A very powerful information associated to the lately introduced (and launched) Oblivion Remaster is the truth that the notorious horse armor was up to date as properly. It’s an additional $9.99 for the Deluxe Version of the sport, which incorporates the horse armor and two different classes of goodies, which suggests it’s — when you divide it by three — practically the identical worth it was 19 years in the past: $2.50.
Again in 2006, $2.50 downloadable content material was a joke — an insult to a era of people that have been used to purchasing a recreation with the whole lot included. It appears quaint now, however when Bethesda first requested gamers to pay for purely beauty horse armor, they laughed. “Horse armor” turned synonymous with overpriced and pointless DLC, evolving right into a meme that has haunted Bethesda for years.
In line with Joel Burgess, a senior degree designer at Bethesda on the time, the unique horse armor was a take a look at. Bethesda leveraged its mod-friendly improvement instruments to see how a lot it may do with DLC. Horse armor galloped so Oblivion’s larger DLC may run.
“We wanted one thing that might take a look at sufficient of our programs, add some new artwork, add some new dialogue, add some new hooks and quests to the sport; one thing that might take a look at the pipeline and simply form of really feel out the marketplace for what was one of the best factor we may probably do,” Burgess advised epicgamejourney in 2015. “So what we got here up with was horse armor.”
In the present day, you’d be fortunate to get any sort of beauty, horse or human, for underneath $20. Dwell service and gacha video games have utterly reworked the economics of the trade, and a number of it traces all the way in which again to the period when publishers have been nonetheless determining the way to promote DLC to individuals. We went from balking at horse armor to celebrating skins that value a lot, rather more.
Whether or not or not you continue to have some resentment for horse armor, I believe we are able to all agree that the Oblivion Remaster wouldn’t be full with out it.
