Faq/Single Player

From WikiAOC

[edit] 6.1 Is there a single player portion to Age of Conan?

Yes. Part of the gameworld and story in Age of Conan will be focused on solo play, but you will always need to connect to our servers. However, even when you are playing alone in the single player portion of the game, you can communicate with your friends and players on the same server.

[edit] 6.2 How does it all work?

Age of Conan is still a full-fledged MMO, but we’ve taken a lesson from other games out there and put together a limited single-player experience that, in some ways, plays out like a traditional RPG. When you first start out, you will be spending the first hour or so learning how to play, solving quests, and getting a feel for the game, and then you will make your way into the city of Tortage, where you will start seeing other players.

From here, you will be able to switch between the single-player story and quests and the multiplayer stories and quests freely. Once you reach level 20 (or thereabouts), you will leave Tortage and step into the massive MMO world that is always multiplayer.

[edit] 6.3 Can I skip all that and go into the wider MMO world right away?

One of the reasons behind the single player experience was to give you a unique and highly interactive story to get you going and teach you to play a deep, intense game before tossing you out into the wider world. By letting you start out with a limited single-player experience, we’re able to show you how the game is played in a more fun fashion, without having to resort to long and tedious tutorial phases (or lots of reading static screens). Playing through as different classes also offers different quests, experiences, and opportunities, so even on a second playthrough (and beyond), it will still feel quite new and fresh!

That said, we hear people tell us that they don’t want to play a starting area/they want to see their friends right away/they don’t need to consort with the lil’ nublets in the starting areas because they are uber enough as it is, so we’re considering ways that you can skip the starting area as we move through the beta phases and get feedback from all of our testers and players.

[edit] 6.4 How long will the single-player experience last?

Only the first hour or so of the game is completely single player. Once you reach the village of Tortage, you’ll be able to quest and interact with other players, or you can switch to the single player quests and stories. Once you’ve finished the Tortage story arc, you will head for the mainland, and from there on, you will be in the standard massively multiplayer environment.

[edit] 6.5 What will the single player experience actually contain?

The single player experience is a complete story that we’re able to tell in a cinematic and interactive manner. Because you’re adventuring in a closed instance of the gameworld, we have the power to create world-changing events and really let parts of it play out like a single-player game.

When you start, you will enter the game as a galley slave. From here, you will create your character, and after this is completed, a sudden change of fortune will lead to your character washing up on the shore of one of the Barachan Isles off the coast of Zingara. You will have to fight your way through the jungle to reach the city of Tortage, where you will discover grand adventures and many challenges. From there, you will progress through roughly twenty levels of character development in a story of your own, with your character at the center of the plot.

[edit] 6.6 How will my character evolve in the single-player experience?

You will start off with nothing but a few rags to keep you warm and a broken oar to fight with. Over the course of the single-player experience, you will carve yourself a place in the world through grit, sweat, and steel, develop your character both in the storytelling sense and in the roleplaying game sense, gaining levels, skills, and insight into the game itself, discover great treasures and dark secrets, and evolve into a fierce and determined warrior ready to take on the wider world once you move out into the massive online world.

[edit] 6.7 Will I have to be online to play the single-player portion of the game?

Yes. You will still be playing on our servers, in a personalized instance of the gameworld. You will also have to purchase a retail box to play the single-player experience and the retail box includes 30 days of free game time to explore Age of Conan.