2) How long will be the first 'offline' section in the game for an average player? Will we be allowed more than one character? If so, will we have to play the 'offline' section for each character?

It’s too early to say exactly how long it will take, but it will be for the first 20 levels (out of 80). We reckon it will take around 15 hours or so, depending on how good you are and what your focus is. I am not sure I fully understand what you mean by “more than one character” but in Conan you can naturally create several characters, which you can take through the single-player. Since we have four branching story-arcs you can therefore go at it again and again with a different approach. If you can skip this part entirely remains to be seen, but we are working on various approaches to see what works best.