Origins of Color Coded Loot

This morning we are going to go on an adventure, or at least travel down a rabbit hole. Be warned that today’s post is going to involve a heavy dose of speculation. There are going to be things that I just don’t know and could not find the answers to, but drew my own conclusions. Like so many of these adventures that I occasionally go on, it starts with a random thought that I carelessly posted on twitter.

Color Coding Loot

Color coding loot as a concept is a brilliant one, because it quickly allows players to filter which bundles of stats are worth paying attention to and which should just be sold or broken down immediately. As someone who plays an excessive number of games that throw loot at you constantly, they are invaluable and help me do a first pass before actually sitting down and inspecting whether or not an item is worth keeping.

The thing is… we have ended up in this situation where most games use effectively the same system with a few minor tweaks here or there. This is a random assortment of games that have color coded loot rarity systems. As you can clearly see there is a pattern here and an agreed upon language that we have landed upon as to what each color means. The funny thing is this same logic applies to many other gaming related spaces, for example when I set up a discord my default is going to be to land upon a white > green > blue > purple > gold scale for hierarchy as far as ranks go. The same was true when I was in the business of building forums.

The Popularization

This lead to a search of what game popularized this concept. This was a fairly short search if we are willing to accept Wikipedia as the authoritative source. To keep you from having to click through and read the entire post on loot in video games, here is the relevant bit.

Loot may often be assigned to tiers of rarity, with the rarer items being more powerful and more difficult to obtain. The various tiers of rarity are often indicated by particular colors that allow a player to quickly recognize the quality of their loot. The concept of color-coded loot rarity was popularized with the 1996 game Diablo, whose designer, David Brevik, took the idea from the roguelike video game Angband.

Wikipedia – Loot (video games) article

So there we have the most basic answer. The game that popularized this concept was Diablo and this style of loot coding has carried forward in the ARPG genre and can more or less still be seen today in games like Path of Exile or Wolcen. This however is deeply unsatisfying because even when the color coding was expanded by Diablo II and Diablo III you still end up with a vastly different scheme than what we have come to accept as the bog standard loot coloration. I feel like we still don’t really have our true answer yet of how we ended up where we are on what colors mean what things.

The Consider System

Now is the point where we start drifting into wild speculation. There are however a few facts that one should take into account. The game that I most closely tie the “standard” loot scheme to is World of Warcraft. I believe in my heart of hearts that its popularity is what has lead to the wide adoption of a specific meaning for each color. However we don’t really know how they landed upon the specific scale that they did. We do know a few things about the early designers of that game and its itemization. In many cases they were hardcore Everquest players, with Alex Afrasiabi and Jeff Kaplan in particular being the leaders of high end raiding guilds. So we know for a fact there is a specific color scale that they would both be intimately aware of.

Everquest was a game that did not give you clear statistics for the monsters you were encountering. It wasn’t like you could highlight the mob and get a specific level number to indicate how difficult an encounter might be. Instead you had something called the /consider command, that would give you a rough approximation both in text and color coding how difficult an encounter might be. So for example if you typed /con on a mob that was significantly lower than you it would spit back a message in green saying “looks like a reasonably safe opponent”. If you considered a significantly higher encounter it would spit back in bright red “what would you like your tombstone to say?”.

As a long time Everquest player, this scale became so ingrained that we just referred to encounters by the color that they considered. You might brag to your friends that you were able to easily solo yellows, or that you managed to kite a red. You also might complain that you ended up getting swarmed by greens and took a stupid death due to the glitchy aggro of a specific zone. It is within this consider system that I think we start to shape up what is the standard going forward.

The Dark Age of Camelot Consider System

Alex Afrasiabi, better known as Furor to the old timers… was the leader of a rather notorious raid guild called Fires of Heaven. I started my Everquest career playing on Veeshan, the server they were resident on and was quite aware of some of their exploitative tactics for coming up with creative solutions to encounters. During one of these such encounters it earned Furor and practically the entire raiding group a permanent ban from Everquest. I believe it was during this time that a number of Fires of Heaven folk set up shop in Dark Age of Camelot, which was the first true competitor for Everquest and offered a significant number of tweaks to the template. Again we are going into the territory of speculation here as I have no specific knowledge that Furor was among this group, but I believe if my memory serves me that Fires of Heaven had a Midgard guild.

The DAoC consider system is pretty close to that of Everquest, with a few tweaks. For starters there is no specific “even” consider within the system. Things that are Yellow are either on level or above your level. One of the problems with the Everquest system is that Red was a really obtuse consider ranking, especially at low levels. There were times that reds were absolutely something that was reasonably to do with a full group, but it was impossible to tell without the use of Allakhazam whether those mobs were 20 or 40 levels higher than you. In Dark Age of Camelot they fixed this problem by introducing purple as being extremely higher than you, meaning that no really… you were absolutely going to die if you tried this thing.

Another really interesting thing that Dark Age of Camelot did was set usability ranges on your gear. if you used an item significantly higher than your current level, it would wear down more quickly given that you “lacked the skill” to use the item. As a result the items in the game used this same consider color system to indicate how far or above an item was to you, giving you some indication of whether or not you should be using a weapon and when you should probably start upgrading it. As far as I am aware this is the first case this specific color palette was applied to specific loot items.

