History VideoGame / Darkstone

* AbsurdlyHighLevelCap: Your characters' level caps at 99, however [[EmptyLevels level ups become meaningless]] around your 30s outside of reaching the level requirements to upgrade your skills and access harder difficulty levels, and the last relevant level that does anything is level 60, the requirement to access the Legend difficulty, which is a ridiculously long ordeal to reach as is without just cheating your level up to it. You'll have to be insane and have no value for your time at all to legitimately grind your character's level up to 99.

* BeefGate: Right from the beginning of the game the whole world is open, nothing prevents you from going to later lands and dungeons, you can even go to the final dungeon in Serkesh and all the way to Draak without doing anything first, you just won't be able to kill Draak without the Time Orb. However enemies of course get stronger and more dangerous the farther you go, so exploring where enemies are beyond your punching weight and trying to get the crystals out of order will very easily get you killed.

* TheBlacksmith: Gunther, in the town, who buys, sells, and repairs equipment for you.

* BondVillainStupidity: In one quest about half way through the game Draak himself shows up. Instead of just killing you before you can get high enough level to beat him, teleports away and summons a much weaker GiantSpider boss to fight you.
* BonusBoss: Three of them - The Evil Garth (a Skeleton Captain), Buzbal the Furious (a Ratman Chief), and Nosferatu the Vampire. If you kill them for a sidequest, you can get a tidy sum of cash.
** In the Poison Vats quest, the three bosses you fight, Arach, Eraldus, and Angelique, are all optional; you can just go to the crystal room, use antidote potions on the poison vats connected to the crystal to free it, and then collect the Crystal of Nobility. You don't ever need to kill Arach nor resue Angelique from the prison to get the crystal, but killing Arach gets you the prison key needed to rescue Angelique and lets you pick up his two medals that you can then use to get yourself a powerful weapon in The Armory (either to use or to sell for a good amount of money), and then killing Eraldus and Angelique after they attack you will get you the key to Eraldus' chest, containing a Leather Armor and Master's Sword that can also be sold for a decent amount if you already have better equipment.
** in the Statues Of Arkhang quest, Ubus initially appears as a friendly NPC just asking you to go help his master Aeron, but once you find Aeron and see him die, talking to Ubus again will have him thinking you killed Aeron and then attacking you. Fighting and killing Ubus is not required at all to get the Crystal of Strength, but killing him will have him drop a spellbook for a very powerful level 4 spell, which can be sold for a lot of money if you don't have enough Magic to learn/upgrade the spell or already have it upgraded to its max.

* {{Cap}}: Each of your stats for every class can go up to 9999, but each class have individual soft caps for each stat, where upon reaching them you can no longer allocate stat points gained from levelling up to those stats. Each class' primary stat has a soft cap of 1000, but their other stats have drastically lower soft caps of 150, 100, and 50 for their second, third, and four best stats respectively. Upon reaching those soft caps, you must drink the stat-boosting elixers to continue raising those stats.
* CartographySidequest: Somewhat averted; each time you enter one of the four lands of Uma for the first time, your map will only display the land as you visit it. Walking around and filling out the entire map doesn't yield any particular reward, but if you eliminate all of the enemies in that land, they stay dead and you don't have to fight them again. The same is true of each dungeon level.

* ChangingGameplayPriorities: Early on you'll depend heavily on level ups to raise your stats and get stronger, as the levelups come fairly quick and the 6 stat points each level provides is significant. Around midgame they'll slow down and you'll start depending on enchantments that raise stats to supplement you, particularly in increasing HP and mana. By late game when you're around level 30 the levelups will slow down significantly and their 6 stat points aren't worth so much anymore while stat-boosting elixers become available to buy, so you'll start depending on the elixers to increase your stats while the levelups are just occasional nice bonuses at that point. Then when you complete your first quest and start tackling the harder difficulties your levelups will slow to a crawl, as well as you likely being only able to invest stat points in your class's primary stat at that point, so you'll be depending entirely on elixers and enchantments to get higher stats from that point forward, with the only real purpose of leveling up being to reach the level thresholds required to upgrade your skills and access harder difficulty levels.

* ContinuingIsPainful: When you die, you will drop all equipment and items you were holding at the time in the spot you died. Unless you have a recent save you can just load up, to get your stuff back you'll have to go back to where you died and pick it all up. Not so bad if you just died in the overworld not far from a spawn point, but die deep in a dungeon with powerful enemies while lacking good backup equipment and it can be a ordeal, especially if you were reliant on enchantments from equipment to boost your stats up. This can be averted in the PC version where you can play with two characters and have your partner revive you, but in the Playstation where you're just one character there won't be such luck.

