I recently worked on a private video (rough video, no plans of sharing it publicly at the moment) to help out a few friends on learning how to start and play PSO2. One of the things I ended up doing was writing a whole script and I feel it’s something I could easily share publicly to help out other people.
So if you are just starting PSO2 or thinking about playing and need some sort of quick start guide, you’re welcome to click and read this blog post as it may have very useful information for you. Also, this post is a work in progress and feedback is welcome in the comments.
What is PSO2?
PSO2 is an Action Online RPG game made by SEGA that is set in a sci-fi fantasy setting. It is not really an MMO but the multiplayer lets you gather with up to 12 people for quests and single parties go up to 4 players. The lobby areas don’t have a limit of players. Best of all is that it’s a free game with no pay to win. You only pay for cosmetics and convenience features.
Picking a ship
The first you will get to do is pick a Ship. These are the game’s servers. Pick the one where your friends are. If you want to pick the same one where I play, it would be Ship 1.
You’ll now get asked if you want to link your account. This is only for people switching from platform, like Xbox to Steam or the other way around. In the future, it’ll most likely also work for PS4/5 and Switch. Since it’s a new account, simply select “No”.
How to change your Player ID
You will be assigned a new Player ID and default Player ID Name. The Player ID Name can and should be switched. This is like your GamerTag. This is unique to you and can not be repeated. On the other hand character names can be repeated.
So before even beginning the game, go to Support Menu -> Change Player ID Name. The first change is free.
How to enable auto-loot and other recommended options
We can also take a quick look at the Game Options already. Mainly, you want to enable nice QoL features like Auto-Loot based on rarity and also switching when the game alerts you that there is a rare drop as the default setting is actually too low. My personal recommendation would be 13 stars and up.
Related to character creation
Now you will get to the part where you actually create a character, right after the “new user” survey. You’ll first be asked if you want to enter a Player ID as referral. If you have one, input it here. In case you want to use mine, I’ve written it below.
Ship: Ship 01: Feoh
Player ID: 10152602
Take your time to make the character the way you want. You have all the time you need. Don’t worry much on the race and gender as the stats differences are barely noticeable. And for class, you can freely change later to whatever you want. These 6 classes are actually not all of the options.
Once you exit the character creator and begin playing, you will have a limited time before you are locked to the number of edits you can do for free to your character’s design. It is still possible overall but you will need a Salon Pass or Color Change Pass. Character name can not be changed at all unless you are willing to pay.
Prologue Tutorial and bit about Story Quests
After this, you will be sent to a Prologue Tutorial Quest. This part is very straightforward. It will mainly explain you the gameplay basics: how to jump, how to attack, etc. As a quest, it’s actually part of the Story. As such, it will ask you what difficulty you want to play it in. Choose whatever you want. There’s no penalty for doing Story in Casual mode. The actual difference is that Casual sets enemies to at least half your current level and Hardcore sets them to your current level or close to it. Hardcore difficulty expects you to have proper equipment.
ARKS Missions Tutorial Part 1
After the Prologue Tutorial Quest, you will now load into the game lobby. You will also get a notification that you now have Afin’s Partner Card but that’s nothing to worry about. It’s a Key Item so it doesn’t take Inventory space.
Now the first screen you will see are the current news or notifications. These show up every time you begin the game after a patch happens and let you know of any new promotion or event going on.
The NPC Astarte will also try to guide you at this time that you got your first ARKS Mission. You may have also noticed that the game lets you know whenever there is a new ARKS Mission with a quick notification on the left side of the screen.
ARKS Missions are objectives you can complete to get rewards. Rewards can be EXP, game money (Meseta), items, or Mission Pass points.
For now, the game will force you to check your ARKS Missions menu through the main menu. Besides getting to it through the way the game tells you, though, you can also quickly access it by pressing the shortcut indicated on your Basic Stats window.
At the moment, you will be locked to only Main Missions and only have one of them. The objective of this guide is to get this Main Missions menu filled up with several of them. When this happens, it means you are actually free to do whatever you want.
Some of the ARKS Missions can be tracked by selecting them and the current game tutorial will force you to do this. To untrack any mission, just select it again.
To progress to the next ARKS Mission, we need to clear the current one. The first Mission is pretty much just watching the first Story Quest which is a cutscene.
ARKS Missions Tutorial Part 2
After finishing the cutscene, you will be back to the lobby and the ARKS Mission tutorial will continue. You will see a notification that you finished the mission on the left side of the screen. To redeem your reward, simply go to the ARKS Mission menu and you can either individually receive each reward or select “Receive All Rewards”.
