Assassin's Creed origins developers discovered that their incredibly detailed horse-riding mechanics were completely broken because the animals kept twitching violently during motion capture sessions.

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Assassin's Creed origins developers discovered that their incredibly detailed horse-riding mechanics were completely broken because the animals kept twitching violently during motion capture sessions. It turns out that putting a horse in a room filled with weird lights and strapping dozens of tiny reflective balls to its body deeply stresses the animal out, leading to terrible, unusable animation data. The animation team eventually had to scrap the expensive equine mocap and just hand-animate the horses themselves by meticulously studying video footage of galloping. The fact that a multi-million dollar studio thought they could just slap a high-tech mocap suit on a massive, skittish prey animal and expect it to act perfectly naturally is a stunning example of tech hubris in the modern gaming industry