Loading up Legends of Aria for the first time is intimidating. After creating your character, you are unceremoniously thrown into the world of Celador without the vaguest hint as of what to do next. The game gives players a “Guide” to summon, but even that isn’t much help. The first few hours are extremely daunting, but don’t give up hope on this massively enjoyable game. Here are a few tips to make the early grind a bit easier.
Watch Your Skills Grow
The best way to make any game more enjoyable is to see tangible results for your hard work. Legends of Aria makes that easy by allowing you to pin skills to the HUD so you can monitor your progress. This way, as you’re killing a rat for the hundredth time, you’ll at least know you are growing stronger.
Pinning skills to the HUD is simple, but not well described in-game. First, press ‘K’ to open the Skill Window. From here, simply flip through the pages of the book by pressing the top left or right corners of the pages until you find a skill you are interested in. Finally, click the small circle at the top right of the page and it will be pinned to the HUD. It’s such a small adjustment, but it really helps you feel as though you are moving in the right direction; something that is needed in such a freeform game.
Get Smelly In The Sewers
A few of those skills you pinned are probably combat-related. In order to level them up, you’ll have to find some weak enemies to fight. Don’t make the mistake of wandering far from your starting location. Simply summon your Guide and ask them to give you directions to the Sewers. These are usually close to all the starting locations. Here you will find the usual assortment of low-level enemies, such as rats, bats, and spiders.
Combat is a straightforward affair. Simply press “Space” to enter Combat Mode, move towards your target, then left-click to begin auto-attacking. Be sure to use Bandages, as they are a critical part of combat and you won’t get far without them. Once you’ve defeated an enemy, remember to loot all of their goodies. To speed up the looting process, hold “Alt” while left-clicking on the corpse to take all the items at once. Be sure to spend ample time in the Sewers before picking up Quests and venturing out into the great unknown.
Purchase The Essentials
Speaking of venturing into the great unknown, it’s best to have a map to help you navigate the wilds. Look for a vendor named, Guy, near your original spawn location. He sells a few knick-knacks worthy of your coin, but the most valuable is a map of the region. Once purchased, double-clicking it will open a map that allows you to place custom waypoints at locations of interest. This makes it easy to remember hotspots for fishing, mining, or lumberjacking, as the original map lacks all these identifiers.
The next big purchase is an Atlas, which can be found at your local Scribe. The Atlas can hold all the maps you’ll collect throughout your adventure, thus saving inventory space and giving you access to all maps at once. The last things to purchase are related to harvesting resources. Look for the Tinkerer, as they sell both the Mining Pick and Hatchet, necessary equipment to get started with resource gathering.
Invest In A Trade
Crafting and Gathering are another massive component of the game that you should try during the first few days of Legends of Aria. It can be time-intensive and grindy to level up these skills, but it’s also a relaxing process. Most crafting skills require you to gather resources first, prior to the creation process (wood for Carpentry, ore for Blacksmithing, fish for Cooking). Your starting location should offer a good variety of resources, such as trees to chop and ore to mine.
Once you’ve collected enough of these, ask your Guide where the nearest crafting station of your preference is. During the first few days in the game, take some time and try out everything that piques your interest, then narrow your focus down to a few skills. Be aware that you can only allocate 600 skill points across ALL available skills, so once you know how you want your build to progress, pay close attention to that total skill point count.
Legends of Aria is a daunting game that does not hold your hand. Take the first few days and acclimate to the sheer volume of available content. Once you have a solid grasp on the basic gameplay mechanics, you’re ready to set off on an adventure across Celdador.
