Looter shooter
A looter shooter is a shooter built around loot: weapons and equipment are generated at random in grades of rarity, and much of the play is grinding for better drops. Many are run as live services with seasons and updates.
Where the name comes from
No first use of the name has been found. Sources name Hellgate: London (2007) as one of the first looter shooters and credit Borderlands (2009) and Destiny (2014) with making them popular; a sponsored PC Gamer feature from 2019 adds Tabula Rasa (2007) as a candidate for the first. USA Today wrote in September 2014 that the Borderlands “shooter looter” was born in 2009.
Where the edges are
Which game came first, Hellgate: London, Tabula Rasa or an earlier shooter with role-playing loot, is unsettled. The looter shooter is defined against the extraction shooter: here you keep your gear when you die. Critics also write about burnout from the endless grind of live-service looter shooters.
Key looter shooter games
Each game links to its article; the last column links to the source that puts it in the genre.
Related genres: Extraction shooter, Hero shooter.
At a glance
- Parent genre
- Action role-playing game
- Early examples
- Hellgate: London, Tabula Rasa (2007)
- Breakthrough
- Borderlands (2009), Destiny (2014)
- Also called
- Loot shooter, shooter looter
Sources
Checked .
- Looter shooter — Wikipedia
- Investigating the Origin of the Looter Shooter — PC Gamer
- USA TODAY — USA Today
- A History of Extraction Shooters — Gfinity Esports