Assassin’s Creed Shadows introduces an autonomous horse feature, but I strongly advise against relying on it.

Ubisoft are giving their Sengoku throat-slicing sim Assassin’s Creed Shadows an update today that’ll let players activate auto-pathing on their horse, essentially turning it into a self-driving car with hooves. This feature was present in previous games of the series, not to mention other similar open world games, and lets you press a button to make the horse auto-trot to your next objective. For some players (those with accessibility concerns, for example) this is a helpful update that will lighten some of the burden of control. But if you’re one of the people who simply likes to use this feature for the sake of efficiency or speed, I’d like you to ask yourself: why do I play these games?

The developers detail the changes in an update post on Steam. Before I go on a good-natured mini-rant about virtual horse-riding, let’s look at what other handy stuff the update adds. For example, the game will now let you reset the skill tree, so you can undo all those ill-advised investments in the wrong weapon types. You can now dismantle or sell multiple items at once, ironing out a minor annoyance when selling loot at shops. Not to mention a bevy of other smaller tweaks like “Improved balancing of boss fights” and bug fixes like “Knocked out NPCs no longer stand up immediately when attacking them.”

But it’s the autohorse that’s making headlines, because there’s a general conception that this is a feature many players want.

“Auto-Follow the road is back to help you navigate while riding your horse,” say Ubi in the patch notes. “Simply activate the pathfinder to enable Auto-Follow, and your horse will automatically follow the road to your marked destination. We’ve also increased horse speeds in cities so you can get to your destination faster.”

Auto-follow. It is efficient. It is fast. It is productive. This type of design makes a certain kind of sense in an open world Ubithon in which icons must be hoovered up and heads must be ticked off a very lengthy to-kill list in blood red ink. But I want players to ask themselves: what are you doing once you hand over the reins, literally and figuratively, to this video game? Once the task of being in control of an animal – of using your mind and hands to steer down dirt roads of your own choosing – once that is handed off to machinery and code, what are you actually playing?

You can probably tell by now that I feel such automation in games about exploring and inhabiting detailed virtual worlds contributes to a quiet erosion of playfulness and “presence”. It’s basically an invitation to scroll TikTok while you non-ride your horse. Monster Hunter Wilds recently introduced rideable dinos with overbearing autopathing and twinkly firefly trails that essentially removed any semblance of hunting from their game about, uh, hunting. It was a strange choice.

Not least because Capcom’s reptilian wrecker has a lush and gorgeous world, just like Shadows. Auto-pathing is the fastest way to get the player to instantly disengage from all that craft, all the geography and world design, all the effort of hundreds of artists and designers. If we cannot even “be present” in a facsimile of 1500s Japan, or a fictional desert full of sand worms, will we ever manage it in reality? But maybe that doesn’t matter to you at all. Maybe you can’t even finish reading this sentence before your brain ejects into the next room. That’s okay. Go get your brain. It’s important to have a brain.

I’m being snarky, but it’s only because I know from my Assassin’s Creed Shadows review that the game is best enjoyed when you’re not in a rush, when you take in the changes to the world brought by the game’s cycling seasons. And most importantly, when you play with that space through movement (this is literally what video games are – movement in space). The cognitive offloading of a human-animal relationship central to travel, far from freeing up brainspace to enjoy the passing scenery, just invites you to think of travel itself as a chore, a grind, a schlep. Instead of what it could be: a journey, sojourn, a pilgrimage. You control your horse and your brain is focused. You activate auto-follow and your brain thinks: now what?