Loot can get a little bit overwhelming sometimes, especially when a game you’re playing has a tendency to give you tons of it. It would useful to have a way to parse the armory and filter the arsenal. Thankfully, loot rarities are here to help.

Let’s talk about them.

The basics of rarity systems in gaming

Rarity is, essentially, a way to communicate how powerful and hard to acquire a given item is. It is typically communicated through distinct color for each of the rarity tiers the game uses, often accompanied by additional labels calling the tier by name.

One of the most common rarity systems is a variation on the six-tier range (see below), but every game is free to stray from it however it wants, both in terms of colors and labels.

  • Grey – Common
  • Green – Uncommon
  • Blue – Rare
  • Purple – Epic
  • Orange – Legendary
  • Red – Mythic

What the item tiers represent

While the name would suggest it’s about actual rarity, it’s not really that. Unlike physical items such as trading cards, items in video games don’t really come in finite quantities, so actual designed scarcity isn’t in play.

Instead, item rarity in video games describes two core aspects of in-game loot:

  • how unlikely/difficult it is to acquire the item – it might be related to the random loot tables, difficulty of a mission they are locked behind, player character level, etc.
  • how powerful the item is – it might mean many things, but often reflects better statistics, a higher number of additional traits, unique abilities, etc.

Now that we have the item tier systems explained, let’s see some games that use them..

Examples

Borderlands

As a first-person shooter cousin of hack’n’slash loot-fests such as Diablo, the Borderlands series has more loot than you’ll see in a lifetime, all stratified into rarities, which went all the way up to 11 distinct tiers in Borderlands 2.

World of Warcraft

Item rarity systems have a warm and welcoming home in MMORPGs, and since WoW is still the MMORPG, it also serves as a great example. There are rarities technically going from grey “Poor” items all the way up to lightblue “Heirlooms”, so you can know at a glance whether you got anything good from that raid.

Cyberpunk 2077

The science-fiction wild ride CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 took us on had plenty of gear to filter and sort. The base game came with five weapon rarities, without any fancy titles, simple weapon tiers numbered 1-5 but conveniently color-coded. There’s also an additional “Iconic” tier for truly unique gear.