Automatically, you will unlock the next Main ARKS Mission and the game will show a video welcoming you to the game.
Introduction to Quest Counter and Party Menu
The next guided mission we have to go through is actually going through the first Exploration or Expedition Quest. To accept a Quest, we have to go to the Quest Counter. There are a few of them available. They work exactly the same way.
You’ll notice there a bunch of other types of quests too but that’ll be touched on later. For now, just focus on completing the mission we are locked to.
When you accept a quest, you will have this quick party menu to set up. Here, you can specify settings like who can join your party, if you want to set up a password for the party, or a password for the whole room. You can also click the squares icon on the top right to switch to the full party settings menu.
Finally, select Accept in Current Block to accept the quest. I will explain the other option later as it’s not something to worry about usually.
Preparing for a Quest in the Gateway Ship
Before starting a quest, every party starts on the Gateway Ship. Here, you can do several things to prepare yourself.
This terminal lets you summon AI partners summon AI partners to help you out during a quest. The AI is pretty basic and can not revive you, but they are better than nothing for simple quests.
We have 4 categories here. Ally tab shows Story characters you have unlocked. Friends are registered characters from your friend list. Support is where your Auxiliaries would show up. And Free are registered characters from people not on your Friend list.
Usually, you either want to choose Friend characters or Free characters since they will give you FUN points too, which will be covered later. They also have better equipment than Story NPCs.
The only benefit of using Story NPCs is that their gift meter fills up. Once it’s full, talking to them will give you a random item gift.
This terminal lets you take a 1-time use Stat Boost drink that is only valid during the next quest. We always want to use it, usually for Attack or HP, depending on your mood. Drinks that have a red icon, AC, means you need Premium to access it.
This terminal lets you access the Quest Counter Menu. It works exactly the same way as you would expect.
This terminal is for the harvesting and fishing options. I’ll cover that later. It’s also currently disabled as you need to unlock those features.
And finally you have the Storage terminal and the Shop terminal. They both work as usual.
Now with an AI partner and most importantly, getting that buff drink, you are ready to drop into the quest.
Ending a Quest
Once you successfully finish a quest, you will get your results and a grade based on your performance. This will usually be an S unless you are on a quest that is much harsher on the grading.
You get back to the Gateway Ship and can return to the Lobby. Your options here are either Return to Lobby without changing your current party, leave the party and return to lobby, retry the same quest in the current block, or retry the same quest after searching multiple blocks.
Always claim your Titles
After finishing the Exploration Quest, you successfully completed the forced ARKS Mission you had to do to keep unlocking the game features. Before you continue, though, you need and should claim Titles. Titles in PSO2 are also like little achievements. They give you a reward once you receive them.
While the game was loading back to the lobby, you should have noticed the game alerted you there are Titles waiting for you. To get them, simply go to the Title Keeper and talk to her. She will then let you redeem all the Titles pending for you and their rewards by selecting each.
And remember overall, “always claim your titles”. To make sure, frequently check the Title Keeper, specially if you think you may have missed the notification.
Dailies, Weeklies, and Tier Missions
If you check your ARKS Missions menu, you will notice that you have actually now unlocked the Daily, Weekly, and Tier Missions. If there’s an event going on, Limited-Time Missions will be unlocked as well. However, you have not unlocked the rest of the Main Missions yet.
Let’s quickly check the new unlocked sections, though.
Daily Missions are missions that change every day. You can check the expiration on the right side, which is also when you’ll get new Daily Missions. These missions can give decent rewards and get harder as you level up.
Weekly Missions change every week. The rewards here are quite good and also get harder as you level up.
Limited-Time Missions are only available during certain events.
Tier Missions are designed to help you out on your Mission Pass. They give a lot of Mission Pass Stars but not much EXP or Meseta. They change every week and get harder as the current Mission Pass grows older. They reset back to easiest levels once there’s a new Mission Pass.
Client Orders and Equipping Weapons and their skills
Back to forced Main Missions, though, you first need to redeem our rewards for finishing the Forest Exploration mission.
Next, you’ll get the next forced Main Mission which are equipment tutorials with the NPC Afin.
This is also an introduction to Client Orders. These are tasks that you can accept from the NPCs and completing them will give you rewards. They will be your main source of Meseta and EXP. By default, you can have up to 20 Orders registered.
With Afin, we want to just accept the first Order for our current Main Mission. This is a tutorial on how to switch weapon. Simply switch weapon palette to complete it. This can be done with the mouse-wheel or with the d-pad on a controller.
