Episode 55: The best game with horse armour (but you can't have Oblivion)

The Best Games Ever Podcast

Welcome to The Best Games Ever Show episode 55: The best game with horse armour (but you can't have Oblivion)

2006 feels like a lifetime ago. I’m sure for at least some of you reading, it literally was. In which case you won’t remember the utter stink that was kicked up over the concept of – get this – paying actual real money for in-game cosmetic items, on top of the money you’d already forked out for the game itself. It seemed unthinkable, until Bethesda went and did it, releasing the infamous Horse Armour pack for Oblivion for 200 Microsoft Points, the equivalent of about £2 in real money today.

The DLC was fairly innocuous in itself. Though hardly substantial, it added a short quest to the game directing you to a particular merchant, and eight different sets of equine armour similar in style to the player character variants available in the game. Though 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. Though marginally useful, the DLC was dirt cheap and completely ignorable. By today’s standards, it seems quaint that it would cause such a fuss.

But it was a canary in the coalmine for the gratuitous aftermarket monetisation of single-player games, and a fairly notable contributor to the fact that almost every conceivable release nowadays, 17 years later, is some kind of live service bollocks with three sets of premium currency and a battle pass. At the time, Bethesda was experimenting with a new idea, which had been made possible by the relatively new fields of digital distribution and microtransactions. Todd Howard probably didn’t mean for it to be a Sliding Doors moment in which the industry chose the path to hell.

But, in the 17 years since Oblivion’s most infamous transgression, which games with Horse Armour have stood above the rest? What is the best game with Horse Armour, premium or otherwise, aside from The Elder Scrolls IV? This a question that I put to our regular panellists on The Best Games Ever Show, and in order to find out what everyone came back with, you’ll have to watch or listen to it. Luckily, you’ve stumbled upon one of the ways of doing just that. Cor!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices