Path of Exile discusses the fine art of templating item descriptions

Odds are good that you spend very little of your day thinking about how an item’s stats are templated in your game of choice. When an item’s abilities consist of a few stat buffs, it’s not really relevant. But in Path of Exile you can have an item providing a very wide assortment of buffs and improvements, and the latest article on the game’s official site discusses the fine art of making sure that players know at a glance just what an item does. Even with line breaks.

Line breaks in particular are a contentious thing; making a text box too wide makes it cumbersome, but if the item’s text cuts off in the wrong place, a single ability can look like two separate enhancements. It’s also sometimes complex to condense a simple-to-understand concept into just one or two lines of text, like a flask boosting your elemental resistance while improving your elemental damage. The very nature of the game requires brevity in all things, just the same. Check out the full rundown to get an idea about all of the complexities involved in making sure a simple item has a comprehensible effect.