There is nothing to install and nothing to pay. Play now opens the game in the tab you are already in. The same page works on a phone held sideways, and you can add it to your home screen if you would rather it opened without the browser around it.
Make an account, then a character
You need a name, a password and an email address. The address is only ever used to get you back in if you forget the password, and there is no other route back, so use one you can still read.
Then build somebody: a skin tone, a hair style and a hair colour, with the figure updating beside you as you choose. None of it changes how you play. It is what everybody else in the street sees when they walk past you.
You wake up in Aeven
Aeven is a crossroads town with a church, a row of shops, a lake at the edge of it and roads going out in every direction. You arrive in a peasant's clothes with empty hands, carrying one weapon for every trade you could take up.
Whatever you draw is what you become. There is no class screen and no wrong choice, because you can put it back down again.
The keys that matter
| Arrow keys | Walk. Tap to turn on the spot, hold to move. |
| CTRL | Attack. Hold it down. |
| I | Your bags. |
| E | What you are wearing. |
| K | Your skills. |
| J | Your journal, for whatever you have taken on. |
| Enter | Puts the cursor in chat. |
Right click somebody on the map to see what you can ask of them: a guard, the guildmaster, the banker, the warden by the road. On a touch screen, hold your thumb on them instead. If nothing opens, they have nothing to offer you yet.
Spend your points before you go anywhere
A new character is made with exactly one skill's worth of points, which is deliberate. The first thing you do is choose, rather than grind for the right to.
Open K, take the one skill your trade offers to start with, and put it on the action bar: drag it down, or select it and press a number. The second way is there because a thumb cannot drag.
When it goes wrong
Health and mana climb back on their own once you have been out of a fight for a few seconds. Every blow, including one that misses, starts that clock again, so backing off is the move rather than a bandage.
If you die you come apart into your own pixels and wake up somewhere safe, carrying everything you had on you. It costs you the walk back and nothing else.
Then what?
- Choosing a class, once you have tried a couple of weapons.
- How a fight works, which is worth reading before your first real one.
- Your first quest, because somebody out past the west gate needs a hand.