World of Warcraft Viral Spread

As I said at the beginning of this nonsense, I am absolutely certain that games like Borderlands use this color scale because World of Warcraft popularized it. World of Warcraft is the very first example I could find of using purple as the rarity immediately following blue for example. My theory is that Diablo had already popularized and codified the concept that loot should have colors denoting rarity, and since very seasoned Everquest and potentially DAoC veterans were over the itemization… that we ended up using that very familiar color scale as their gauge. I feel like I am bolstered in this notion by looking at the original launch color rarity scale. Red in the Everquest consider system was used to indicate the end of the scale, and this was also the original color of artifact gear. Yellow at some point became gold, maybe because in later revisions of the DAoC con system Orange was introduced to wedge between Yellow and Red.

Today we have a slightly different looking color scale with Artifact and Heirloom meaning very specific things and as such being outside of the actual rarity scale. Once World of Warcraft became a cultural event, this same loot scale spread from game to game until now it is just effectively the standard language for quickly indicating how special an item might be. Do I know for certain that anything I just said is the truth? No… not really. Like I said at the beginning of this, today’s was a journey of speculation. Do I think that my theory is likely? Yeah I really do think that Diablo popularized the concept of loot color coding and that the World of Warcraft Standard was deeply influenced by the Consider system from Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot.

5 thoughts on “Origins of Color Coded Loot”

  1. That’s a really cool thought! Of the games mentioned, I only played WoW and Borderlands, so I don’t know much about the other games’ colour systems. In my opinion, it’s highly likely that you’re right that WoW’s devs took inspiration from Everquest’s Danger-system. People have been influenced my much smaller things. One thing to consider is the different use in these two games and how we inherently interpret colour.

    In Everquest, colour is used to convey danger. Grey and green are obvious choices for signalling low damage. Grey has always been meaning “unimpressive/inconspicuous”. A “grey mouse” is someone who you wouldn’t notice on the street, “grey-in-grey” basically means boring. Green is the international colour for “Go ahead!” and “It is safe”.

    Blue is also a soothing colour. It’s colder, and often is used to symbolise rational thought or calmness. In other words, still no danger, but think about it. And White is just the default non-descript colour. It doesn’t say “uninteresting” like Grey, but it is seen as “normal”.

    Yellow and Red, on the other hand, are instantly alerting to us. These colours stand out in nature, and we use them to signal “Danger” or “Stop!”

    In WoW, the colours were used for a different cause. It’s not about the danger, but to convey quality. Also, as far as I know, it was the first time for many people they were confronted with such a thing. Nowadays we instantly know what colour coding means, but we have to consider that people back then had no clue about it. Naturally, the use of colours had to shift a bit.

    Grey and White still mean “uninteresting” and “normal”, that hasn’t changed. But then you get a good item. The devs want to make this first encounter feel special and instantly noticable. So they need a bright colour, something that springs right to your attention. Red and Yellow would scream “Danger”, but Green can be bright and vivid, while still giving people a sense of “everything’s okay, that is supposed to happen”.

    Going from Green to Blue does not scream for attention as much, but it’s still a “safe” colour. By now, people know that this means an upgrade in quality, and the change is still noticable very well. On the other hand, going from Blue to Purple is far less of a change, since players should know by now how the system works. The novelty of the colour-coding has faded, so still bringing a lot of attention to it could be seen as a cheap way to instigate fake excitement in players.

    THen we have the change to Artifacts (I never played as far as to get one). This time around, the jump in colours conveys 3 messages: 1) It’s a crass change, so it’s time to get excited again! 2) It’s Gold, symbolising wealth. You know you’re getting the best stuff right now 3) It’s close enough to Yellow, which would say “Danger”, to stop you in your tracks for a moment. It’s an Artifact, alright, nothing to be playing around with. A little sense of danger is appropriate.

    I’m aware that I might read far too much into this, but seeing how important colour is to our day-to-day life, and how nobody has come up with a better system so far, I think a lot of thought went into this. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if we just scratched the tip of the iceberg here!

  2. I can’t believe you left out Marvel Heroes when mentioning Diablo 😉

    white, green, teal (apparently only on PS4), blue, purple, yellow/gold for artifacts iirc

    And the prestige/rebirth runs: white, green, blue, purple, orange, red, yellow

  3. It took me a long time to get used to the blue/green reversal in GW2 but now, since that’s the game I’ve played most for the last few years, I have the same problem in games that go the other way, Also Orange and Purple seem to switch positions quite frequently when I game-hop. They are always at the top end though.

    I’d forgotted about the gear degrading if you were underlevel for it in DAOC. That used to annoy me at the time but then a lot of things about DAOC got on my nerves. They seemed to have altered stuff just so as not to be EverQuest as far as i could tell.

  4. I’ve always credited the color scheme used by basically every game with loot rarity that isn’t Diablo to WoW, so it’s interesting to see the digging behind it.

    One of the things that’s always amused me/bugged me about Guild Wars 2 is how their color rarity system is both “more intuitive” and “backwards”. With the exception of Legendary (which you normally don’t see), moving from blue to “warmer” colors is better. But this means that blue is worse than green and purple basically doesn’t exist.

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