So I've bought Darklands after some consideration. I've been spending my entire evening educating myself through the manual and whatnot. Including going through some wiki's and beginner's guides to make sure I'd create a well balanced party (because who goes with the default party, right?)

Now here's my problem. I've had to restart my game 20-30 times because I kept getting killed by pretty much everything. I haven't won a single fight let alone kill a single enemy unit. I've tried everything from working in the inn and buying a few better weapon and turning down the difficulty but nothing seems to work.

Then, after contemplating throwing myself from a bridge, I decided to look at the default party. I noticed that they all had avatars. Something my initial game didn't present me with. I also noticed that the load wasn't just 0/79 (see the attachment) or something like that. Am I missing something? Am I supposed to equip my items? If so, how? I've tried clicking pretty much everything.

So, yeah. The missing avatar, which in the default party resembles knights in armor, is just the background in my first game with custom built characters.

In any case, if anyone knows if this is a bug or I'm just being stupid please let me know. Thanks a lot!

Update:

Well, it seems like you had to drag and drop your equipment into the slots. My bad :P

I guess the somewhat aged user interface got the better of me.

Yeah, its kinda brutal in it's old school way. I believe you can also equip gear with a key command once the gear is highlighted (either by mouse click or by up/down arrowing to the item). I believe that E equips, U unequips and D drops, but I am not 100% on any of those.

So you will want to equip the torso armor, the limb armor (T and L I believe) and then a weapon, and a shield if you are using a 1 handed weapon. Be aware that encumberence has a huge impact on weapon speed, so that you don't want to be overloaded.

For power gaming, I have found that focusing on Strength and Endurance for everyone except the alchemist is the "way to go", but it's not realistic in the theme of being a group of men off the street.

Don't forget that you have to have each character targeted on a specific enemy in combat, and once that enemy drops, you have to retarget each character. The only way they will auto attack is to attack the person meleeing them.

Darklands is an aquired taste, but god - I still think it quite possibly would be the best game for the genre if it had a modern UI. It quite simply is that immersive.