Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Community Q&A #8

The eighth installment to 38 Studios' weekly community Q&A series for Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is now online, and this time the team addresses questions about dual wielding, the ability to hide helmet graphics, what they mean by "Diablo-like" loot, and more.
Q: Can you expand a bit on the loot, specifically your past references to "Diablo-like" loot? On the surface this sounds grand, and based on the discussion you started in the Dev Discussion area, it sounds like you will have the standard color-coding of rarity of items, along with expected "unique" and "set" items, including both "standard" versions and "legendary" versions. Can you verify this, or expand on it at all? One thing I'm specifically curious about is how "loot chance" will be balanced/tweaked, given that this is a single-player game and item trading won't be a part of it like it would be in a game like Diablo. Will there be extra-uber items with a miniscule chance of dropping, that will require a lot of playing/grinding with high-level characters? Or is the expectation that most players who play to the level cap will see most of the really good stuff?

A: Behind the scenes, Reckoning has three different kinds of loot: Common, Unique, and Affixed. Common loot includes your standard non-enchanted sword or helmet. Unique loot items are hand-crafted and have custom art and bonuses. Some unique items are set items, and give you extra bonuses for wearing multiple pieces of the same set. In addition to the hundreds of unique items, Reckoning also features a procedurally generated, or "Affixed" loot system. This system can generate massive amounts of loot by taking a common item, and attaching a suffix, prefix or both a suffix and a prefix to it.

To give a real example from the game, a sword called the Savage Longsword of Hemorrhaging has two buffs on it: a buff to critical damage (Savage) and a buff to bleeding damage (of Hemorrhaging). Each suffix and prefix is selected based on the player's level, the type of item, the type of enemy killed, and rarity, among other things.