It seems impossible not to have horses in a title that features the wild west as prominently (and supernaturally) as the Weird West does. Regardless of how players choose to undertake the journey ahead of them, horses will be a key mechanic for players to move about.
Users that choose to pre-purchase Weird West will receive a starting horse, Calamity, which can be retrieved from the mailbox at the beginning of the game. For those who don’t, you’ll need to purchase a horse from stables that are scattered about the map for roughly $200 at the beginning of the game. Opting to move forward without a horse will make bounty hunting in Weird West far more difficult: these timed events can expire if players don’t reach them in time.
Aside from bounty hunting, moving about without a horse is feasible: the title encourages players to explore at their own pace. Still, having a horse cuts the travel time in half, and there is a lot of traveling to be done across the full map of Weird West. Expect to need to purchase a horse for some characters at the beginning of their journey, and the price increases slowly as the chapters conclude.
Alternatively, players can simply steal a horse in scenes that they load into, although it may cost the character Honor. These horses can be used to get from one destination to another, but the horse leaves after the completion of a single journey. It’s possible that you could find yourself loading into a scene that doesn’t have horses available to steal, but for some, this may be a worthwhile roll of the dice in exchange for saving more than $200.
Stealing horses, however, means that players are missing out on additional inventory space. Cowpokes will constantly find their bags bursting with loot as they explore the world of Weird West, and even using the inventory slots in other characters may not be enough. Horses have a saddlebag inventory that offers an additional 32 slots of space. All horses have a shared storage system, meaning a horse stored with ore in the first chapter can be retrieved in a later chapter with a completely different owned horse.
Finally, horses cannot be upgraded to move faster. While new chapters of Weird West will introduce higher costs for horses, these newer stallions traverse the map at exactly the same speed. All horses that we’ve found thus far have matching speed, (whether purchased, stolen, or from the pre-order bonus) gauged by traveling between two pre-determined points on the map.
