You broke your butt knuckle <| sep |> The whole point of the elder scrolls games is to give a large amount of systems that are entirely optional , putting focus into the horses is going to mean that entire other systems get neglected , so it makes sense to limit the amount of time money on something that isn ' t very important . For example if the horse mechanics were better in skyrim the game wouldn ' t have improved as a whole that much . But if the horse mechanics were worse in Red Dead the game would of been significantly worse , due to every player using them frequently and them essentially being a requirement in every story mission . I ' m not even the biggest fan of Skyrim , but its design intentions are very clear .