Comment by listic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by listic | Hacker News Reader

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Great game designers are not necessarily great game historians and/or have good memory.

> It's amazing how many new standard things came out of Diablo and Diablo II. [...] The rarity thing [for loot], for example, just kind of made sense.

While Diablo certainly helped popularize quite a few such features and even arguably gave birth to a genre (I heard people calling various other games a Diablo), it would be overconfident for them to claim inventing it: Magic the Gathering [1] had it years prior. There, rarity was implemented with printed pages: you print all your common cards on a Common sheet, uncommon cards on an Uncommon sheet and rare on Rare sheet; then put 1 card from Rare, 3 from Uncommon and 9 from Common into each booster pack. (not actual numbers! there are also Mythic Rares and each card has a tiny chance to be a Foil version, which complicates the situation, but the basic idea is something like that; from memory)

Same goes for the idea of a quest log: I don't have a specific example in mind, but I have a hard time believing no game had it before Diablo II.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic:_The_Gathering

That's not the same thing, though. They're not just talking about the fact that some items are more common than others, or even the correlation between power and rarity.

What Diablo did (that M:tG didn't) was that the same weapon could have multiple rarities, with the rarer versions being more powerful. Each card in M:tG has only a single rarity, and the foil version is just a cosmetic difference with no gameplay effect. An Uncommon (or equivalent) in Diablo is not a sui generis item, it is a common with upgraded stats. A Rare is the same thing with magic effects added.

I'm not clear how that's different from e.g. the random loot tables in D&D, except that Diablo's version called some different items by the same name for added confusion.

You took that quote out-of-context:

> The rarity thing [for loot], for example, just kind of made sense. In some roguelikes, they would have your common item and your magic item, so they were different colors of text or whatever. If it was a magic item it was blue, if it was a normal item it was white, that kind of thing. And, so, we took a step further and went with the rarity levels. The rarer something is then it has a different color.

M:tG did not have a visual distinction for rares versus uncommon versus common when I played it in the mid 90s, and that is what they are talking about here, a visual indication of the rarity of an item.

MTG cards have had rarity indicators on cards since 1998.

http://mtgsalvation.gamepedia.com/Rarity

Even so, the rarity of a card is simply a measurement of how many of that type of card are produced. There are not, for instance, some uncommon or rare cards printed with different text or statistics from the common version of the same base card. (The idea is intriguing, though!)

Ah, good to know. The last set I purchased from was Alliances.

MUDs have had stuff like this since the early 90s. I haven't seen a graphical RPG come close to the complexity of some of the MUDs I've played (and are still around today).

nods They very well might be, though I never encountered explicit item rarity in my MUDs. Also, they mention being inspired by Ultima Online. Creators of Ultima Online were inspired by MUDs.

btw, Magic: the Gathering debuted in 1993.

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