Rarity and Purpose - Game Design Discussion #1

 Source that game me an idea for this topic; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJkV1Aj2o5c

As it would seem rarity in of itself has no value unless you're an NFT bro or into Crypto but as it stands outside of that and into something like gaming this thought only recently occurred to me. When it comes to gaming and designing open world games and finding resources in these kind of games.

Keep in mind this never crossed my mind because I mostly played games like Merge Nymph where more resources + a simple factor about them playing any kind of role in their rareness. However; onto other games and subject about rarity.

Number of purposes

The number of uses out of an item matters, not just the amount but the effectiveness. When it comes to a rare item one must ask, "why" in using an item at the end of the day. This is the same with MTG to Minecraft. With the idea being does it have a purpose, does it have a use? In this case; the desired use case being how many can be used at any given time.

That said; an item having a number of purposes can negate and or outright bring down other gameplay items. An example is iron in Minecraft; the utility creep which is a different form of power creep to tackle on it's own. The usage creep makes it where the number of areas you'd want to find/ use iron out weighs the need or desire of diamond. As the uses go up, the desire/ need for diamond go down and so you have players searching for diamond less and less as the hunt for iron increases and as thus causing a demand and supply shift.

When playing these kind of games you want to tackle/ think about them in different ways and methods of tackling them in any meaningful manner.

Power creep through Utility

There is the power creep but utility creep is worse; power creep it's easy to spot/ deal with but with utility creep it's much more difficult; you have a system where the utility out weighs the power aspect of the gameplay when it comes to moment to moment gameplay with players going to pick the items with the most uses.

That outside of Minecraft funnily enough this happened with Dead Cells; a not so powerful Tendril became and insanely useful traversal tool with moving across the map and other such items. However; for Dead Cells this is less of an issue because your item pool is insanely large as it is with the pool of items.

However; other items such as the Hollow Knight blade with it being able to let you bounce off enemies, hit enemies from above you and from side to side as well giving you a multi-directional weapon, the only weapon in the game with this kind of power.

The utility creep can happen with other items where the use case of other items come into play with the other items and systems being limiting with how they perform and function and as thus; make other items more powerful.

Conclusion

You need to balance not only the power, the rarity and the use case of said items; otherwise you make other items useless and or unwanted by making other system of items too useful.

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