Diablo 4’s $8 Horse Armour is a hell we created for ourselves
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Welcome to episode 55 of The Best Games Ever Show: The Best Game With Horse Armor (But You Can’t Have Oblivion)
2006 feels like a lifetime ago. I’m sure at least for some of you reading, it literally was. In which case, you won’t remember the absolute stench that was unleashed on the concept of, get this, paying real money for in-game cosmetic items, on top of the money you’d already shelled out for the game itself. It seemed unthinkable, until Bethesda went and did it, releasing the infamous Horse Armor pack for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion for 200 Microsoft Points, the equivalent of about £2 in real money today.
The DLC was pretty innocuous on its own. Although barely substantial, it added a short quest to the game that directs you to a particular merchant, and eight different sets of equine armor similar in style to the character variants available in the game. Although these are generally believed to be purely cosmetic, they actually generously increased the health of any horse they were applied to, reducing the chances of losing your mount in a fight. Although marginally useful, the DLC was dirt cheap and completely ignorable. By today’s standards, it seems strange that he would cause such a fuss.
But it was a canary in the coal mine for free aftermarket monetization of single player games, and a pretty notable contributor to the fact that almost every release imaginable today, 17 years later, is some kind of of bullshit live service with three premium games. currency and a battle pass. At the time, Bethesda was experimenting with a new idea, made possible by the relatively new fields of digital distribution and microtransactions. Todd Howard probably didn’t intend for it to be a Sliding Doors moment where the industry chose the road to hell.
And yet, it’s not entirely their fault, because the fact remains that the players absolutely enjoyed it. Horse Armor made a lot of money for Bethesda, it ranked for a long time as one of their most popular pieces of DLC, and while the criticism they leveled at it made them avoid producing such insubstantial content ever again, it did inspire a lucrative industry of useless cosmetics. on which empires have been built, from Valve to Epic.
So Horse Armor may have been the butt of all jokes back in 2006, but in the end it got the last laugh, with the phenomenon coming full circle this week in the form of premium micro-DLC for Diablo 4 that come at an absurd price: in the higher, they are more expensive than many new games. you can buy directly minecraft dungeons and I still have change left for a Big Tasty for what some of those cosmetic packs are after.
But, in the 17 years since Oblivion’s most infamous transgression, which Horse Armor games have stood out above the rest? What is the best game with Horse Armor, premium or not, apart from The Elder Scrolls IV? This is a question I asked our regular panelists on The Best Games Ever Show, and to find out what everyone responded with, you’ll have to watch or listen. Fortunately, you’ve stumbled across a web page full of options to do just that. Cor!
Watch the video version here:
You can also just read the summary below, if you’re the type of person who jumps to the last page of a book (an evil, a reprobate, a bad seed).
Thomas
tom chose Football coach for at this point we are powerless to stop it.
kelsey
kelsey picked Return to Monkey Island on the grounds that it contains useless horse armor as a joke about Oblivion, which on the one hand was an extremely dated gag when it came out, but on the other hand, we’re doing this entire podcast because Diablo 4 is now on it, so it’s still quite current actually.
billcliffe
James opted for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt instead of being able to pick Oblivion itself, on the grounds that W3’s horse armor is really useful, comes at no extra charge, and is part of a game that is largely considered to have done DLC right: with a litany of free add-ons along with two premium but extremely jam-packed expansions.
“What is the best game show of all time?” you ask? Well, it’s essentially a 30 minute panel where people (Jim Trinca and associates) decide on the best game in a specific category. That’s all. It’s good. listen to it.
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