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Weapons and armor are also a quite traditional mix. Most items can and will be looted from corpses and found in treasure chests, as the in-town weaponsmith is somewhat understocked. There is an impressive variety of equipment, and many pieces, even of the same basic type, have various attribute-raising properties, making the diversity of gear even greater. Like spells, many items have minimum stat requirements, making the more powerful weapons and armor unusable by low-level heroes. Each item has its own set of hit points that diminish with prolonged use. The equipment must be repaired in town (or by a character with the repair ability), or it will become destroyed. The inventory and equipping system will be instantly familiar to Diablo players. Each character's carrying capacity is depicted as a grid. Every item, rather than having a specific weight, takes up a certain number of grid spaces. There are also eight special slots representing the character's equipped areas: head, body, left arm, right arm, and four ring spaces.
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Darkstone characters are further defined by skills. Each class has its own skill set, though there is some overlap. Many of the skills are services that would otherwise need to be purchased in town, such as equipment repair, magical artifact recharge, and item identification. Others are more esoteric and affect innate abilities in various ways. Characters start without any special skills and must purchase them in the form of training from merchants in town. Once learned, a skill can be increased through further training, though the price rises steeply with each level.
You are given control of two characters, rather than the one allowed in Diablo. One character is under your direct control, while the other is directed by the computer. Active control can be switched at any time, and the interface is well designed so that you never feel overburdened by supervising multiple characters. The computer-directed protagonist can be commanded to either follow you or stand guard. The game takes advantage of this play mechanic through puzzles that can only be solved by positioning the two characters in different locations. The computer-operated hero is generally intelligent, attacking monsters where needed and staying out of your way, but will occasionally and inexplicably decide to simply sit out a battle. This seems more like a bug than a feature and will hopefully be fixed in the final version.
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The game is broken into three major sections: town, overland, and dungeons. The town is a safe haven. Within its walls, you can purchase and sell equipment and listen to NPCs recite plot-enhancing text. Overland is an outdoor area where you will discover the entrances to the different dungeons and meet various characters who will send you on side quests for cash rewards and special equipment. These missions generally involve retrieving an item from one of the dungeons and returning it to the quest giver. The dungeons are also where the seven pieces of the Time Orb can be recovered so that our heroes can ultimately smack the extra vowel right out of the very evil Draak and restore peace to the realm. An interesting feature of Darkstone is that each new game is composed of a random selection of dungeons and side stories picked from a larger pool, making replaying the quest a much more attractive prospect. Characters created in one adventure set can be carried over into a new one, although navigating the initial portion of the game with high-level characters is a somewhat tedious exercise in goblin massacring.
Next: The Graphics
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