The Stack

Early in Throne of Darkness, I decided to keep things relatively simple by playing only with the four simplest characters: the Leader, Brick, Archer, and Swordsman. (The special roles of the Ninja and Berserker weren’t obvious, and playing the Wizard would require learning the magic system immediately.) I did try using fewer than the full complement of four, but doing that for very long is risky. You never know when you’re going to find yourself suddenly outnumbered.

When more than one character is active, you directly control one of them at a time, switching between them at will. The ones you’re not controlling at the moment act autonomously, following you around unless they see something that they want to kill, like the dog in Nethack. I suppose the developers were trying to make the single-player campaign more like cooperative multiplayer play, since that’s generally acknowledged to be the best way to play Diablo.

This scheme yields ironic results. To explain: Each character earns experience points independently, and they seem to get them by hurting foes, not necessarily by killing them. So the more often a character can successfully strike a blow, the faster he’ll level. Now, the characters you’re not controlling at a given moment are pretty efficient about finding and attacking foes. They’ll rush at things that aren’t even onscreen yet, leaving the player-controleld character chasing after them. Melee is rapid, and it’s easy to misclick, either by clicking the spot that a moving foe has just vacated or not being able to distinguish friend from foe. These clicks are interpreted as instructions to move. Consequently, in most battles, the player-controlled character spends a lot of time running around aimlessly instead of fighting. Overall, then, the characters that you’re not controlling directly will tend to level faster than the one you are. If only there were a way to just abandon control of everyone, let the computer play the battle for you so that everyone would participate optimally! Which, come to think of it, is the idea behind the Final Fantasy XII “gambit” system..