Playing both Final Fantasy XIV and Diablo III — two fundamentally similar but also quite different games — this weekend has got me thinking about loot. Yes, this is a very specific thing to be thinking about, but I find the two games’ differing approaches to providing the player with new equipment to be quite interesting.

At heart, the difference between the two games is in whether gear acquisition is purely vertical (Final Fantasy XIV) or whether there’s a degree of horizontal… ness about it, too.

What do I mean? Well, in Final Fantasy XIV, the equipment you put on your character is largely determined by your level. And when you hit the level cap, you then work your way up through several “tiers” of equipment that are increasingly challenging to acquire. Item Level 50 items are provided to you as the final stages of your class’ quest; Item Level 60 items come from entry-level endgame dungeons; Item Level 70 items used to come from endgame currency and now come from more challenging endgame dungeons; Item Level 80 items come from Crystal Tower; Item Level 90 items… you get the idea. Everything comes from a specific place, and you generally have to “work” for it — items you purchase require grinding out the requisite amount of currency before you can afford them by running dungeons and other content, while items you acquire as loot from dungeons are random drops that, in many cases, will require a large number of runs of the same dungeon to acquire a complete set of.

In Diablo III, conversely, you are constantly thrown new gear. Every other fight you get into, a monster drops something. And with the recent Patch 2.0, it’s usually something interesting that has an impact on your stats, damage, healing potential or other stuff. You’ll be swapping out equipment very regularly as you find new bits of gear; consequently, equipment starts to feel a lot more “disposable” than it does in something like Final Fantasy XIV. Diablo certainly has an element of vertical progression, too, as items get gradually better over the course of the whole game and have minimum level requirements to use, but when you strap on a new piece of armour it’s on the understanding that you might not be holding onto it for very long, unlike, say, my Sorcerer’s Coat that my Final Fantasy XIV Black Mage has now been wearing for a number of months now. (That thing must reek.)

There are other ways to handle it, too. Japanese role-playing games tend to take a vertical approach, with new “tiers” of equipment presenting themselves as you progress through the linear storyline, with the “ultimate” equipment usually either tucked away in a secret place or secreted behind a significant challenge. Western role-playing games tend to allow pretty much any character to strap on anything at all, though if your class isn’t proficient in it you can expect penalties to your performance. Western role-playing games also tend to festoon their worlds and dungeons with hundreds of the same shitty pieces of armour and weaponry, and then hide a few good bits and pieces in the deepest darkest dungeons. And then you have weird hybrid games like The Witch and the Hundred Knight, which is a Japanese role-playing game that takes heavy cues from loot-whoring role-playing games like Diablo, which combine a toned-down degree of player choice/horizontal progression with vertical advancement as the game goes on.

It must be a really tricky balance to get right, and I don’t envy the people who have to design all that gear and ensure it’s reasonably well-balanced for the game. (Although unbalanced super-gear can be a lot of fun, too, so it’s not unusual to find at least one massively overpowered piece of gear in many games — at least in the single-player sphere.) I’m not sure, on the whole, which system I prefer — if indeed any — because they each have their pros and cons. I really like the sense of achievement that acquiring a new piece of equipment in Final Fantasy XIV brings, for example — it feels like you’ve done something major. Conversely, I like that the sheer volume of loot in stuff like Diablo allows you to tweak and tailor your character a lot more to your liking — but it is a faff to have to keep comparing stats every few minutes.

There you go. One of the nichiest posts I’ve ever done. It’s late. I’m going to bed.