** The most glaring example is Korgun, the Orc chief you fight in the Horgan's Amulet quest. He is exactly the same as the other Orcs, he doesn't move any faster nor have a projectile nor hits harder nor anything else, just with about like 20-30 times the amount of HP a normal Orc has.
* DeathIsASlapOnTheWrist: As long as you've been saving fairly regularly, that is. It's even less than a slap if you play with two characters and the survivor carries a Scroll of Life, knows the Resurrection spell, or is a Priestess.

* DiscOneNuke: As mentioned in the BeefGate section, you can explore wherever you want right from the start of the game, there will just be increasingly stronger and more dangerous enemies the farther you go. And expectedly, the farther you go the better loot enemies will drop, so if you go to the farther lands at the start and can kill the enemies there (which is especially manageable as a Thief/Assassin with their ranged weapon proficiency to keep them out of harm's way), with some luck you can get yourself a particularly strong late game weapon before you go after your first crystal, allowing you to stomp the early lands with an overpowered weapon. While such a weapon may have high minimum stat requirements that may prevent you from using it initially, MinMaxing in your class' main stat will allow you to use a preferred weapon quickly (for example you get 6 stat points per level up and your class' main stat starts with 20 points, so after 10 levelups that come fairly quickly you'll already be able to use weapons in that stat class with an 80 point requirement if you devote each entire level up to that stat).

* DoomedHometown: Somewhat averted. The town in which you begin the game is the only completely safe place in all of Uma, and can be revisited at any time. However, when the Darkstone makes its appearance, the residents are affected.

** If you're playing an Assassin/Thief or Wizard/Sorceress, you'll get little benefit out of spending stat points on Vitality. Getting more health is crucial, but it takes them a few points in Vitality to get a single hit point, and the only other thing increasing Vitality does is let you use better Priest equipment, so until you alleviate stat-distribution concerns by being able to mass buy stat-boosting elixers, you're better off depending on enchanted equipment to increase your HP and focusing your stat points on Dexterity and Magic. Strength also isn't very useful for them, as for them it takes several points in Strength to get any increase in your base armor/damage while they'll never want to use any Warrior weapons, so it would always be more beneficial to invest points into Dexterity instead where they get the same damage/armor improvement faster plus increase their hitrate and build towards using better ranged weapons. But Strength is required to use shields, which besides providing more armor, will provide another piece of equipment to get vital enchantments from, so you don't want to completely neglect Strength if you want to be able to use more than the weakest shield, which you won't find any enchanted versions of once you reach Marghor.
** If you're playing a Warrior/Amazon or Monk/Priestess, Dexterity is the clear dump stat. For them it takes several points in Dexterity to get any increase in your base armor/hitrate/damage, and spells will much better supplement their close-range combat than ranged-weapons will, so besides increasing their primary stats, it's much better to put points towards Magic to learn better spells and get more mana than points towards Dexterity to use ranged-weapons that they attack very slowly with. And with improving their hitrate, they can rely on the Berserker spell and enchantments to hold them over in the hitrate department until they're at the point where they can buy Elixers Of Dexterity without sacrificing improving their other stats.

* EmptyLevels: Gaining levels is very important early on to get stronger but as you progress they'll become gradually less important, and once you reach about level 35 and start taking on the difficulties beyond Novice your level ups will become irrelevant other than for reaching needed level requirements to upgrade your skills and access harder difficulty levels. The reasons for this are each of your stats beside your class' primary stat have very low soft stat caps (of 150, 100, and 50 for their 2nd, 3rd, and 4th best stat respectively), where upon reaching those caps you can no longer allocate your stat points from levelling up to them despite those stats being way too low to handle any of the difficulties beyond Novice, while stat-boosting elixers become available to buy, which can continue to raise all your stats beyond their soft caps and will make you so much more stronger than your level ups ever will. It's a wonder why the devs locked the Legend difficulty behind reaching level 60, when you won't be remotely close to it after beating all the other prior difficuties once and when reaching that level is so meaningless for your character's actual readiness for the difficulty.

* FairestOfThemAll: In one of the quests, the desire of a very old VainSorceress to be this leads her to curse a nearby village. The player character must perform a reverse GlamourFailure to trick her into undoing it.

* ForcedLevelGrinding: You can reach the level requirement to play the Expert, Master, and Hero difficulties naturally by just successively playing through each difficulty once; you should reach level 20 to access Expert around or even before the halfway point of your first Novice playthrough, you should reach level 35 to access the Master difficulty near the beginning of your Expert playthrough or even at the end of your Novice playthrough if you grinded some, and you should reach level 45 to access the Hero difficulty by the end of your Master playthrough. But by the end of your Hero playthrough you will probably be around level 47-50, while the level requirement to access the Legend difficulty is 60, and at this point it becomes so slow to level up you'll only be gaining about one level or two ''a whole playthrough''. Even if you ensure your character is always 20 years old and have your Learning skill maxed out to gain EXP as fast as possible, you'll have to grind for a ridiculously long time before you can reach level 60 to access Legend, and it's especially painful with how [[EmptyLevels meaningless]] levels are at this point. Upon beating Hero you're much better off just cheating your way to level 60 to access the Legend difficulty.