You can see the orders you have accepted at the moment in the Client Orders menu. The first option shows them as a plain list and the 2nd one shows them by character together with their mood and gift meter status. The third option let’s you see Client Orders that you can accept based on your current accepted Quest.
Back to completing the Main Mission, though, you need to report the cleared Order with the appropriate NPC. In this case, it’s Afin. So we talk to him again and select the order with the green checkmark to report it and get the rewards.
You will get a brief help on the Sub-Palette which is the other bar around the Weapon Palette. In this area, you can add consumable items or skills, depends on your style. They can be quickly used with the number keys or select them through the d-pad and pressing the left stick.
So your next Main Mission is now doing either of those two orders from Afin: Set a Photon Art or Set a Technique. Photon Arts are like weapon special skills. These are what you would say “non-magic users” use. Techniques are what you would say are “magic skills”, so only usable for the mage type classes.
Accepting the order will give you the disc item that is needed to learn the Photon Art or Technique skill.
You can read the skill’s description to the right. To learn its skill, we simply select it and use it. It gives a preview of how the skill we are learning will change in the case we are learning a higher level version. In this case, since it’s new, though, there’s nothing on the left side.
Now that you learned the skill, you need to equip it. To do that, we need to go to the Equip Weapons section. It’s on the 2nd option of the “Pause” menu. First one is Inventory related, 2nd one is Equipment related.
Select Equip Weapon and we get a view of our full Weapon Palette. You can swap weapons here and skills as well. Simply select a spot to swap it.
Select a slot that matches the weapon you learned the skill from. For example, for Aimed Fire, select one from the currently equipped Gunblade row and then select the skill. That’s how you equip skills.
Skill Trees
Now we are going to do Afin’s order related to Skill Trees. They work exactly like you would expect. For each level up on each class you get a Skill Point to use on that class’s Skill Tree.
To edit your Skill Trees, go to Class Consultant in this area. Here you have the option to Change Class, save or load Loadouts, which are an easy way to swap your equipment and class, Learn Class Skills, add an extra skill tree to a class, or reset all your skill trees.
At the moment just focus on the order from Afin, so let’s learn a skill. Each class has their own Skill Tree. You can choose to either manually set the skill points or let the game automatically sort them for you. Be careful on how you use your Skill Points as there is no way to reset your Skill Tree except for letting the game rearrange them all automatically. Your other options would be either getting a new Skill Tree or waiting for a Reset Skill Tree Pass which is given out rarely, mainly every time there’s a new Episode or Skill Tree change.
Right now, we will just learn this basic HP Up skill and give it 1 point. That is enough to clear Afin’s order.
Overall, feel free to customize your Skill Tree the way you personally feel is best for you. There are already pre-made Skill Trees online too if you don’t want to think much about it.
With the order completed, let’s go back to Afin.
Equipping Units (Armor)
Report the order with Afin and then clear the Main Mission as usual. Now your next Main Mission is related to Afin’s tutorial order on how to equip units or “armor”. He will give you the necessary items like before.
Accept his order to get the units first. Then we go to the Equipment section and select Equip Armor. Here we can select an outfit, three units (back, arms, legs), and skill rings (left and right). Skill Rings will be done later, so don’t worry about it.
To equip units, simply select a slot and choose a compatible unit. For Back, I have two options instead of just one since I was picking up random loot while doing the previous Expedition. Any of them does the trick for the order, though.
Once you set up all three slots, report the order to Afin to be able to complete the Main Mission as well. Feel free to also do the Set Technique order for easy EXP and Meseta and register the PSE Burst 101 order since it will just happen naturally as you play the game. The other remaining order from Afin which is quest related is not necessary.
Client Orders from Cofy
Alright, we’re done with Afin. We’re pretty close to unlocking most of the game now. The next part is just doing easy orders with Cofy which will just unlock more game options.
Cofy is right here, to the right area of the Lobby and Quest Counter. She already has 4 orders for us to go through. All of Cofy’s orders are worth doing as they unlock game features.
First, let’s do the Main Mission related to Practice Quests. These are quests where you can practice any class without issues. They give you all the equipment needed. So just accept the appropriate order from Cofy and then move to the Quest Counter on the left. You’ll find the Practice Quests under their own category. The class Practice Quests are specifically the ones that Cofy wants and she’s fine with just one of them. So just select any that you want and complete it. They are overall useful to learn the basics of any class. And as a quick note, Standard Training at the top of this menu is just quick review on the basic gameplay, in case you need it.
With that done, go back to Cofy and report the order to proceed.
