I wish I had more time to mingle in the DarkSpore forums (or any forums for that matter) but I just can’t be everywhere at once!  I missed out on this forum post that was created last Friday about the loot in DarkSpore.  If you’ve been keeping up, I’m sure you have already read it, but to others it may be new.  Have a read (by MaxisSparks)!

Hi again! We’ve talked about a lot of things, but one thing that we haven’t talked much about is loot. Which I’m about to fix, because, well, loot is one of the most exciting things in the game.

When I talk about Loot, I’m talking about Parts with power-ups. And Parts go on your Heroes. One of the interesting things about Darkspore is that you have a LOT of Heroes. So you need a lot of Parts to equip your Heroes with the best stats. Which means not only do we give you lots of Parts, but that you’ll need to use them. Imagine there were, oh, I dunno, 5 slots for parts on average for each Hero (+ Flair, but Flair doesn’t affect stats). We’ve shown something like 9 Heroes so far? That’s 45 parts if you have all those Heroes. And there’s a LOT more Heroes.

You get a LOT of Parts.

You get Parts in Darkspore in two different ways: you beat levels, and you defeat Darkspore. Beating Darkspore gets you the most loot, but the loot you get by beating levels is stronger. So you have incentives to do both. If you race through the first 5 levels of the game, you’ll get 5 pieces of loot, but you won’t have as much as someone who took their time.

Plus, of course, more Parts makes it easier to make your Heroes look exactly how you want. Seems good, doesn’t it?

We call the bonuses that Parts give you affixes:

Here, +Dexterity, +Health, and +Critical Rating are affixes.

All parts can also be Rare (blue) or Pure (purple). As you can see, Rarified Loot gets 1 extra affix and Purified Loot gets 2. Read that as Rare Loot is as good as 1.5 other Parts, and Epic is as good as 2 other Parts. Yowzers!

There’s not enough room on your Hero to max out every stat. So you’ll want to split up your Loot to outfit the Heroes you have the way you like.

Of course, affixes get a lot more interesting than the basic ones above. In particular, we wanted some affixes to be better for some Heroes then others. For example, a few of the affixes I’ve added this week:

  • An affix that gives 4 Heroes stronger friends
  • An affix that overdrives Overdrive
  • An affix that makes helps you survive but doesn’t boost any of your stats
  • An affix that works 6x more often on Arakna then the average Hero.
  • An affix that makes Jinx’s Curse of Weakness and Vex’s Temporal Strike more powerful
  • And, of course, an affix that helps you find more affixes!

(All of these are subject to change, of course. But see if you can figure them out!)

CORRECTION: MaxisYegg pointed out that Rares are worth more like 1.5 Parts and Epics are worth more like 2 Parts right now. That’s what I get for not asking him first!