** The reason Draak is impossible to defeat without the Time Orb is his regeneration ability, as whenever his health is depeleted to half he'll instantly regenerate his health back up to full. When the Time Orb is activated Draak will be unable to regenerate, but if he is not finished off before the Time Orb's duration is up he'll instantly regenerate back up to full health again.

* KarmaHoudini: Gutrick in the Fountain of Light questline, who ''poisons his sister-in-law out of jealousy due to his brother dying and leaving her their fortune''. And just for added points, Genna's worried ''son'' is part of their caravan. Once you confront him with the proof of his poisoning Genna, however, he goes with you to request the antidote from the wizard he ordered the poison from and...nothing further comes from it. To be expected of a game with limited storytelling, but it's a particularly standout moment that Gutrick doesn't pay any more for this crime than that.

* NoGoodDeedGoesUnpunished: During the Poison Vats questline, you can help the knight, Eraldus, save his wife, Angelique, from a dungeon filled with spiders since he's too scared of them to save her himself. While it's not required to get the Crystal of Nobility, you can still choose to do so...after which he immediately chews you out and tells you to leave because you ''took too long to save her''. Talking to him two more times results in him attacking you. Kill him in self defense and his wife will turn into a werewolf and try to kill you too! You do get a key to a nearby chest for your trouble though.
* NoStatAtrophy: Averted; your character can and ''will'' age, and once you hit a certain age your stats begin to decrease. Additionally with each year you get older the rate at which your character gains exp will slow down by 1%. You can counteract this however and lower your age by five years (or down to the minimum of 20 years if you're younger than 25) if you drink an Elixer Of Youth. Since Elixers Of Youth will become available to buy at Elmeric's shop late in the game (and will become available even sooner on harder difficulties), you should be able to ensure your age will never be a problem and even keep yourself permanently at 20 if you have enough money, unless you somehow take a very very long time ingame on your initial Novice playthrough to reach the point where you can buy elixers (you should be no older than 30 by the time you can buy them).

* OurWerewolvesAreDifferent: The Sorceress class (and the Wizard too in the Playstation version) comes with the Lycantrophy skill to turn into a werewolf for a limited time, where they'll move and attack much faster, and have their mana become their HP (and vice versa), to become much more durable in the process. Additionally since it's a skill, it has no cost to use and you can continue spamming to stay a werewolf for as long as you want. However with the HP and mana swapped you'll be more limted in your spell usage as a werewolf, and can't use any weapons, being restricted to your claws, that will be relatively weak past midgame.
** In the Poison Vats quest, when you rescue Angelique and then kill Eraldus in self-defense, she'll turn into a Werewolf to attack you. Though rescuing her and then killing Eraldus and her is optional and not neceesary to obtain the quest's crystal, doing so will get you the key to their chest.

* PointBuildSystem: Each class has set base stats they start from, but upon levelling up you get six stat points that you can allocate however you desire to the four stats; Strength, Magic, Dexterity, and Vitality. Increasing Strength will gradually increase your character's base armor and damage, with a faster rate for Warriors/Amazons, as well as letting you use better Warrior equipment. Dexterity also gradually increases base armor/damage in addition to increasing your base hitrate, but with a faster rate for Assassins/Thieves, and is the stat used for the stat requirement of Thief equipment. Increasing Magic will gradually increase your max mana and the damage of your attack spells, as well as letting you use better Wizard equipment and learn higher level spells or upgrade spells you already know farther. Then increasing Vitality will gradually increase your max HP, as well as let you use better Priest equipment. Once you can buy stat-boosting elixers from Elmeric however stat distribution goes out the window, with the only limitation to increasing your stats from that point forward being your money.

* RareCandy: There are the Elixers of Strength, Magic, Dexterity, and Vitality, which each raise the corresponding stat permanently by 1. When you reach near the end of your first Novice playthrough you'll become dependent on them to get your stats stronger from that point forward and through all the harder difficulties, as level ups will slow immensely and [[EmptyLevels become no longer rewarding]], and they're the only way to permanently increase your stats beyond their soft caps, which except for your class' primary stat will be all very low. They can be bought from Elmeric when you progress far enough (they'll be available earlier the higher the difficulty), but they're quite pricey at 10,000 gold each, limiting how much they can be abused by how loaded you are.

** Then there's the Elixers Of Youth, which will decrease your age by 5. These will be vital to ensure you never become old enough to have your stats weakened, but also vital if you want to get your level high enough to upgrade your skills and access harder difficulties as fast as possible, as the rate you gain EXP will very slightly decrease with each year you get older. They also will eventually be buyable from Elmeric, but for a very pricey 100,000 gold.

