A new update for Assassin’s Creed Shadows drops today, and it includes many new features and improvements to the new hit installment in the franchise. Patch 1.0.2 has introduced several desperately-needed quality of life updates, including bulk selling and/or dismantling, the ability to reset Mastery Nodes, and most importantly, they have finally updated the horse’s functionality to be more user-friendly. This includes a feature I’ve been waiting on since release that is absolutely essential in a game as vast as AC Shadows: horse auto-follow.

The new update for AC Shadows has also addressed my biggest gripe with the mount, which is the horse’s slowed movement speed through cities. The slow movement made riding horseback completely pointless whenever you entered key areas. The update is a good sign of things to come for AC Shadows, and it shows that developers are aware of some of the annoying gameplay mechanics that might be frustrating players in various situations, such as Yasuke’s exploration pitfalls. The updated horse mechanics are a major step in the right direction.

Why Auto-Follow Is Essential In AC Shadows

The Massive Open World Requires Long Journeys

For some inexplicable reason, no auto-follow feature for your mount was included in the original release of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which seems like a massive missed opportunity for a world this massive. The feature will allow you to enable auto-follow while riding your horse, making the horse automatically run along the designated path toward your most recent pinned location, or your active quest if no other pins are placed. Even with the various fast travel locations and Kakurega in the game, you’ll often travel on horseback as you level up and explore new regions.

Being able to kick on the autopilot and relax your fingers for a moment is really nice, and it makes better use of the pathfinding system.

Auto-follow is a godsend and removes an unnecessarily annoying part of the game. Depending on where you’re trying to go, journeys on horseback can take a long time, and now you don’t have to sit there and tediously watch every movement of the horse as you go from point A to point B.

Being able to kick on the autopilot and relax your fingers for a moment is really nice, and it makes better use of the pathfinding system. My second-favorite feature of patch 1.0.2, increased horse speed in cities, makes this even better.

Horse Speed In Cities Has Been Increased

Now The Horse Is Faster Than Naoe & Yasuke On Foot

My biggest gripe with the horse mechanics in AC Shadows was definitely the strange decision to slow down the horse in cities and towns with crowds of people. This effect might have started as a good idea, but in practice, it just disincentivized me from using the horse once I entered crowded locations. There’s no good reason that Naoe or Yasuke should be faster than a horse when going through a city, but they’ve finally done away with the slowed-down-horse effect.

I cannot emphasize enough how much of a game-changer this is for me in terms of general playability for AC Shadows. While the game is quite enjoyable and fun to explore overall, features like a slow horse in cities could break your immersion and take you out of the experience. Doing away with slowed horse movement and re-introducing auto-follow as an option are both massive wins for fans of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and it’s only one of the many improvements and updates included in patch 1.0.2.