icely - Representations of Power and Rarity

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Game Design

Representations of Power and Rarity

I've always been strangely attracted to how rarity is represented in games, but also how games communicate power and progression in general. It's kind of interesting, right? Because those are the visual component that isn't tied to your actual skill level at a game (which can be visual but can also be very subtle).

Common<br>Uncommon<br>Rare<br>Epic<br>Legendary<br>Mythic

This system of color coded rarities, which can be attributed to a game called Angband (but more popularized by Diablo and World of Warcraft), really do kind of feel right in a way, which involves the psychological aspect of the nebulous color theory and qualia of how it feels to look at these colors.

To me: Gray is utterly unremarkable, like a disabled or discarded item, so it should be common. Green and Blue are 'easy' colors (having some 'beginner' feel to them, even), Purple is some royal or at least 'special' color, and Legendary orange/red colors are like you are wielding dangerous power as a weapon. When it goes further than that with gradients or animations it begins breaking beyond.

Borderlands 2 was one of the first games I played with a rarity system that went above Legendary. That hasn't seemed to last throughout the games though.

When I was younger I was enraptured by this and I still feel like I am a more-rarities maximalist. I always feel so disappointed when, inevitably, in these games you get a full set of legendary equipment and there's nothing more to get to.

Legendary<br>Seraph<br>Pearlescent<br>Effervescent

Of course there is a practical cap to this: you run out of colors and some look too similar. Even if you have subtly-changing colors, gradients, and background effects, of course. Terraria has a lot of rarity tiers:

Gray<br>White<br>Blue<br>Green<br>Orange<br>Light Red<br>Pink

Lt. Purple<br>Lime<br>Yellow<br>Cyan<br>Red<br>Purple

Dev<br>Fiery Red

I look at these rarity tables and feel oddly happy about them.

A Different Source of Power (Visual Polish)

Rarity is interesting to me because it is using something so 'simple' like color for a certain vibe, which means many indie games that lack polish in other areas still have this satisfaction.

But it is worth noting that satisfying visuals count for a lot. Thud effects, screenshake, shockwaves, hit delay, for a big creature dealing damage (or arriving on the battlefield) versus a small one. Contrast matters a lot for that too of course.

There are many roguelikes that seem way more popular than they otherwise would be without effortful visual polish, and this article is to make the point that rarity and power actually are, in some ways, in that category of "visual polish" even if it does not appear like it.

Another Different Source of Power (Incremental Games)

There is another source of power that is 'easy' to make even in a game without polish otherwise.

Literally.

Like, as in a power of 10.

10<br>100<br>1,000<br>10,000<br>100,000

1M<br>10M<br>100M<br>1B<br>10B<br>100B

1T<br>10T<br>100T<br>1e+15<br>1e+16<br>1e+17

Of course, when you got to the last few entries on that list, if you've ever played an incremental game (and think like I do) there is a wave of boredom right there. '5.342e+45' just sucks to look at, and you no longer feel like you're breaking through to new levels, which is the feeling that an incremental game often gives you (where the progression is on a log scale, while you watch number-go-up-fast on a linear scale).

Before then, each quantity really does feel like you're playing with something that feels new and different, even if the gameplay hasn't 'really' changed. I suspect that this comes from the fact that all of the 'lower' numbers are ones that, even if you don't have yourself, you see other people play with them meaningfully (as in, "100k" and "1B" are commonly seen and talked about in regards to money and audience).

It's like 'million' or 'billion' is its own kind of rarity 'tier'.

There is also the awkwardness of abbreviating Quadrillion and Quintillion (in one of my games, it's "Q" vs. "Qn", but of course "S" and "Sp" for sextillion and septillion come up right after...), but I still like that I get up to 1036 before switching to scientific notation.

When it switches to something like '5.342e+5', I've always hated that. That 'e' feels so artificial, the same problem with "letter notation" (aa, ab, ac...). At least with like, 1.984 × 1072 you're still playing with 'pure numbers', even if you practically may always look at the number after the '10' when playing. I have lots of rarities and the "1.984 × 1072" style system in one of my games so I have actually put this in practice.

A powerful image

While there are of course other videos in this genre, I find this one "The Insane Scale of Numbers (from 1 to Infinity) 3D Comparison" to be very illustrative in its visualization.

It is always breathtaking to look at the sheer vastness and expanse of the world, when you go from a table to a house to a...