* SchmuckBait: Cursed equipment will appear to have an enchantment that raises all your attributes by a very high amount, and will often not having a stat requirement to equip too, really enticing you to put it on, but upon putting on cursed equipment it'll turn out it doesn't raise your stats at all and will instead inflict a nasty status effect on to you, while you'll be unable to unequip it unless you go to Irma and have her free you from the curse for a hefty price. In the PC version you can use the Detection spell/skill to distinguish cursed equipment from legitimate enchanted equipment, but in the Playstation version you'll have to deduce it yourself or take it to Gunther to see if it'll sell like a legitimately enchanted equipment will (or SaveScum to safely put it on to see), but equipment having no stat requirement will be a 100% sure sign that it is cursed.

** In the Holy Number quest, each of the three dungeon levels before the last will have a "Crystal Room", where you'll find what appears to be the Crystal Of Strength just left lying on a pedastal for easy pickings, with no sign of anything relating to the holy number and demon the monk's scroll told you about. Try picking up the crystals in these rooms and they'll instead turn into Potions Of Surprise, while in the second and third "Crystal Room" you'll also be surrounded by two super-powered Chief Rat Men that move and attack at insane speed.

** Ranged-attacking enemies can also hit and damage enemies that get in the way of their projectiles, they won't retaliate back but you can still potentially get enemies to indavertently kill each other through this.

* StupidityIsTheOnlyOption: In the Luxorious The Vampire quest has you regain an artifact for the titled character who is quite obviously a vampire. An evil vampire. The sort of character you should not be helping. But you have no choice.
** In the Sun Cross quest, you have to steal the Sun Cross from the Kaliba priests and give it to Drakus, who you are explictly warned by the farmer Greg of his shady nature and to stay away from him. However there's no other way to progress and once you give the Sun Cross to Drakus he'll turn into a Spectre and attack you. Killing Drakus will have him drop the Crystal Of Wisdom.
** Subverted in the Fountains Of Immortality quest. In Omar you'll find a monk named Langolin, who tells you he'll need three Potions Of Immortality to recover Mrs. Argana's husband, which sounds reasonable enough, but after doing so he says he also needs the Crystal Of Wisdom, an obviously questionable demand. And sure enough upon giving it to him he reveals his true nature and teleports away while leaving behind a horde of Spectres to attack you. Upon reaching the final floor of the associated dungeon you'll find Langolin at the Crystal Room where he is about to use the Crystal Of Wisdom to get the Crystal Of Compassion, and confronting him will have him to turn into a Damned Spectre to attack you, where you then have to kill him to get the Crystal Of Wisdom back. The subversion comes in that you don't actually need to ever give any of that stuff to Langolin to complete the quest, you can just head straight to the Crystal Room, find Langolin there anyway blocking the entrance and kill him, and then use your crystal to get the Crystal Of Compassion. Doing it this way saves you the Potions Of Immortality which you can then sell to Perry for a good sum of money after you complete the quest, but if you're on the Playstation version and playing an Assassin/Thief you can duplicate the Crystal Of Wisdom by giving it to Langolin and stealing it from him in his boss fight.

** In one quest, there is a witch who was so obsessed with her looks that she swore to turn any woman to stone if they dared to be more beautiful than her. Given that she looks to now be about two hundred years old, this has been a problem for her neighbors.

** The Night Vision spell. Being able to see better in the dark when dungeons can be so dark could be handy, but its mana cost is not that cheap and its duration is awful, lasting only seven seconds at level 1. Comparatively, the basic Light spell that just lights up the area around you instead to let you see in the dark has a very cheap mana cost and has a much better duration, lasting over 30 seconds at its first level, and it has a lower Magic requirement to upgrade farther, as it's a Level 1 spell while Night Vision is a Level 2 spell. You really have no reason to ever use Night Vision instead of Light unless you somehow missed getting a Light spellbook. It does have a secondary effect of showing you enemy locations on the map when active, but rarely should you ever be needing to avoid enemies (and often probably can't anyway), or if you're seeking them out instead, they won't be hard to find either.
** The Haste spell. Doubling your movement speed is really helpful, but then the Berserker spell exists, which not only does the same but also drastically increases your armor and hitrate while granting significant health regeneration, all while having a lower mana cost than Haste and significantly longer duration, on top of being a Level 1 spell while Haste is a Level 2 spell so it'll have a lower Magic requirement to learn and upgrade. Similar to the Night Vision vs. Light example above, you'll have no reason to ever use Haste instead of Berserker unless you were unlucky enough to miss picking up a Berserker spellbook, in which case you should just reset if you didn't get a Berserker spellbook in the first few dungeon levels as it's so essential. You can't stack the movement boosts of Haste and Berserker either, eliminating the one possible use Haste could have had.

