Diablo 4's $8 vest is the hell we created for ourselves

Welcome to Episode 55 of The Best Games Ever Show: Best Vest Games (But You Can’t Have Oblivion)

2006 felt like a lifetime. I’m sure, at least for some of you, it does. In that case, you won’t remember the utter stench of paying actual real money for in-game decorations on top of the money you’ve already paid for the game itself.It seemed unthinkable until Bethesda went for it, releasing the infamous Horse Armor pack The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion 200 Microsoft Points, equivalent to around £2 in real money today.

The DLC itself is fairly harmless. While not exactly essential, it adds a brief quest to the game that directs you to a specific merchant, and eight different sets of horse armor in a similar style to the player character variants available in the game. While these are often considered purely cosmetic, they actually greatly increase the health of any horse to which they are applied, reducing the chance of losing their mount in combat. While somewhat useful, DLC is cheap and completely negligible. By today’s standards, it seems odd that it would cause such a fuss.

You can still pick up Horse Armor from the Xbox Store for a measly £1.69, which is a perfectly reasonable price, and it includes the Sex Number for added conviviality. Note that companies don’t know the difference between buying something ironically and just buying it.

But it’s the canary in the coal mine of gratuitous aftermarket monetization of single-player games, and a fairly notable contributor, and 17 years later, almost every release imaginable these days is some kind of triple-set premium The live service bullshit currency and battle pass. At the time, Bethesda was experimenting with a new idea made possible by relatively new fields like digital distribution and microtransactions. Todd Howard probably doesn’t mean it’s a sliding door moment where the industry chooses its path to hell.

However, the blame doesn’t lie entirely on him, as the fact is that the players fully accept it. Horse Armor has made a lot of money for Bethesda, it’s been listed as one of their most popular DLC titles in a long time, and while the flak they’ve gotten for it has kept them from making such insignificant content, it inspired Taking lucrative profits from Valve to Epic, building empires of the useless cosmetics industry.

Hey, look, we’ve pretty much destroyed a vibrant creative industry, monetizing every aspect of it to such an extent that it’s become a joyless void, but in about two decades we’ve Provides a lot of value to shareholders.

So Horse Armor may have been the butt of all the jokes in 2006, but it finally had the last laugh, and this week the phenomenon came full circle in the form of ridiculously priced premium micro-DLCs for Diablo 4: at the high end, they cost more than many new games .You can buy directly minecraft dungeon

And there’s still change to spend at Big Tasty for some of those cosmetic kit uses.

But in the 17 years since Oblivion’s most notorious breach, which games with Horse Armor have topped the rest? What are the best Horse Armor games besides The Elder Scrolls IV? This is a question I posed to our regular panelists on the best game show ever, and in order to find out everyone’s feedback, you have to watch or listen to it. Fortunately, you’ve stumbled across a web page full of options. Cole!

Watch the video version here:

If you’re the kind of person who skips to the last page of a book (wrong people, fallen people, bad seeds), you can also simply read the summary below.

tom

tom picks football manager Because at this point we are powerless to stop him.

Kelsey

kelsey pick Back to Monkey Island Because it included a useless horse armor item as a joke about oblivion, on the one hand it was a very dated joke when it came out, but on the other hand, we’re doing the whole podcast because Diablo 4 is here now, so it actually is still very popular.

Bill Cliff

Witcher 3 Grandmaster Feline Equip Location: A white-haired man with a ponytail sits on a brown horse.They are on a hill overlooking a field of sunflowers with mountains in the distance

james goes all out The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Instead of being allowed to choose Oblivion itself, as W3’s horse armor is actually useful, costs no extra, and is part of the game that’s largely considered DLC done right: there’s a bunch of free add-ons in addition to the two premium but very Packed with expansion packs.

“What’s the best game of all time?” you ask? Well, it’s essentially a 30-minute panel show where people (Jim Trinca and co) decide the best game in a particular category. That’s it. very good. listen to this.

Check back in a week for another exciting episode of the Best Games Ever Show.