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

Uncommon

Rare

Epic

Legendary

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.

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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

Seraph

Pearlescent

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

White

Blue

Green

Orange

Light Red

Pink

Lt. Purple

Lime

Yellow

Cyan

Red

Purple

Dev

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.

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Literally.

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Like, as in a power of 10.

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1

10

100

1,000

10,000

100,000

1M

10M

100M

1B

10B

100B

1T

10T

100T

1e+15

1e+16

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 neighborhood to a city to a continent to a globe and to a solar system and beyond. (This is a feeling I plan to use for Disconcordia 3.) However, I find the video a bit special for how it portrays numbers far above the Observable Universe, which is usually when it stops. Usually things of this genre get a lot of mileage from galaxies and nebulas, but after the Observable Universe there's no more.

In the video, many 'dimensional effects' play after that point still, going faster and faster, and it's sort of interesting how it's not really the fact that "the numbers are getting so large that they are no longer 'real'-seeming" that makes you lose the tether to real scale, but just that there still needs to be a sense of progression, even if the methods are sort of not real. The videos are simulating a psychological effect, the way videos trying to make people 'visualize 4D' don't really work, but you still have a faint psychological effect that mimics it.

This also has overlap with videos talking about numbers that get bigger in general, and games playing with infinity are always a great time.

By the way! These two halves of the article are not as separate as they might seem. Some rarities in games are like, "Cosmic" and "Galactic", and the things those words evoke are of course related to outer space.

The "running out of colors" is broader than it appears

Perhaps I can split this off into its own article in the future, but "running out of colors" has an interesting parallel and comparison with the subtle downside of cosmetics. Because 'adding a rarity expends a resource of color uniqueness' is potentially not obvious and isn't true early on.

But in many games I have played, cosmetics, including premium cosmetics, have often actually caused a cost visually that I often find not worth it. Mechanical legibility is a limited resource.

• Any "premium" card graphic could have represented some upgraded or modified version of the card. (In Hearthstone Battlegrounds, the 'golden' cosmetic is used to represent a triple, which I love, but the maingame uses it as a cosmetic...)
• In Chess Arena, a chess battle royale with different classes, players can choose different piece skins which change your piece's entire color scheme. To determine an enemy player's class is looking at an emblem at the bottom of their piece. I am intensely dissatisfied by this and it is an obvious sacrifice, as colors=classes would be way more distinct.
• Similarly in many chess-variants that add more abilities to chess, natural design space like pieces having status effects and location effects do spend this limited resource, which also tends to lead to a cap on maximum effects-on-one-piece or effects-on-one-square.
• Overwatch was criticized for poor contrast and needing to put outlines on enemies.
• There are also shooters like Fortnite and Warzone adding hundreds of skins, diluting the game's artstyle and occasionally even leading to visibility problems and pay-to-win skins. Even Team Fortress 2, a game praised constantly for its strong silhouettes and red/blue team distinction, had issues of other-team appearances after years of community cosmetics and even dyes.

Other random notes I couldn't get in there

• The YouTube video I listed above is 'flawed', or rather 'could be even better' in these ways: more numbers that really represent a real life scale (yes, like nebulas and galaxies) instead of a combinatoric abstract game, and the 'fractals' section at the end of the video, the cubes could have been presented as much more massive.

• I only worked on puzzle design, feedback, and bugfinding for Islands of Insight (a massive open world puzzle game). Caveat in that it is only my personal opinion, but I felt it was lacking in terms of visual distinction between puzzle difficulties and different areas. It still had distinction in vibes from different symbols and puzzle mechanics, but I wished boss puzzles and secret puzzles had some red gradient or different background, I think it would have gone a long way.

• The different feeling of "beginning vs middle vs endgame" in games like Chess also count as a different vibe.
• The way Cookie Clicker fills the screen with milk is also reinforcing polish.

• Hearthstone and Slay the Spire are outright 'missing rarities' from even the 'standard' five-rarity system. There are many practical reasons for this (most obviously those are not games with traditional level-ups as progression), yet perhaps there is some execution of a Slay the Spire endless mode where that would be incredible and enhance the game.

• Minecraft updates have been very disappointing on this front. Only Netherite and Copper added after so many years, and still linear instead of representing choice or difference in how they function. Enchants look cool but I can't believe there's still only one shine style.
• Hearthstone's Shatter mechanic could've shattered the rarity gem into left/right halves.

• I find Yellow to be a 'mediocre' color, and so it being a high tier color in Terraria is a bit weird. Gleam/shining is underrated for rarity but it is kind of interesting how it can be recontextualized so much. Brown can be poop-worse-than-junk, but you then give it gleam and it is bronze now. I remember thinking it was a little silly how camos in Battlefield Hardline had 'bronze', 'silver', and 'gold', but no 'platinum'. Because probably the platinum would look indistinguishable from the silver and not convincingly pass as a higher tier. Similarly, Yellow can easily become recontextualized as Gold.
• It's also interesting the way the colors can 'wrap around' but with some different saturation or brightness value. I once had dreamed of a highly customizable FPS game where white was a color of finality and final achievement.

Now if you'll excuse me I will be admiring my favorite pony.