** The Detection skill. When active it'll show you where enchanted equipment are on the map, but it'll only show such equipment after it already dropped, in which case you already have the enchanted equipment in your inventory or left it lying around because it's junk, in which case you probably won't bother trying to find it again unless you're just really that strapped for cash. This really screws over the Wizard in the PC version when he has this skill instead of Lycanthrophy like the Sorceress does, a very vital skill to helping the Wizard's and Sorceress' very weak early game, but in the Playstation version with the multiplayer-only Languages skill removed the Wizard gets Lycantrophy too in its place.
** The Eternal Youth enchantment. Being permanently 20 while wearing Eternal Youth equipment sure is nice, but the enchantment doesn't actually prevent aging, it just makes the game ignore your character's age while it's worn, so unless you plan to keep that Eternal Youth equipment on forever you're going to need to still drink Elixers Of Youth to bring your age back down once you swap the equipment out for something else. Additionally those elixers will be available to buy by the time Eternal Youth equipment can appear and you'll be able to easily afford buying one every couple ingame years, so you're much better off just continuing to drink the elixers to stay young and wearing equipment with other enchantments that are actually useful.

* YourSoulIsMine: Type One. Part of Draak's master plan. In order to become godlike, he needs to extract the core energy of the country's inhabitants by using the Darkstone.
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** Subverted in the Fountains Of Immortality quest. In Omar you'll find a monk named Langolin, who tells you he'll need three Potions Of Immortality to recover Mrs. Argana's husband, which sounds reasonable enough, but after doing so he says he also needs the Crystal Of Wisdom, an obviously questionable demand. And sure enough upon giving it to him he reveals his true nature and teleports away while leaving behind a horde of Spectres to attack you. Upon reaching the final floor of the associaated dungeon you'll find Langolin at the Crystal Room where he is about to use the Crystal Of Wisdom to get the Crystal Of Compassion, and confronting him will have him to turn into a Damned Spectre to attack you, where you then have to kill him to get the Crystal Of Wisdom back. The subversion comes in that you don't actually need to ever give any of that stuff to Langolin to complete the quest, you can just head straight to the Crystal Room, find Langolin there anyway blocking the entrance and kill him, and then use your crystal to get the Crystal Of Compassion. Doing it this way saves you the Potions Of Immortality which you can then sell to Perry for a good sum of money after you complete the quest, but if you're on the Playstation version and playing an Assassin/Thief you can duplicate the Crystal Of Wisdom by giving it to Langolin and stealing it from him in his boss fight.

* StupidityIsTheOnlyOption: One quest has you regain an artifact for a character who is quite obviously a vampire. An evil vampire. The sort of character you should not be helping. But you have no choice.

* NoStatAtrophy: Averted; your character can and ''will'' age, and once you hit a certain age your stats begin to decrease. If you're lucky enough to find a Potion of Youth, it will help.

* UselessUsefulSpell: Some of them, depending on the resistances of the enemies, but ''Darkstone'' can have weapons with this, such as Poison enchantment on your sword. Sure, your sword may do 50-80 damage in addition to the poison, but if the enemy resists the poison, you do ''1 damage with every attack''. As a result, it's typically best to avoid using anything with weapon enchantments for damaging enemies as you're likely to be wasting your time, effort, and life.

* EmptyLevels: Gaining levels is very important early on to get stronger but as you progress they'll become gradually less important, and once you reach about level 35 and start taking on the difficulties become Novice your level ups will become irrelevant other than for reaching needed level requirements to upgrade your skills and access harder difficulty levels. The reasons for this are each of your stats beside your class' primary stat have very low soft stat caps (of 150, 100, and 50 for their 2nd, 3rd, and 4th best stat respectively), where upon reaching those caps you can no longer allocate your stat points from levelling up to them despite those stats being way too low to handle any of the difficulties beyond Novice, while stat-boosting elixers become available to buy, which can continue to raise all your stats beyond their soft caps and will make you so much more stronger than your level ups ever will. It's a wonder why the devs locked the Legend difficulty behind reaching level 60, when you won't be remotely close to it after beating all the other prior difficuties once and when reaching that level is so meaningless for your character's actual readiness for the difficulty.

** Elixirs of Youth reverse your age by five years, which is the only way to remedy stat atrophy caused by aging.
** As you progress through the game, Master Elmeric eventually has Elixirs of Youth to purchase. Without the Trade skill, the price is 100,000 gold. The higher the difficulty level, the sooner he has the Elixirs.

* LizardFolk: Draak's minions include these. One quest even has you destroy their unhatched offspring.

* OurWerewolvesAreDifferent: The Sorceress class comes with the handy ability to change into a werewolf once the proper spell is mastered. Full moon not required.

* ShockAndAwe: The Spark and Thunder spells. There are also Ice Golems that, somehow, throw lightning.

