How to Play
New to this kind of game? You will be questing in minutes. Here is the short version, one step at a time.
Your first 15 minutes
Get in
Make a free account (a username, a password, and an email address for recovery) or sign in to the one you have, then pick a world from the World List.
Make a character
Pick a class and a look, give your hero a name, and enter the world. You can make more characters later.
Find your first quest
Marshal Redbrook is waiting in the starting town with Wolves at the Door, and Foreman Odell nearby has work too. Talk to either to take your first quest.
Move and look around
Move with W, A, S, D. Hold the right mouse button and drag to look around. That is most of it.
Fight something
Press Tab to target the nearest enemy, then press your abilities on the bar (keys 1 through 0) to attack.
Turn it in
Finish the objective, return to the quest giver (look for the marker on your map), and collect your reward.
Keep going
You just hit level 2. Follow the quest trail out of town and the world opens up from there.
The basics
Resources
Spells and abilities cost a resource. Warriors build Rage by fighting, rogues spend Energy that refills on its own, and everyone else casts from a pool of Mana.
Targeting and your bar
Tab cycles enemies, F interacts and loots, and your action bar holds the abilities you have learned. Drag spells onto it from your spellbook.
Quests
Accept quests from people with a marker over their head, complete the objective, and turn them in for experience, coin, and gear. The tracker on screen keeps your goals in view.
Death is not the end
If you fall, your body stays where it dropped and you rise as a ghost at the nearest graveyard. Run your spirit back to your body to revive on the spot, penalty free, or accept the Pale Keeper at the graveyard for an instant raise at the cost of a passing weakness. Brand-new heroes are spared the weakness entirely, and nothing you own or have earned is ever lost. The game also tells you what did it: a line in your chat names whatever landed the killing blow, which is usually the quickest way to work out what went wrong.
Playing together
Invite others to a party to share quest credit and take on dungeons. Most of the world is soloable, so grouping is a choice, not a chore.
One shared online world
Play the shared online world with everyone else: make a free account, pick a world from the World List, and you are in.
Choosing a world
Online play happens on worlds, and each one is a full copy of the game with its own players, its own World Market, and its own standings. The World List shows how busy each world is, from Low to Full, so pick a quiet one for elbow room or a busy one for company. Your characters live on the world you made them on, and you can keep characters on more than one.
Your characters
One account can keep up to ten characters on each world, so there is room to try several classes without giving anything up. Deleting one is deliberate: the character has to be out of the world, and the game asks you to type its name before it will go. A deleted character is gone for good, and its World Market listings and Ravenpost mail go with it. Once you have picked a class you get to decide what your hero looks like. A tabbed panel holds Body, Face, Hair, and Style: pick male or female, work the face over with a set of sliders and a choice of eyes, then choose a hair style and color and a skin tone, either from the named presets or from the color wheel behind them. A randomize button rolls a whole look if you would rather be surprised, and a reset puts your character back to the standard face for the body you chose. None of it touches how your character plays.
Naming your hero
A name is 2 to 16 letters long, starts with a letter, and can hold spaces, hyphens, and apostrophes. No two characters on the same world can share one, and capitalization does not make a name free: if Ashwind is taken, ashwind is taken too. Your own spelling is kept exactly as you typed it. Pick a name you will be happy with, because it stays with the character.
If your connection drops
A lost signal, a closed lid, or a page reload does not log you out. Your character is held in the world for about five minutes while the game reconnects on its own, and you come back to the same spot in the same session. That also means dropping out is not a way to leave a fight: your character is still standing there. Logging out from the game menu leaves at once instead of waiting, and so does signing in on another character on the same account.
Talents start at level 5, and there are six rows in all, one each at levels 5, 8, 11, 14, 17, and 20. Every row is a single pick of three, and you can reset whenever you are out of combat and not in an arena match, so your early choices are never permanent. Experiment freely.