Horses have been a part of the Story of Seasons series since the very first game in 1996, but their actual usefulness has always left something to be desired. Though you can win races or bet on them during festivals in some games, more often than not they feel like they’re just a mode of transportation and little else. Being able to get new colors and styles being probably the most exciting thing to do with them in some recent games in particular, no longer even serving as a mobile shipping bin or doing something practical like eating weeds.
Even the latest game in the series, Pioneers of Olive Town, simply has horses as an optional means of transportation and require no care whatsoever. No feeding, no brushing, no talking to them, no training them…. It just feels like an obvious missing link to the overall gameplay for the series, and farming sims in general, when actual horse care is an extremely involved and potentially very lucrative business in the real world.
Breeding horses is an obviously good starting point, with modern Story of Seasons games already incorporating a mechanic that requires you to breed animals to get higher quality byproducts. For a horse, their speed, stamina, coordination, and patterns/colors of their coat could all be factors changed/improved by breeding them and contribute to various horse-focused activities or events.
Expanding on Racing
Racing is a recurring series staple and is thankfully done pretty well. A simple mini-game that raising a capable horse will allow you to consistently win. Where do you go from there, though? What’s the long-term goal outside of winning the local race? Every other animal on the ranch is an on-going activity that gives some form of return like milk or eggs so if you’re actively breeding and training several horses at a time you’ll probably want them to appear in races more than once or twice a year. It’s also important to maintain game balance so horses don’t completely take over gameplay by filling the year with events for the player to manually participate in. There’s not a lot of contemporaries in the genre that have really tried to address the problem either, so perhaps the best thing to do would be to look outside it.
SEGA’s Yakuza series may be a good place to start. Several games in the series include miniature business management sims that are generally fast-paced, menu-driven affairs covering concepts like operating a construction company, baseball teams, real estate, and more. Using some of their concepts, maybe a Story of Seasons player could be able manage their horses and even new aspects like jockeys and caretakers as their horses travel during the local off-season while in return receiving a portion of simulated race results/winnings/prizes. It could even be a treat for long-time players to learn their horse is competing in places with recognizable names like Waffle Island or Flower Bud Village that week. To push it even further, perhaps it could be part of a game’s online component and feature other player’s horses being the opponents in these simulated races.
It might seem like it could be super involved, but, ideally, this would essentially be checking a few menus every so often and letting an invested player’s multiple horses prosper and gain fame while being otherwise ignorable for players who don’t want to delve into the activity. This way, racing could become a more significant, rewarding reason to raise horses without completely taking over as the focus of the game.
New Activities
Racing isn’t the only sport for horses though. For Olympic enthusiasts, I’m sure they’re aware of equestrian events like Dressage, Show Jumping, and Cross-country. By expanding annual horse events to include something that demands more training, horse raising can become a more rewarding activity for ranchers that provides a new gameplay element for them to want to work towards and excel at.
The main drawback of including these kinds of events would be more on the development side than the player-side however. An event like dressage requires a ton of additional animation to work well as a bulk of the event focuses on a horse’s movement, and an event like Cross-Country would ideally feature numerous unique assets for your horse to navigate across multiple courses with different kinds of layouts so that it’s not a one-and-done event and still encourages you to raise horses that excel in different things.
It’s kind of a lot to ask for a game that’s not exactly dedicated to the idea of horse raising and just includes it as a side-activity to the core farming experience. Maybe that’s why no major farm sim has actually attempted it yet… It’s certainly a large obstacle for any developer to overcome. Personally speaking, I do hope the issue is solved some day soon though. With the overall theming of the genre being on cooperation with nature, raising plants and bonding with animals, it feels unusual that one of the real-world examples of an industry that prides itself on animals and people competing together has fallen by the wayside for farm sims.
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