OBLIVION BETTER LOOKING ARMOR UPDATE

We've spent a decade holding up 'horse armor' as an example of DLC gone wrong, all the while publishers and players alike slowly but surely converged on that model of moderately priced cosmetic upgrades as a mainstay of DLC done right.

OBLIVION BETTER LOOKING ARMOR UPDATE

This was a time when the idea of a console game requiring a mandatory update to play online after a patch was cause for grave concern (not to mention worthy of an article on GI.biz), a time when players were shocked that publishers would charge extra money for content that developers had finished making prior to the game's release. These days, people spend more money on dumber stuff online all the time.Д«ut in April of 2006, this was practically heresy. The price of 200 Microsoft Points ($2.50) isn't entirely out of line for a mostly cosmetic purchase (the armor increased the horse's health, but honestly, frail horses were not exactly a common pain point for players of Oblivion).

The thing is, for all the gnashing of teeth and outrage and mockery Oblivion's Horse Armor attracted, there's fundamentally not that much different about it than the sort of DLC some companies base their entire business models around these days. Whoa, Nelly!Д®ven 10 years down the road, Bethesda Softworks' first DLC offering for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion remains the shorthand of choice to refer to downloadable content whose insignificance is exceeded only by the exorbitant price a publisher is asking for it. So to refresh our collective memory and perhaps offer some perspective on our field's history, will run a monthly feature highlighting happenings in gaming from exactly a decade ago.

That said, even an industry so entrenched in the now can learn from its past. The games industry moves pretty fast, and there's a tendency for all involved to look constantly to what's next without so much worrying about what came before.

Oblivion better looking armor