Beginner Guides

Welcome to Anarchy Online! The group of guides found on this page and linked into this page are meant to serve as a guide to your first experiances on the game to help you get orriented with how the game is played and how the different systems work.

Creating a Character

The first step of playing Anarchy Online is to create a character. You will find offical instructions on how to do so in the chapter about character creation in the online manual. Note that you can store eight characters on your account at the same time, and delete characters to make place for new ones. Don't be afraid to experiment a bit.

Through this guide we will make an example character to walk you through many of the low level quests and events found early in the game.

Choosing A Breed

After starting the character creation process, the first choice you need to decide on is the choice of a breed. A breed is similar to a 'race' in other games, although all the breeds in Anarchy Online come from the same groups of human ancestors, and many are genetically engineered, but they are all essentialy 'human'. The choice of a breed effects several things in game. The first thing is influences is how much each of your base abilities cost. Some breeds favor certain base abilities like Strength or Agility, and have to spend fewer points on improving it; on the other hand, those same advantages come with abilities that are disfavored and are more expensive for characters of that breed to buy. The second thing that breed has an effect on is the amount of health and nano pool a character gets for each point in the skill that controls them. Choice of sex has no influence on game mechanics, females are equivalent to males. Here is a basic overview Solitus are a direct decendent of humanity and are balanced in all abilities. Opifex have been bred for stealth and speed, as such their favor their Agility and Sense but count less on their Strength and Stamina. Nanomages were created as Nanotech research assistants and as such they have more Intellegence, Psychic, and have more nanopool because of their greater command of nanobots. They are more frail though, depending less on physical abilities like Strength, Stamina, Agility, and have less health. Nanomages are considered harder to play at high levels due to their lower health. Atrox were specialy created as mine workers and were made sexless (though most identify as male). They are large hulking beings that favor Strength and Stamina over Intellegence, Psychic, and Sense. Also, Atrox are much heartier and have greater health, but less Nanopool due to their less than intuitive control of nano technology. Atrox can be good to play because of their high health but suffer as casting professions, and sometimes find it difficult to get into better equipment earlier that requires one of its many unfavored abilities. you can find more indepth information on Breeds here. When you have decided on a breed and gender for your character by clicking on the model you want, click on the button labeled 'next' While some of the options are very tempting, for this character we are going to go with a Solitus Male to get an even spread of different attributes for what ever profession we choose.

Choosing Appearance

The Appearance screen does not effect the way a character behaves in the system of the game, and are largely for aesthetic purposes. Each of the different breeds has a different set of faces based on its gender and rolling the mouse over the face arrows will zoom your view into the face of the character. Height and Weight change the model in similar ways for each character. The choice of how your character appears can be important though, since there are very few ways to change it once you have decided in character creation.

For our Solitus we decided that we wanted him to be tall and thin, and that the orange flat top had a millitary look about it, since we want our character to be a shooter.

Choosing A Profession

The choice of a profession is all important in character creation because it determines how much your skills cost, what your list of abilites (defined by your nano programs) will be, and several other features related to the expansions such as Perk sets and Research lines. Some professions are more difficult to play that others due to a combination of cost of equipment or the need for special stategies for playing the character. While more indepth information can be found in the Professions guides, an over view will be give here. When reading through the information given in character creation, remember that many things have changed since the descriptions were written so you may wish to do a little background research before you commit to a profession. There is no law against experimenting though, and some times that is the best way to find out how a profession plays. If you do not have the Shadowlands expansion the options for Keeper and Shade will be greyed out and unusable since they can only start in the Shadowlands.

If you are interested in playing a character that is Damage Dealer you might want to try an Adventurer, an Enforcer, an Engineer, a Keeper, a Martial Artist, or a Soldier. If you are looking for a Caster you should try a Doctor, Trader, Nano-Technition, or Bureaucrat. Classes with pets are: Engineers, Meta-Physicists, and Bureaucrats. If you want a character that requires more Strategy you might consider an Agent, a Fixer, a Nano-Technition, a Trader, or a Shade. If you want to play Solo you should try an Engineer or Martial Artist If you want to be a team player or a Support profession Doctors, Traders, Agents, Bureaucrats, and Engineers are good choices. If you like to make things than you want a Tradeskill profession which are mainly Engineers and Traders. After some thought of either choosing an Enforcer, a Martial Artist, or a Soldier for their combat abilities, we decided that big guns were awesome so we decided to go with a Soldier for our orange haired Solitus.

Choosing a Name

While the choice of a character name is ussualy personal, remember that you need a name that isnt offensive in some way. Additionaly, if you want to PvP you might want to use a name that is not based on a profession theme, such as 'Ihealall' for a doc or 'Fullautoshtr' for a soldier, because those names allow people to pick you out very quickly in combat. If you are having trouble finding the name you want, consider adding a number to the end of the name. Once you have a name that you like you can start playing the game. If you have the Shadowlands expansion you can choose to start in the Jobe training area, or go to the ICC shuttle port on Rubi-Ka. If you have a free account you must go to Rubi-Ka. After a couple of tries we decided to call our Soldier "Dravet". We started off wanting to call him "Davet" but that was taken so after some experimentation we found a combination that worked well.

The User Interface

The main article for this topic can be found at: User Interface

Well now we are on the beach, ready to kick ass and chew bubble gum but... We should probably give some note to the snazzy hud we have going and explain how some of it works. The User Interface in Anarchy Online is very customizable, not only in the form of new interface 'skins' but also simply by the sheer virtue that many of the interface elements can be turned off or moved around with a couple mouse clicks so that everything works how you want it to. We are going to review some of the basic elements of the default interface though, and how to use it to navigate the world.

Source

http://www.anarchyonline.com/content/guides/beginnersguide/gettingstarted.html