Next is your only remaining Main Mission which is another order from Cofy. This will unlock the Mag feature, which is a little floating robot that mainly gives you stat boosts. I will talk more about the Mag later.
To complete the order, it’s as simple as hearing Cofy’s explanation. Report the order as usual and then clear the Main Mission. PSO2 will also let you know that you have unlocked new Client Orders from more NPCs. As you level up in the game, more Client Orders will become available.
The Mag system
For our next Main Mission, we have to talk to Echo to complete her order related to Mags. She simply wants you to feed it once.
Accept the order and then equip the Mag. This can be done from the Mag menu in the Inventory section.
Feeding Mags is something you have to be very careful about since resetting it can be costly. The food you want to give it depends on what will be your main class. Your main objective is to boost your main attack stat. So, for example, Hunter would want a MEL Support Mag while a Ranger would want a RNG Support Mag. The current Support Level of a Mag indicates its overall Level and the max this value can reach is 200. So, ideally, you want a Mag that has 200 levels on just a single stat decided by your main class.
To clear this order from Echo, I’m going to feed my Mag an extra Melee weapon as I’m playing Hunter at the moment. The right screen shows how the Mag’s stats will change after I feed it. Red means increase while blue means decrease. Once a meter fills up, it gains a level. Support levels can not be downgraded, though, unless you have the right item.
With this done, we can now report the order to Echo and complete the Main Mission.
The Energy Meter of the Mag is just a way to stop you from feeding it constantly and for the extra Mag actions listed below. The stat boosts a Mag gives you are always active regardless of the current Energy level.
Additionally, once your Mag reaches a certain level, it will learn a Photon Blast attack which can be placed on your sub-palette and activated from there.
Daily Client Orders
Next Main Mission is just selecting the Talk option with Fina which is over here.
Fina is in charge of the Daily Orders in the Lobby area. These are Orders that are swapped daily, as the name suggests. The first three can also always be completed on the main recommended quest of the day and provide a boost for being cleared.
2nd Expedition – Volcanic Exploration
You should have two new Main Missions now. Let’s get the easy one out by simply viewing the current Mission Pass. It’ll swap to receiving rewards from it, which you probably can’t do yet. So now we move on to the next Expedition Quest as requested and forced by the game. Simply go through the usual procedure at the Quest counter to play through it and get the Mission cleared.
As you clear Expeditions, new maps get unlocked. This will be one of your main objectives at the beginning of the game.
Main ARKS Missions unlocked – What to do next?
As you complete the Main Mission and receive your reward, you will now notice we have finally reached the point where the game pretty much unlocks all the Main Missions. This is what we were looking for and the main objective of this guide.
There are still a few tutorial orders to do and few features to unlock, though. But at least we are not forced through one specific path or just given one Main Mission. Feel free to explore the game at your own pace.
From this point on, Main Missions are also essentially your guide of objectives of what to try next in the game. It covers completing Cofy orders, unlocking Harvesting and Fishing, doing the next Exploration maps, and even rewards for going through Story Quests.
My suggestion on what Main Missions to do next would be the “Speak to Jan” and “Go to Franca’s Cafe”. Jan will guide you through how to enhance weapons and other game features while visiting Franca’s Cafe will let you access orders that will unlock Harvesting and Fishing in Exploration Quests.
As for level, as you complete this new set of orders, you should be able to easily reach level 20. That’s when the game really begins and starts to open up even more. Additionally, feel free to use any EXP Tickets you may have. There’s no penalty or negative on doing that.
The overall game’s objective can vary from person to person. For the hardcore ones, the most common one is getting every single class to level cap, but that’s not really needed. Just getting a class to level 75 will give you a nice account-wide stat boosts bonus. Others prefer focusing on fashion. Again, you can play at your own pace.
Have fun in PSO2!
About New Genesis
PSO2: New Genesis is about launch in a few days. So a lot of you may be wondering, “Is it still worth it to play the original PSO2?” The answer is “Yes”.
PSO2 and New Genesis share the same game installation and characters. In fact, you can already get an early start by already downloading PSO2 and creating your character already. When New Genesis gets released, you will still be able to edit your character with the new editor too. And you can swap between PSO2 and New Genesis at any time within the game.
Besides that, PSO2 still offers 8 years of content that you can enjoy. That includes a full story mode with rewards (SG), sources of free SG, the Casino, and access to a bunch of cosmetics that you may be interested in, specially the accessories.
So, as you can see, PSO2 will still definitely be worth playing and checking out, even after New Genesis gets released.
