For starters, the horse armor was purely cosmetic.

So… you would rather purely optional RMTs over “So yeah, if you want to find out what Roman Alexander did after he was abducted by this ship, send me ten bucks”?

I think it was really the first of the AAA first person fantasy genre,

First, Oblivion was very much NOT “AAA”. I know that term has grown to basically mean “anything from a major publisher or that looks pretty” but, for the era, that was games like Medal of Honor (with god damned Steven Spielberg) which tried to “transcend” gaming.

Second: Everyone who even knows what Myst is are either arguing over the definition of “fantasy” or grabbing socks full of nickles to beat you to death right now. You… got some time.

But you more or less keyed in on the reality of it. In the early 2000s, games media was still primarily console based. In large part because most of the PC mags had already gone out of business or went from “Hey, just in case this article on DOOM 2 wasn’t good enough, here is Kerri Hoskins in her panties” to “When you finish wanking to all the girls in this magazine you might want to try out Warcraft”

Its why people think Halo invented combined arms gameplay or… almost the entirety of Nintendo’s “innovative gameplay” even to this day. Release a game with light survival mechanics and aimless progression in the late 2010s and EVERYBODY forgets the entirety of the Eurojank Genre.

And Oblivion is probably the first console game that had RMTs.