"Looking for treasure... just like the Goonies."

In any given RPG, the wooden sword and cardboard shield you start with aren’t going to be the ones you keep forever. Usually you get rid of them by the time you hit your first town. But when you buy that new set of gear and equip it, only to find your character has only changed in numbers and not in appearance, it is a bit of a letdown.

If you are talking about old school sprite based games, I will concede that it was more trouble than it was probably worth to put visible loot into a game. Re-drawing that many sprites would be time consuming and prohibitively costly. Where 3D character models are involved, there aren’t a lot of excuses left when you are dealing with stat driven games and RPG mechanics.

There is nothing quite as addictive to me as a progressive, well thought out loot system that is reflected on your character.

I am not going to deny the merits of a well developed “static” character in this article. That is an entirely different subject. What I’m talking about are games where character growth is driven by a good system of fighting monsters, getting gold, and gathering random loot drops. Recently, three very different games have made me realize what a sucker I am for loot.

The first was Torchlight, which I originally saw when wandering the show floor of PAX last year. What drew me in at a glance was its aesthetics. Runic Games picked a very unique, cartoonish style for their world that I find very appealing.

I happily pre-ordered the game through Steam, then sunk a ton of hours into it upon its release. Torchlight is what has commonly become known as a “Diablo Clone”; a game where you fights hordes of enemies, gain levels and new abilities, and most importantly, collect randomly dropped loot. Combat takes place by clicking on your enemies and (most effectively) using keyboard shortcuts to use your special abilities to get yourself out of jams, buff your stats, etc.

The loot is progressively better as you delve deeper into the mines and fight tougher monsters. Being a class based game, much of what you find won’t apply to the character you are currently using. The good news is, you can store it in a special treasure chest for your other characters back in town or give them to your pet, who can go back to town and sell all your stuff while you keep fighting. This is a huge contributing factor as to why Torchlight is my favorite game in this genre.

Torchlight is an easy recommendation to make. For a mere $20, it provides hours of loot hunting goodness. If you keep your eyes pealed, it often goes on sale in both the Steam and Direct2Drive stores.

The second game that made me realize my loot addiction was Borderlands. 2k Games was stoking the fires of the hype machine for this game long before it’s release, but something about it just didn’t hook me; until I played it for myself, that is.

When I booted up Borderlands, my first thought was that it was trying a little hard to be “wacky”. The bus driver’s thick accent and abrasive personality while he regails you with stories of the vault and the aggressively goofy, nearly Jar Jar-esque first encounter with Claptrap turned me off.

I had heard good things and really wanted to give it a fare shake. I’m glad I did. Once I settled in to the world of Pandora, I found myself addicted. Once again, the game had a heavy focus on a loot mechanic. This time, instead of swords and armor, you find guns. Lots of guns.

The fun thing about the loot in Borderlands is the strange combination of stats the guns can have. I have found a shotgun that fires all the bullets in one big ball in a perfectly straight line, essentially making it act like a rocket launcher. I have found a 2-shot pistol that, despite a super-fast reload time, regenerated bullets faster than I could shoot them.

The loot system drew me in enough to not only end up loving the game (enough that it was #10 on my top games of last year), but I actually ended up enjoying the goofy aesthetic that went along with it.

The third game on my list works in an entirely different way, but is still all about the loot. Monster Hunter Tri doesn’t just hand you loot, you have to work for it.

I once told my wife that if they ever made an MMO that played like Fable 2, I would be hooked for life. I have to amend that and replace Fable 2 with Monster Hunter Tri.

The Monster Hunter series doesn’t have a level up mechanic. If you want to be stronger, then you need loot. But you aren’t just handed loot from killing the game’s impressively giant monsters. You kill monsters, skin them for parts, gather resources, then build and upgrade your own weapons and armor.

Even with as much as I enjoy random loot drops, there is something even more gratifying about doing a boss run to get that last piece of the puzzle you are missing to build that sweet new giant hammer or finish a full set of matching armor to get it’s additional bonuses.

There may not be a lot of story or any character development to speak of, but Monster Hunter Tri keeps me playing with my friends for one thing alone: the love of loot.