Can you play the story missions with friends?

[Burba]

Friend of mine wants to play this together. At what point in the story can we start co-op? Can we play together right away? If so how do we do that? Any help or advice is appreciated thank you.

[mayonaise]

You can start playing together immediately.
I think there's a couple of instanced "dungeons" you can't party together in (never tried, 99% sure they're solo), but all the open world stuff and the actual dungeons are fair game.

Before one of those people show up to have a cry and take things out of context, throughout most of the starting areas you're going to see bots, maybe 1 or 2 real people every now and again. Lost Ark has systems that let you skip the 8 hour tutorial once you've completed it once, which is why you'll only see bots.

What region/server do you plan on playing on? Some of them are more dead than others, so it's better if you're recommended a good one in here first.

[Burba]

We were going to play on NA west but we could go NA east if the west servers are all dead. I am open to server recommendations as we have not started yet.

[mayonaise]

NA west is fine. I THINK Mari has people, but the safe bet is Valtan, since it's the unofficial OCE server. Server population only really matters for Open world content though (Field bosses, timed islands, some events), Raids and Dungeons you unlock after level 50+North Vern Story are region-wide.

Pre-level 50 areas are basically a tutorial, so don't get your hopes up on finding more people for dungeons in those areas unless you can organise with someone on the forums or find an actual person through other means. Those areas are dead on every server.

[Hedning]

The story is not meant to do co-op. Not only are key parts single player, when questing you'd steal each other's objectives because you are not playing the same quest, you are playing parallell quests. Of course if the objective is to kill a boss then you will both get credit as long as both of you hit it.

Everything else though. On the server I am on real players are on the tiniest islands whenever the co-op event starts.

[Novuhz]

You can do most of it together and also you can do the quest dungeons together as well.

[Hosenbund]

Originally posted by Burba:

Friend of mine wants to play this together. At what point in the story can we start co-op? Can we play together right away? If so how do we do that? Any help or advice is appreciated thank you.

yes you can in theory.. but practically its senseless. but if you enjoy running from npc to npc together then go for it

[Sykar]

There are solo story instances occasionally but you rejoin after you are done with them. The instances are also brief, rarely take more than 2-3 minutes. Annoying but not a huge problem.

[Itrace4]

Yeah but there's no challenging content before 10-20 hours in ( once you cleared intro story, which brings you to vern at lvl 50 )

You can skip that for like 20$ its called vern powerpass. The games gives tonz of free ones, but only once you reached X objective once. AKA you can make easily 3-4 characters off the go with 20$ and save hours of your life. If you're into lore there are cool resumé quests you can do that comes with the pass

[Sykar]

Heh, I still have not used any of the fast level options, including the free power passes I gained earlier this year and managed to get 4 characters to level 50+ so far, though most are between Rohendel and Punikka with my first character being there, though could get her to South Vern if I wanted to but I enjoy Korean Ironman too much atm who just finished Rohendel.