Announcement Trailer for Horse Tales – Emerald Valley Ranch: An Open World Horse Adventure Game with Breeding, Building, Racing and more
French Publisher Microids and German Developer Aesir Interactive are very happy to announce their upcoming game Horse Tales – Emerald Valley Ranch, an equestrian open world adventure coming this winter to PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and Steam PC.
What sets this one apart from all competitors: I am part of the team that’s making it. As the project’s creative producer, I’m excited to share our teaser trailer and give you all some exclusive new insights into what to expect from Horse Tales – Emerald Valley Ranch.
Welcome to Cape Emerald
In good old genre tradition Horse Tales – Emerald Valley Ranch begins with the protagonist finding their family estate in desperate need of repairs:
A holiday at your aunt’s place turns out to be far from what you expected: the family’s once prestigious estate has fallen into disrepair and you are stranded there…
Embark on a delightful adventure to befriend the peninsula’s residents and freely explore the vast wilderness around you! Breed and tame horses, train them and compete in thrilling races. All while taking on the mission to fully renovate your family’s ranch by building, upgrading and customizing it with a variety of stables, horse care stations and decorations.
Horse Tales will give you a main storyline to follow, the beats and themes of which I am not going to spoil here. By playing through the story, you gain access to more areas of the Cape Emerald peninsula, find blueprints and gather resources for more buildings to place on your home base, discover challenging race tracks and more ways to restore your family name.
Gameplay Systems
The game is meant to appeal to a younger target audience on one hand, but has been intended from the start to also satisfy the desires of teen and adult horse game fans as well: Today, I’d like to shine a light on what I think are some of the most exciting features for the latter part of the audience – which I very much consider myself to be a part of.
Stable Expansion and Resource Gathering: Your dilapidated family estate is a blank canvas: as you progress through missions and explore the world, you will find blueprints to buildings that unlock Horse Care and Customization features. To construct the buildings on suitable building slots, you will need resources such as different types of wood and stone, which you find out in the open world.
Horse Traits: Horses have personality traits that influence how they behave in the world: some horses prefer forests to fields or vice versa, others are scared of heights. Some of these traits can be trained for improvements, others are unchangeable personality quirks.
Horse Breeding: Our horses have a genetic pattern very closely based on real life horse genetics. While not a 100% accurate simulation, Horse Tales – Emerald Valley Ranch will definitely be able to satisfy players interested in strategic breeding for color, stats and traits. To breed horses (or tame wild ones!), you need enough resources on your Estate - that means constructing buildings for Food, Shelter and Activity in order to provide for your animals.
Make a Name for Yourself: By helping people out, competing in races and exploring new areas in the world, you gain Fame, which will let you access more building space on your home base and homesteads across Cape Emerald. You can optimize this in a few ways: Gathering Fame through horse racing for example is directly influenced by your horse’s Charisma value as well as its current condition.
Customization: You are able to play as a masculine or feminine character. The dialogues are kept as gender neutral as possible and all clothing and hair style options are available regardless of the character model you pick at the start, giving you plenty of room to roleplay as a main character of any gender and expression you like.
A Lush and Large Open World: This part is perhaps the most obvious from the announcement teaser, but it still deserves to be said: Our team at Aesir has created an absolutely gorgeous, colorful open world with dozens of lovely spots and little secrets to discover.
Bringing Horse Games to the Next Level
As some of you already know, I’ve been giddy about this project’s development ever since I first heard of it from former Aesir CEO Wolfgang Emmer back in late 2019, then under its working title “Stable Girl”.
I am incredibly excited for you all to see what we’ve been making, and to try it for yourselves. I am of course biased here – I’m directly involved and I absolutely want this project to succeed so I can make more good horse games at Aesir in the future – but I genuinely believe that Horse Tales – Emerald Valley Ranch has a chance to catapult the oft-neglected genre of horse games to a whole new level and to show the market just how much untapped potential there is for peaceful open world games with prominent equestrian components.
I joined the project as a consultant back in Spring 2021, and then as project lead and creative producer in November 2021. Thanks to the existing Horses & Video Games community and especially our early playtesters, we’ve been able to crowdsource a bunch of horse knowledge that made it into the game in one way or another, which brings me a ton of joy.
Managing Horse Tales and its team of up to 20 people has been a significant professional challenge for someone used to making games with 1-2 coworkers, but actually being able to directly work on a horse game project of this scope is still unbelievably cool to me.
I cannot wait for all of you to give Horse Tales – Emerald Valley Ranch a try later this year.
Horse Tales – Emerald Valley Ranch will be released in Winter 2022 for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and Windows PC. Wishlist Horse Tales on Steam right here and check your local gaming retailers for preordering the console version.