The hidden history of Oblivion’s DLC
If you told someone living in 2005 that Bethesda Game Studios would become kind of a laughing stock in the future, I don’t think they would’ve believed you. To them, Bethesda had just made The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, which brought with it a true revolution for the RPG genre. And in 2005, they were continuing this streak with the very promising sequel, Oblivion.
In 2006, Oblivion would grace store shelves and gamers around the world rejoiced. However, it took only a single month for those same people to adjust their cheers to a very confused look, as in April 2006, the very first expansion pack for Oblivion would be released, the Horse Armor Pack. More than fifteen years later and it feels as if Bethesda fans are still laughing at this baffling, barebones release. Even Bethesda themselves are still happy to reference the event. This shouldn’t be surprising, as despite the ridiculousness of it all, the Horse Armor pack was the best-selling of all the game’s DLC. But where did it all go wrong?
Well, Morrowind is partly to blame for that. Back in those days, we still spoke of “plug-ins”, rather than full-on DLC. The game received eight of these small plug-ins, as well as two full expansions. The latter added a lot of new armor, weapons, and quests to the game, while the former often did way less. For example, one of these plug-ins just added some atmospheric details and noises to a single area in the game, while others just added armor sets or an arrow shop. In today’s gaming climate, that wouldn’t really fly, and even back then this would be seen as lackluster, if not for one thing: they were completely free of charge.
A couple of years later, and it seemed like Bethesda wanted to try the same thing with Oblivion, two bigger expansions and a multitude of smaller stuff. Even back before the game’s release in 2006, a strategy was already thought out to keep supplying the game with more content. When asked about plug-ins in an interview, Vice President of Marketing and Public Relations Pete Hines stated that :
“Horse Armor is definitely one you can expect. We’ve got three or four others that are in the works. But, again, until they pass the test of being worthy for release we prefer not to comment on them. Because, if we decide we’re not gonna do them, someone’s always gonna be upset.”
In another interview before the game’s release, he elaborated on both Horse Armor, and another DLC concept:
“We already have plans to do downloadable content on a regular basis. Once a month, couple times a month with different levels of content. Two of the ones we know we’re doing already right at the beginning, one is Horse Armor. So, you can own horses in the game and one of our downloadable things is so you can buy different kinds of armor to put on, you know, you’re riding around and you’ve got all this cool Daedric armor on, you wanna have something cool for your horse. So you can buy this downloadable stuff that’ll let you go to different places and buy armor for your horse. And then the other one is something we did in Daggerfall, which is holidays. So different towns in the game will have different holidays at different times of year, and you can go there and get perk bonuses, you can get special artifacts… One of the towns will have “Jester’s Day”, so on Jester Day you can go to town and all the crimes in the town are 50% off. So you get caught doing a crime and a guard arrests you, you pay half as much as you normally would. Because it’s kind of “everybody’s screwing around, being a goofball”-day. So just different stuff like that that you can do that adds to your existing game, you know, gives you some different experiences whether there is new stuff to put on or new things to do.”
By now, you’ve probably realized two things; The released Horse Armor doesn’t work like Pete describes here, and Holidays were never a thing at all, so what’s all that about? It appears that at some point before the release of the Horse Armor Pack, it got simplified, now only sporting two available sets of armor without any sort of special requirement. The rest is history. The pack launched and instantly became the laughing stock of the gaming world for years to come. It can be assumed that the reception was so bad, that the Holidays pack and the other packs mentioned by Pete, were silently canned in order to get some revisions done.
But now comes the interesting part. That horse armor? That was meant to be included in the vanilla game from the start, as traces in the game files show us. So, at some point, the idea was scrapped only for it to be turned into DLC. But that’s not all. Those holidays might’ve also once been planned for the vanilla game, as even without any DLC, some dialogue related to these holidays can still be found in the game’s files.
The next DLC that would get released, the Orrery, doesn’t fare much better. Everything points to almost the entirety of the new content actually being scrapped stuff reused from the vanilla game, only to be brought back here. Everything that actually is new, isn’t anything to write home about. Unless you like writing about basic nameswapped items or reused vanilla dialogue.
Wizard’s Tower and Thieves Den, the next two DLC to get released, actually aren’t reused vanilla content, or not entirely. While their concepts didn’t exist in the vanilla game, some test cells were reused for their worldspaces, resulting in some strange bugs, which is arguably worse than just reusing vanilla content present in the files.
Mehrunes’ Razor is one of the most blatant cases. Recently we learned that the entire dungeon was just repurposed from a creation the level designers made while goofing around. While this is already quite lazy, the item the DLC is named after, Mehrunes’ Razor itself, was actually present in the vanilla game all along! It has always been weird to not include the item that’s tied to the Daedric Prince which is the main villain of the game, but introducing it in this manner just seems wrong.
Vile Lair is the first DLC that doesn’t have any clear signs of repurposing content (Besides more vanilla dialogue, of course). Yet, because this is an Oblivion DLC, it doesn’t escape the general bugginess that comes with this title.
Spell Tomes is just a simple excuse to implement some more spells into the game, and should’ve been included from the very start. It’s not hard to imagine this was also scrapped vanilla content, although there are no remnants of this in the files if that was the case. It does, however, reuse some spells that went unused in the vanilla game, so there’s that.
Fighter’s Stronghold was the last of the game’s player home DLC, and the last DLC in general. It’s weird that Bethesda would release this more than half a year after the release of the Shivering Isles, which would’ve been the perfect sendoff for Oblivion, but now it just… has this. Fighter’s Stronghold is exactly the same as its predecessors; it introduces some bugs, gives the player another fantastical home tied to a fantasy trope, and reuses vanilla dialogue while introducing nothing really worthwhile. It should also be noted that the empty space present without the DLC would’ve once held an old fort known as “Spy Rock”. Its removal paved the way for this sendoff, for better or worse.
Of course, Shivering Isles and Knights of the Nine aren’t present here because they’re both well-thought out expansions and not small bonuses, and neither seems to be based on discarded ideas from the vanilla game. While it is kind of nice to see how these DLC came to be, one might argue that if they had never existed, we wouldn’t miss out on much.
