Diablo 4’s $8 Horse Armour is a hell we created for ourselves

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 The Elder Scrolls IV: 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.