* TakenForGranite: The Stone spell.

* WhoForgotTheLights: Some of the dungeons are very dark, meaning that unless you have a torch or a Light spell, you're only going to be able to see the character's immediate surroundings.

* Cap: Each of your stats for every class can go up to 9999, but each class have individual soft caps for each stat, where upon reaching them you can no longer allocate stat points gained from levelling up to those stats. Each class' primary stat has a soft cap of 1000, but their other stats have drastically lower soft caps of 150, 100, and 50 for their second, third, and four best stats respectively. Upon reaching those soft caps, you must drink the stat-boosting elixers to continue raising those stats.

** If you're playing an Assassin/Thief or Wizard/Sorceress, you'll get little benefit out of spending stat points on Vitality. Getting more health is crucial, but it takes them several points in Vitality to get a single hit point, and the only other thing increasing Vitality does is let you use better Priest equipment, so until you alleviate stat-distribution concerns by being able to mass buy stat-boosting Elixers, you're better off depending on enchanted equipment to increase your HP and focusing your stat points on Dexterity and Magic. Strength also isn't very useful for them, as for them it takes several points in Strength to get any increase in your base armor/hitrate/damage while they'll never want to use any Warrior weapons, but Strength is required to use shields, which are handy and provide another piece of equipment to get enchantments from, so you don't want to completely neglect Strength if you want to be able to use more than the weakest shield.
** If you're playing a Warrior/Amazon or Monk/Priestess, Dexterity is the clear dump stat. For them it takes several points in Dexterity to get any increase in your base armor/hitrate/damage, and spells will much better supplement their close-range combat than ranged-weapons will, so besides increasing their primary stats, it's much better to put points towards Magic to learn better spells and get more mana than points towards Dexterity to use ranged-weapons that they attack very slowly with.

* EmptyLevels: Gaining levels is very important early on to get stronger but as you progress they'll become gradually less important, and once you reach about level 35 and start taking on the difficulties become Novice your level ups will become irrelevant other than for reaching needed level requirements to upgrade your skills and access harder difficulty levels. The reasons for this are each of your stats beside your class' primary stat have very low soft stat caps (of 150, 100, and 50 for their 2nd, 3rd, and 4th best stat respectively), where upon reaching those caps you can no longer allocate your stat points from levelling up to them despite those stats being way too low to handle any of the difficulties beyond Novice, while stat-boosting elixers become available to buy, which can continue to raise all your stats beyond their soft caps and will make you so much more stronger than your level ups ever will. It's a wonder why the devs locked the Legend difficulty behind reaching level 60, when you won't be remotely close to it after beating Hero difficulty and when reaching that level is so meaningless for your character's actual readiness for the difficulty.

* GameBreakingBug: Normally, items and equipment left in the overworld will remain where they're left until you pick them back up. This is always true on the PC version. However, a glitch in the Playstation version can result in an overworld item disappearing permanently. Usually it's not a big deal and you probably won't even notice it, but it can affect a plot-important item you left lying around to save inventory space until needed, in which case - unless you're playing an Assassin/Thief who manages to steal a duplicate through a GoodBadBug with their Thief skill - the game is rendered UnwinnableByMistake and requires a restart. If the affected item is one of the Crystals of Virtue, restarting is the only answer.

* IdiosyncraticDifficultyLevels: There are five difficulties, named from easiest to hardest: Novice, Expert, Master, Hero, and Legend. Initially every new character can only access the Novice difficulty, as your character must be at a minimum required level to start a new game on the harder difficulties, which are level 20 for Expert, 35 for Master, 45 for Hero, and 60 for Legend. As you go up in difficulty all enemies will scale up drastically in stats, with the beginning enemies being about as strong as the enemies at the endgame of the prior difficulty, and they may gain new tricks too, such as all ranged-enemies having permanent Reflections on Hero difficulty. However the loot that gets dropped and that you can buy from the stores will also get increasingly better as the difficulty goes up, and the enchantments that equipment can have will get more powerful too, though cursed equipment will also start showing up on Expert difficulty and will get more common the higher the difficulty becomes.

* PointBuildSystem: Each class has set base stats they start from, but upon levelling up you get six stat points that you can allocate however you desire to the four stats; Strength, Magic, Dexterity, and Vitality. Increasing Strength will gradually increase your character's base armor, hitrate, and damage, with a faster rate for Warriors/Amazons, as well as letting you use better Warrior equipment. Dexterity will also gradually increases base armor/hitrate/damage, but with a faster rate for Assassins/Thieves, and is the stat used for the stat requirement of Thief equipment. Increasing Magic will gradually increase your max mana and the damage of your attack spells, as well as letting you use better Wizard equipment and learn higher level spells or upgrade spells you already know farther. Then increasing Vitality will gradually increase your max HP, as well as let you use better Priest equipment. Once you can buy stat-boosting elixers from Elmeric however stat distribution goes out the window, with the only limitation to increasing your stats from that point forward being your money.

