𓆏rsus north and south, since screens are always wider than they are tall. It also creates an issue with the UI at the bottom of the screen blocking your pa𝐆th. You want to drag your mouse out as far as possible, but if you pass over your UI with your cursor the horse will just stop moving completely. None of these issues affect controller players, but they’re incredibly frustrating on mouse and keyboard.
There’s so many little annoyances that build up over time. The map is full of gaps you have to jump over. Sometimes your horse will jump it and sometimes it won’t, and there’s no way to tell if it's going to until you're awkwardly standing at the edge of a cliff trying to force the horse to jump. Any time you have to get off the horse to jump a gap, climb a wall, or use a rope bridge, there’s a cooldown that prevents you from immediately getting back on the horse. Navigating tight corners is unnecessarily difficult, and running through crowds of enemies is always unpredictable. Sometimes you move through the crowd and keep going, sometimes you’ll stop, and sometimes your mount will completely turn around, seemingly for no reason.
I often find it easier to just walk instead of mounting up, especially if the terrain is rough or there's a lot of gaps to jump over. I can only assume Blizzard doesn’t want the horses to be this frustrating, given how much of the in-game shop is dedicated to selling horse cosmetics, so I hope these issues can get some attention sooner rather than later. I’m not sure how I feel about the amount of traversal Diablo 4 requires just to get from dungeon to dungeon, but I’m already getting pretty tired of horse shenanigans.