Striding difficulty setting (Patreon)

Showing you the new striding difficulty setting! This feature was added due to the striding mechanic becoming a mandatory part of the gameplay. I've written about this decision on a plenty of earlier posts already, so I won't yap more about it this time. I recommend reading the earlier posts if you haven't.

The Jump Striding Difficulty setting comes with 3 levels :

Easy  - The easy option requires 25% accuracy in jump timing. In other words - 75% of every canter animation loop is jumpable time - you have to quite majorly fail the timing to end up in a refusal. You can also think of this as - if you were to ride around on the easy setting without paying any attention striding (jump at completely random times), you'd still be expected to clear every 3 out of 4 jumps. That being IF the horse in question doesn't adjust strides by itself - with the auto-striding horses I would estimate the likelihood of success being closer to 100%, given that other requirements (take-off distance, speed) are also correct.

Normal - This is the default setting and is closest to the demo. The normal mode requires 50% accuracy, so exactly half the canter loop is jumpable, and the other half is not. If one were to jump around with the normal setting randomly, every other jump would be expected to fail. With auto-striding horses the normal setting is still quite forgiving though and thus should provide an ideal learning curve to newbie players.

Realistic - The realistic option is the hardest one, requiring 75% accuracy. This means that only 25% of every canter stride is jumpable time, aligning with the duration of the suspension phase (all hooves off the ground) in a real horse's canter stride. This mode is about twice as hard as the demo. It setting requires careful jump timing, even with horses that can automatically adjust strides. Jumping with this setting at random is impossible and would nearly always result in a refusal. I myself use this setting and at this point am very used to it, so it's definitely still playable with practise.

In the video I tried my best to demonstrate randomly jumping on the easy setting versus an advanced realistic setting. As you can see, the easy setting only results in refusals every now and then. I do recognize however that I as a player am extremely used to the striding mechanic so my testing of this might not be perfect. Depending on player feedback the accuracy requirements might fluctuate in the future.