The most important news related to the recently announced (and released) Oblivion Remaster is the fact that the infamous horse armor was updated as well. It’s an extra $9.99 for the Deluxe Edition of the game, which includes the horse armor and two other categories of goodies, which means it’s — if you divide it by three — nearly the same price it was 19 years ago: $2.50.
Back in 2006, $2.50 downloadable content was a joke — an insult to a generation of people who were used to buying a game with everything included. It seems quaint now, but when Bethesda first asked players to pay for purely cosmetic horse armor, they laughed. “Horse armor” became synonymous with overpriced and pointless DLC, evolving into a meme that has haunted Bethesda for years.
According to Joel Burgess, a senior level designer at Bethesda at the time, the original horse armor was a test. Bethesda leveraged its mod-friendly development tools to see how much it could do with DLC. Horse armor galloped so Oblivion’s bigger DLC could run.
“We needed something that would test enough of our systems, add some new art, add some new dialogue, add some new hooks and quests to the game; something that would test the pipeline and just sort of feel out the market for what was the best thing we could possibly do,” Burgess told Polygon in 2015. “So what we came up with was horse armor.”
Today, you’d be lucky to get any kind of cosmetic, horse or human, for under $20. Live service and gacha games have completely transformed the economics of the industry, and a lot of it traces all the way back to the era when publishers were still figuring out how to sell DLC to people. We went from balking at horse armor to celebrating skins that cost much, much more.
Whether or not you still have some resentment for horse armor, I think we can all agree that the Oblivion Remaster wouldn’t be complete without it.
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