After watching a storyline introduction movie, your character starts out in the middle of an ocean aboard a ship. This is a tutorial area where you can become familiar with the basic game controls and interaction with the game world. Once you’ve finished that tutorial session, you’ll already be up to level two and dropped off onto the starting island, the Isle of Refuge. From this Isle, you’ll be able to select your class and also get your character up to level 6, plus earn yourself some armor, weapons and coin by doing some fun quests. When you’re ready to leave the Isle, a boat will whisk you off to the mainland where the real adventures begin.

Beyond that, you’ll have to talk to NPC’s to discover other quests to do or head out to explore the world. Either way, you’ll find that the world is large and each area has an amazing amount of detail. Just about every NPC has some kind of quest and the ones that don’t initially talk to you might have higher level quests for you later on so it’s always a good idea to talk to any NPC’s that you come across.

One of the nice things about exploring is that you also gain experience points for discovering new and important areas so feel free to wander around and take it all in. It’s nice to be rewarded for exploring by gaining valuable experience points and also uncovering new areas of the map at the same time. Most of the areas will be explored as you do quests so I encourage you to talk to some NPC’s and use the quest journal to start discovering some of the new areas that way.

SOE has released twelve initial servers that include localized language support for English, French and German and also a special Role-Playing Preferred server for all the die hard RPG players. To support the growing amount of players, another six servers have already been added since the first day of release. It’s a good idea to check with friends and join the same server as them so you can all play together.