The days of slowly getting off your horse to kill a wolf and then slowly climbing back on to get where you're going in Skyrim are OVER. Fans asked for it in Oblivion, but it never happened. Then we thought Skyrim's muscly chargers might be able to handle a bit of rider combat, but it hasn't happened, until now. The Bethblog mention that mounted combat has been casually added in the latest beta patch. You can opt in and try it out right now by selecting Skyrim from the beta participation list on the accounts tab in your Steam settings menu.
The patch also fixes a few glitches with the recently added ranged and magic kill cams, another feature added in a post-launch patch. We expected a bunch of post-release bug fixes, but these bonus features are a pleasant surprise. Grab a glance at the beta patch notes here.
NEW FEATURES
Mounted Combat - Skyrim now allows you to do melee and ranged combat while riding a horse
BUG FIXES
General stability and memory optimizations
General AI pathfinding optimizations and bug fixes
Optimizations and crash fixes for data leaks
Fixed rare crash with lighting
Fixed crashes related to loading and saving games
Fixed crash with summoned creatures/NPCs
Fixed rare issue where saves would be corrupted
Improved logic for when ranged kill cams are played
Fixed issue with ranged kill cams while killing a dragon
Fixed rare issue with certain ranged kill cams not playing properly
Fixed issue with nirnroot lighting not properly cleaning up
Fixed issue where bow damage was being calculated incorrectly
Fixed rare problem with werewolf kill moves would not finish animating properly
In “The Break of Dawn” fixed rare issue where Meridia’s Beacon would disappear from player’s inventory
Fixed occasional issue where followers would disappear after player pays off a bounty after committing a crime
Fixed issue where certain creatures and NPCs would fail to respawn properly
Fixed rare issue with dialogue subtitles not displaying properly
Fixed issue with water appearing blurry when loading a saved game after creating a save underwater
