Crusaders of the Dark Savant is played from a first person perspective, with the party's character portraits visible alongside what they see in the game world, and movement is tile-based, and the player can only turn in 90° increments. The game supported contemporary VGA displays and a variety of sound cards for effects, and synthesized background music. The player could use the mouse or keyboard to navigate the user interface. The party's characters are not autonomous and have no personality; they are completely under the player's control. The gender, portrait, race and profession of each character is, however, customizable, allowing for many different types of parties to explore the world of Lost Guardia. The party of
player characters can be imported from a previous
saved game of Wizardry VI, or characters may be created anew. Each character's statistics (such as strength and intelligence) are given a baseline by the character's race and gender. A random dice roll provides a certain number of bonus points for each character. Each profession has minimum requirements for entrance, so a given random character may not be eligible for some professions. Unfortunately, this means to be an elite group, the player may need to spend considerable amounts of time trying to obtain the highest possible dice rolls to create strong or exotic characters (such as the faerie ninja). Formation of the party, up to six, is set up to allow the first three characters to be on the front line, where stronger short ranged weapons can be used, but where more damage is taken. The final three can only hit with ranged weapons, spells or while hidden, but are less likely to be hit and take damage. The game lets the player change a character's profession at a later time, provided the character meets the class' requirements. This permits the player to develop more versatile characters (allowing fighters to obtain magic, for example), and allows characters to join professions they were not eligible to join at creation. Profession changes carries certain penalties. Each race has a certain statistic value attached to them, before bonuses: • Strength affects carrying capacity and melee damage. • Intelligence affects the number of academic skill points and the number of spell points a character gets. • Piety does the same as Intelligence and also affects spell point regeneration speed. • Vitality affects HP, and resistance to disease. • Dexterity affects number of attacks per round and thieving skills. • Speed affects number of total attack rounds available and initiative. • Personality affects how likely a character is to make friends with neutral or hostile NPCs. • Karma does much the same as Personality, except that low values in Karma impress similarly low Karma NPCs (thieves like the company of thieves, and so on). As with the first five
Wizardry games, the races include
Tolkien-esque
Humans,
Elves,
Dwarves,
Gnomes and
Hobbits. However, continuing with the expansion of this concept in
Bane of the Cosmic Forge,
Lizardmen,
Faeries, Dracons (half-Human, half-Dragons), Rawulf (humanoid dogs), Felpurr (humanoid cats) and the alien Mook (tall and hairy
Sasquatch-like people, who make an appearance in
Wizardry 8) are all playable. Each race carries its own unique set of benefits and detriments to statistics, unique resistances, and can make use of race specific equipment. The game even includes a weapon that is relegated only to Faeries who become
Ninja: the incredible Cane of Corpus. There are also several classes: • Fighters are the frontline troops. • Thieves disarm traps, steal and fight. • Samurai, Lords, the female-only Valkyries, Bards, Rangers, Monk and Ninja are all hybrid classes that can fight, in addition to casting spells and/or thieving. • Psionics, Priests, Mages and Alchemists all cast spells from one of the game world's four spellbooks. • Bishops cast both Priest and Mage spells, but learn them half as quickly as a pure Priest or Mage. Combat is phased or turn based. When battle begins, the enemy party is shown graphically on the worldview screen. The fastest characters or monsters act first, complete their turn, then allow the next fastest person to take theirs. This mechanic means that party members' actions may take no effect (if a party member attacks a group that others have already eliminated) or healers may take their turn too late and fail to save their injured companions. Leveling is similar to other RPGs. When enough experience is earned through defeating enemies, a character advances in their current class, earning new statistics, skills, spells and ranks in that class. Statistical growth can result in one statistic going up, several going up, or even (rarely) having one decrease. Skill gains are divided among weapon skills, physical skills like swimming and climbing, academic skills like spells, critical strikes and mythology, and "personal" skills. NPC interaction, on the DOS and Windows versions of
Crusaders of the Dark Savant, is carried out by the mouse and keyboard. The mouse selects general actions, such as "Fight," "Spell," or "Trade." Magic is divided into four schools of magic, and six elements. The four schools are:
Psionics, mind-based spells;
Alchemy, potion-based spells; Theology, prayer-based spells; and Thaumaturgy, element-based spells. The six elements are fire, water, air, earth, mental and divine. ==Plot==