* TeleportSpam: Enemy Wizards prefer to teleport instead of walk. If you open a door to a room with Wizards, they'll immediately teleport over and start throwing fireballs.
** This is also the preferred tactic of the bonus boss Nosferatu.

* WalletOfHolding: A living one in the form of Larsac the Usurer. Instead of wasting valuable space in the limited inventory on coin, you can hand all your money over to Larsac, who will take care of your debts with the merchants in town.
** In addition, any money your character stores in the bank can be accessed from other games if you start another playthrough with the same character, making it work as a sort of off-shore bank account.

* WhyDidItHaveToBeSnakes: One of the quests involves collecting a series of pipes to play "the song of the snakes" in order to lull a huge horde of them into a trance so you can collect the nearby Crystal. Once you have it, however, get ready to run.

* ExplodingBarrels: If they're booby-trapped. Characters with a sufficiently high stealth skill can identify the booby-trapped items.
** Some classes can learn Perception, which permanently highlights all traps in red, but only when you're controlling that character. There are also time-limited spells and skills which will identify traps. The Thief and the Assassin can even learn to defuse the traps, but it's easier to just identify them and then stand back and pop them with Telekinesis.

** The Telekinesis Spell. It lets you open doors, flip switches, pick up items, and open chests/pots/crates from a distance. However there's really never a time where doing that stuff from far away is really any useful and worth expending mana on other than opening booby-trapped chests, and with such chests you can still stand far enough way to open them manually without getting hit by the explosion, while with pots and creates you can just break them with a ranged weapon.

* SchmuckBait: Go ahead, click on the well in the Village of the Damned. See how that works out for you. [[spoiler:It summons literally hundreds of venomous spiders. Your character will be dead within seconds.]]

* VendorTrash: The only thing you can do with most of that armor, weaponry, and various other dungeon loot is to sell it to Gunther the blacksmith (armor and weapons) or Master Elmeric the wizard (rings, amulets, spell books). Many plot equipment andi tems are also able to be kept after completing their relevant quest but the plot equipment is almost certainly going to be worthless to actually use compared to proper equipment and the items will probably have no use at all, but after finishing their quest you can sell them as artifacts to Perry for a nice sum of money.

** Gunther's Upgrade service. Pay a bit of coin and the selected item will have its stats upgraded by 1 (AC for armors, and both Min/Max damage for weapons) at the cost of reducing its max Durability by 1. However, as equipment gets stronger so does their maximum durability, and later equipment have HUGE durability pools, meaning you can basically craft an especially powerful piece of equipment if you have the gold to spare, as opposed to hunting for a pricy one in shop or just lucking upon one in the field. Just be careful not to overdo it, as higher difficulties see faster equipment degradation and it sucks to have your powerful new equipment nearly broken after two minutes.

** Gunther's Upgrade service. Pay a bit of coin and the selected item will have its stats upgraded by 1 (AC for armors, and both Min/Max damage for weapons) at the cost of reducing its max Durability by 1. However, a number of items have HUGE durability pools, meaning you can basically craft a powerful piece of equipment if you have the gold to spare, as opposed to hunting for a pricy one in shop or just lucking upon one in the field. Just be careful not to overdo it, as higher difficulties see faster equipment degradation and it sucks to have your powerful new equipment nearly broken after two minutes.
** Theft, available to only Assassins and Thieves, obviously. You won't ever steal good equipment, but you can sell what you get for more coin. One particularly profitable option is to play two characters, a Thief and a Warrior. Go to the training grounds and steal repeatedly from the troll. Since it can be killed and respawns endlessly, you can steal an item, kill it, and steal again repeatedly. Fill both characters inventories, have your warrior repair everything to max durability, and have the one with the best Trade skill sell the goods. Simple skill, enormous profit potential, though it can take a LONG time if your skills are particularly low.
** Many spells count:
*** Magic Door. Opens a portal to the town, and from there can be used to go back to where you were. Nothing more, but endlessly useful, particularly to quickly get to town and back to sell your loot and stock up inbetween dungeons floors, and to escape if you get yourself into an overly perilous situation.
*** Light. It just lights up the area around you for a limited duration, but Darkstone can visually be a very dark game, and in dungeons you'll often find it difficult to see with how dark it is if you're not playing on a tv/monitor with ramped up brightness/gamma, so Light will be a big convience you'll use a lot just to help you see better, especially with its cheap mana cost and long duration.

*** Telekinesis allows you to pick up items or open containers and doors from afar, which is useful if you're trying to avoid traps.

