Apologies for the long title.

In gaming circles, whenever the subject of overpriced DLC, lootboxes, and microtransactions comes up, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, inevitably gets mentioned. “Remember when the idea of paying $3.00 for horse armour was unacceptable?” someone will say. Simpler times indeed. Horse Armour has even become something of a meme for Bethesda themselves, spawning tongue-in-cheek addons for both Fallout 4 and Skyrim through Bethesda’s controversial and oft-maligned Creation Club service. However, it’s easy to lose sight of just how big a deal the Horse Armour DLC really was.

At the time when Oblivion came out, its predecessor Morrowind was still going strong, thanks to an active modding scene. Comparisons between the two would have been inevitable either way, but thanks to tools like Morrowind Script Extender, graphical updates like the widely used Better Bodies, and a lot of talented and dedicated individuals, it was pretty hard to call the older game an outdated product.

However, it goes even deeper than that. Morrowind had been given two phenomenal add-ons. Bloodmoon saw players travelling to the frozen plains of Solstheim for the first time, encountering new monsters and challenges in the lands of the Nords, and introduced a whole new way to play the game with werewolves, who featured as prominently in Bloodmoon’s quest as dragons do in Skyrim’s. Tribunal, meanwhile, took the player to the Dunmer capitol of Mournhold, a true, bustling metropolis that put pretty much every city in the base game to shame, and to the Clockwork City of Sotha Sil. Both expansions were rich in lore, offered plenty for the player to do, and both provided completely different visual styles to what could be found on the isle of Vvardenfel, with tons of completely new content.

The first DLC released for Oblivion was Horse Armor. That’s what they chose to lead with. Quite a step down, and even at a much lower price tag, it’s understandable that fans would have been disappointed. However, it actually goes deeper than that. What a lot of people don’t realize is that Morrowind actually had more official content released than just Bloodmoon and Tribunal. In fact, Bethesda released a total of eight different minor addons for Morrowind that would be roughly equivalent to what people were getting with Horse Armor.

Image courtesy of the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages.

Called “official mods”, these addons included new armour sets, quests, aesthetic enhancements, new weapons, and other things for players to discover, in bite-sized form, all of them made and distributed by Bethesda. Here’s the kicker, though. All of the official mods, 100% of them, each and every one were given away completely free. Going from all of that - Siege at Firemoth even included an entirely new landmass - to charging money for armoured horses with slightly more health…well, needless to say that’s quite the jump, and quite the change in philosophy. It was a particularly stinging blow back in 2006, and it’s important that the context there not be lost. When people talk about the changing attitudes with DLC since the days of Horse Armour, what they’re really talking about is just how much we’re willing to pay now for something that only a little over a decade ago would have been free.

