Great game designers are not necessarily great game historians and&#x2F;or have good memory.<p>&gt; It&#x27;s amazing how many new standard things came out of Diablo and Diablo II. [...] The rarity thing [for loot], for example, just kind of made sense.<p>While Diablo certainly helped popularize quite a few such features and even arguably gave birth to a genre (I heard people calling various other games <i>a Diablo</i>), it would be overconfident for them to claim inventing it: Magic the Gathering [1] had it years prior. There, rarity was implemented with printed pages: you print all your common cards on a Common sheet, uncommon cards on an Uncommon sheet and rare on Rare sheet; then put 1 card from Rare, 3 from Uncommon and 9 from Common into each booster pack. (not actual numbers! there are also Mythic Rares and each card has a tiny chance to be a Foil version, which complicates the situation, but the basic idea is something like that; from memory)<p>Same goes for the idea of a quest log: I don&#x27;t have a specific example in mind, but I have a hard time believing no game had it before Diablo II.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Magic:_The_Gathering" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Magic:_The_Gathering</a>