** The Haste spell. Increasing your movement speed drastically is really helpful, but then the Berserker spell exists, which not only increases your movement speed but also drastically increases your armor and hitrate while granting significant health regeneration, all while having a lower mana cost than Haste and significantly longer duration, on top of being a Level 1 spell while Haste a Level 2 spell so it'll have a lower Magic requirement to learn and upgrade. Similar to the Night Vision vs. Light example above, you'll have no reason to ever use Haste instead of Berserker unless you were unlucky enough to miss picking up a Berserker spellbook.
** The Healing spell. Being able to recover your health is vital in Darkstone, but health potions exist, which are cheap, can be carried in stacks of 9, can be set to one of your belt items for instant access any time, and heal you fully instantly, as opposed to Healing recovering a portion for a non-negligible mana cost. Additionally you can just cast Berserker instead to regain more health through health regeneration on top of all the other aformentioned benefits of Berserker, while Berserker also has a lower mana cost than Healing.

*** Magic Door. Opens a portal to the town. Nothing more, but endlessly useful.

* VendorTrash: The only thing you can do with most of that armor, weaponry, and various other dungeon loot is to sell it to Gunther the blacksmith (armor and weapons) or Master Elmeric the wizard (rings, amulets, spell books).

** The Night Vision spell. Being able to see better in the dark when dungeons can be so dark could be handy, but its mana cost is not that cheap and its duration is awful, not being much longer than a few seconds at level 1. Comparatively, the basic Light spell that just lights up the area around you instead to let you see in the dark has a very cheap mana cost and has a much better duration, lasting over 30 seconds at its first level, and it has a lower Magic requirement to upgrade farther, as it's a Level 1 spell while Night Vision is a Level 2 spell. You really have no reason to ever use Night Vision instead of Light unless you somehow missed getting a Light spellbook.

* DiscOneNuke: As mentioned in the BeefGate section, you can explore wherever you want right from the start of the game, there will just be increasingly stronger and more dangerous enemies the farther you go. And expectedly, the farther you go the better loot enemies will drop, so if you go to the farther lands at the start and can kill the enemies there (which is especially manageable as a Thief/Assassin with their ranged weapon proficiency to keep them out of harm's way), with some luck you can get yourself a particularly strong late game weapon before you go after your first crystal, allowing you to stomp the early lands with an overpowered weapon. While such a weapon may have high minimum stat requirements that may prevent you from using it initially, MinMaxing in your class' main stat will allow you to use a preferred weapon quickly (for example you get 6 stat points per level up and your class' main stat starts with 20 points, so after 10 levelups that come fairly quickly you'll already be able to use weapons in that stat class with an 80 point requirement if you devote each entire level up to that stat). Additionally the shops in your town will get much better stuff if you go explore far immediately, allowing you to potentially just buy a DiscOneNuke near the start of the game if you can get enough money.

''Darkstone'' is a role-playing game for the [[UsefulNotes/IBMPersonalComputer PC]] and UsefulNotes/PlayStation, created by Creator/DelphineSoftwareInternational in 2001. It was one of the earlier ''VideoGame/{{Diablo}}'' clone action [=RPGs=] to use fully polygonal graphics - technology that would eventually be adopted by many developers including the creator(s) of the genre codifier themselves.

* EstablishingCharacterMoment: In the opening video the narrator talks about how Draak is back after the disciples of [[GodOfGood Kaliba]] banished him. We then see said disciples praying peacefully until Draak [[BreathWeapon breaths a a huge blast of fire and fries them all]].

** Magic Door. Opens a portal to the town. Nothing more, but endlessly useful.

* DeusExMachina: Literally, in one quest; a monk has lost his eyesight and his faith. You must restore both, with the help of a minor deity.

* GameBreakingBug: Normally items and equipment left in the overworld will remain where they're left until you pick them back up, however a glitch in the Playstation version can result in an overworld item disappearing permanently. Usually it's not a big deal and you probably won't even notice it, but it can affect a plot-important item you left lying around to save inventory space until needed, including the crystals, in which case unless you were an Assassin/Thief that managed to steal a duplicate through a GoodBadBug with their Thief skill, the game is rendered unwinnable and requires a restart.

* GodsNeedPrayerBadly: Part of one of the longest and most convoluted quests involves finding a new worshiper for a fading deity.

* WalletOfHolding: A living one in the form of Larsac the Usurer. Instead of wasting valuable space in the limited inventory, you can hand all your money over to Larsac, who will take care of your debts with the merchants in town.
** In addition, any money your character stores in the bank can be accessed from other games if you start another playthrough with that character, making it work as a sort of off-shore bank account.

''Darkstone'' is a role-playing game for the PC and UsefulNotes/PlayStation, created by Creator/DelphineSoftwareInternational. It was one of the earlier ''VideoGame/{{Diablo}}'' clone action [=RPGs=] to use fully polygonal graphics - technology that would eventually be adopted by many developers including the creator(s) of the genre codifier themselves.

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