I’m working on an RPG, and have been thinking if I should make randomly generated items, or only have pre-made items. It would be nice to have thousands of items. But I’m afraid of the items getting dull, when it’s just X copies of the same item. Then I was thinking of maybe randomly generate gray, white, and some of the blue items. But any quality better then that, are pre-made. I would like to know what you think.
Use a modifier system.
Basically spawn a weapon and randomly pick a stats modifier from a look up table.
Toy can implement a chance need system with this to make higher level items difficult to obtain.
A few examples would be :
The protagonist picks up a short sword from a chest.
Dice rolls and picks the slow modifier which reduce swing speed by 33%, however it also gets the deadly modifier that increase damage by 25%.
If you have trouble imagining that in code, I’ll write an example when I get home.
Could look at games like Dungeon Siege. They work(At least the first, and second?) by having different kinds of weapons but they can have on them Prefixes and Suffixes that gives different types of boosts or negative stuff. So you can have your pre-made sword, but have random chances for the Prefix/Suffix just as Gibbo says. So you can have your Deadly Iron Sword, your Iron Sword of Poison, Deadly Iron Sword of Poison, etc. Same sword, but different stuff added to it.
You could as well look at the Minecraft Mod “Tinker’s Construct” you could add 2 Models/Images together to create an effect on a weapon, for example there’s a texture for the Iron sword and a texture that would show poison on a sword which can be put on every sword (only if the sword textures look the same) so your Items with different stats also have a different visual appearence without having to draw them on each one
Randomly generated items is posible, i did it and its quite nice, just remember to make sure everything is balanced 
I am very interested in this topic. I have also thought about making a game that will contain randomly generated items.
I think if you look into the Diablo series then it will help you with some ideas.
I do think there should be some items in the game which are pre-set. Awesome and hard to attain.
Also, I like the option of re-rolling some stats or being able to directly improve them through an NPC in exchange for something valuable to the player.( maybe levels 8) haha)