"You're all making fun of it and yet you buy it": Skyrim and Oblivion vet on Bethesda's horse armor, and how the dev "didn’t know what the hell it was doing at the time"
Oct. 16, 2024He has a point
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Former Bethesda game designer Bruce Nesmith never expected everyone to be so angry about Oblivion’s Horse Armor DLC when it released 18 years ago. I mean, it’s mostly just a cool outfit for your horse. But Nesmith suggests that “part of the Horse Armor story is you’re going to make mistakes when you’re the first one in the water on something like that.”
In a recent interview, Nesmithtells VideoGamerthat Bethesda must have sold millions of horse armors, “and that was kind of a head shaker for us: you’re all making fun of it and yet you buy it," he says.
It had its merits. “One of the things about Horse Armor that you have to remember is Bethesda, I believe, was the very first company to do downloadable content expansions,” Nesmith said. “Nobody had done that before for the platforms. We literally pioneered that. And so Bethesda didn’t know what the hell it was doing at the time.”
““I think… you can thank online games for a much stronger interest in costume-related DLCs,” Nesmith argues. “Things that are purely visual or audio for you character, they’re not gameplay-related, that’s become more and more accepted when you have a game where you’re playing against other people and other people will see it.”
Whatever the future holds, there’s one thing that remains constant: the intoxicating appeal of horse armor. People are still purchasing itfor $2.50on the Xbox storefront, where it has a whopping 4.8 out of 5 stars across 60 user reviews.
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Nesmith also recentlycommented that “Bethesda games could have a higher degree of polish,“but reckoned some jank “could be forgiven.”
“Any Bethesda developer who has been around since the horse armor days knows that by this point, if we understand one thing, it’s DLC,” studio design director says of Starfield Shattered Space.
Ashley Bardhan is a critic from New York who covers gaming, culture, and other things people like. She previously wrote Inverse’s award-winning Inverse Daily newsletter. Then, as a Kotaku staff writer and Destructoid columnist, she covered horror and women in video games. Her arts writing has appeared in a myriad of other publications, including Pitchfork, Gawker, and Vulture.
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