In Breath of the Wild you can obtain up to six saddles and six bridles to customize your horses, which originally was only something to change the looks. However, the Ancient Bridle and the Ancient Saddle that were added in the second DLC Pack, The Champions' Ballad, changed things. The new horse gear introduced abilities, where all of the previous sets basically became obsolete.
The Ancient Saddle lets you call your horse from any location, where it gets teleported to you. And the Ancient Bridle adds two spurs of stamina to your horse:
This leaves all the previous sets of horse gear in a bad spot. Why wouldn't you want to use these features? It's functionality over aesthetics. A solution would have been tying these abilities to other key items, but what's done is done...
However, if the Ancient Bridle and Saddle have special features, then so should the other sets of horse gear. There are certainly other benefits that could be offered by the different saddles and bridles to create real alternatives to the Ancient set, while also keeping horses more relevant overall in the sight of the Master Cycle Zero.
And here's a list of ideas what each item could have provided:
- Traveler's Bridle: Sharp Turns
- Traveler's Saddle: Weapon, Shield and Bow Stash
- Knight's Bridle: Strength Up
- Knight's Saddle: Strength Up
- Royal Bridle: Max Bond
- Royal Bridle: Mild Temperament
- Extravagant Bridle: Speed Up
- Extravagant Saddle: Speed Up
- Monster Bridle: Disguise and Blinders
- Monster Saddle: Night Speed Up x2
Well... of course it's probably impossible to beat the usefulness of the Ancient Saddle, but at least the bridles could offer some interesting alternatives, where you might even want to mix different sets with each other. Still, this is nothing spectacular and most of it just tampers with the remaining horse stats: Strength, Speed, Temperament and Bond.
So, the Knight's set simply increases the horse's strength with both parts, so the horse has more health points. And the Extravagant's set increases the horse's speed. The Royal set changes any horse's behavior to that of a mild temperament with a full bond. It's probably not that useful, but it fits the picture of how Zelda told you to treat your horses nicely.
The Monster Bridle and Saddle then take a page from some of the Set Bonuses from Link's armor collection. The Monster Saddle would increase your speed by two units, but only during the night. With the bridle on your horse, certain monsters like Bokoblins or Lynels would be confused on first sight and mistake you for one of their own.
In addition, with the blinders of Monster Bridle the horse won't shy away from monsters. This also works with obstacles, which would allow for more classic horse controls and would probably be useful for the Horse Obstacle Course. So, use this set during the night for some crazy speed records.
The most interesting ideas here are tied to the Traveler's Bridle and Saddle, which is probably a bad thing, because those are amiibo items and therefore are locked behind a pay wall much like all the quality of life improvements that came with the DLC. But it's the set that was shown in the first trailer of the game at E3 2014. There you could see, how Link had his bow, a shield and sword attached to his Traveler's Saddle:
You can even still see his shield on the saddle of the amiibo figure, but this didn't make it into the final game. Instead Link always carries his equipped items on himself at all times.
Now, with a stash feature on the Traveler's Saddle you would have to ability to place your current sword, shield or bow on your horse. It would work similar to the gear displays in Link's house, where in this case you wouldn't be able to mount your horse from behind anymore, only from the side. If you interact with your horse from behind, it would access the saddle gear. So, there's a slight disadvantage to this system.
If your horse dies, it drops the equipment. And you won't be able to change the saddle again, as long as the Traveler's Saddle still has equipment attached to it. This seems needlessly complicated, however, which is probably why something like this didn't make it into the final game. But it's still an idea for what this saddle could do.
Last, but not least, the Traveler's Bridle would allow for sharper turns with your horse. (Yeah, I was running out of ideas here. But feel free to give any ideas in the comments!)
Dragon Bridles and Saddles
Why stop at adding abilities to the existing bridles and saddles? We could also think of some additional ones, where horse gear based on the game's three dragons comes to mind: Farosh, Naydra and Dinraal.
Those could be obtained by offering the horn of a dragon for its bridle and the claw of a dragon for its saddle at the respective Spring. So, if you put Dinraal's Horn into the Spring of Power, the Goddess Statue will reward you with Dinraal's Bridle and so on.
Here's what they would do:
- Farosh's Bridle: Thunder Breath
- Farosh's Saddle: Unshockable
- Naydra's Bridle: Ice Breath
- Naydra's Saddle: Unfreezable
- Dinraal's Bridle: Fire Breath
- Dinraal's Saddle: Fireproof
The Dragon Bridles would activate a new elemental "breath" attack, which could be activated by pulling the horse back. These shock, freeze or burn your enemies respectively. The Ice Breath could work similar to the Blizzard Rod for example.
The Dragon Saddles on the other hand defend your horse from such attacks, so that they can't be shocked, frozen or burnt. Dinraal's Saddle theoretically could even let you take your horse to Death Mountain, which finally would be a big advantage over the Ancient Saddle and even the Master Cycle Zero. You just have to be careful not to run it into lava.
PS: With so many saddles it really would be a good idea to keep them in their own tab inside the inventory, instead of stuffing them all into the Key Items tab.
No comments:
Post a Comment