(Image credit: Bethesda)

The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered is out now, and it costs $50 ($67 CAD in my country!) for the standard edition of the game—a hefty price tag for an update of a 20-year-old RPG. But if you want to give Bethesda even more of your money, there’s also a deluxe edition available for $10 more—and you better believe it’s got horse armor.

Horse armor, in case you missed the fun back in 2006, was a post-launch add-on for the original Oblivion: For a couple bucks, you could buy your pretend horse some pretend armor that nobody would ever see unless they came over to your house and watched you play the game.

The whole thing was ridiculous and widely (and rightly) mocked, but—and here’s the rub—people bought it. For all the well-deserved ridicule it took, horse armor won. Cosmetic microtransactions are now so commonplace we barely bat an eye at them.

So here we are in the year 2025, and yup, we’re doing it all over again. The OG horse armor is included in the standard edition of Oblivion Remastered, but for 10 bucks more you can get two new horse armor sets, the Armor of Order and Armor of Cataclysm.

(Image credit: Bethesda Softworks)
That’s not all of it: The deluxe edition also includes new weapons and player armor, along with a digital art book and soundtrack, and the soundtrack is probably worth the extra money on its own—it’s a good one, and sells for $10 all by itself on Steam. So if you’re going to pony up $50 for the game anyway, what’s an extra tenner?

There’s some faux-upset about the new horse armor on Reddit and Steam, but for the most part people are laughing it off and having fun with it—quite a reflection of just how much the landscape has changed over the past 20 years. I’m not even really mad about it myself. I refused to buy the original horse armor back in the day as a matter of principle (although I eventually ended up with it as part of the Knights of the Nine expansion) but now, well, this is the path we’ve chosen and I tip my hat to Bethesda for having the stones to rub everyone’s face in it. Nicely played.

Lest there be any doubt, the presence of horse armor (or the fact that Oblivion is the third or maybe fourth-best game in The Elder Scrolls series) is not keeping fans from throwing their money at it: Oblivion Remastered shot to the top of the Steam best-sellers list almost immediately after it launched. Horse armor really did win.