First impression of Tera.

Lately the market for MMOs has truly grown and more and more are coming into the market after Blizzard has sort of become some big lazy gits who hardly care abut their costumers anymore. This has lead to them loosing a lot of fans and therefor Blizzard is slowly loosing the tight grip they had on the MMO scene and all of a sudden new MMOs actually have a chance to succeeded.

Now back in the days Blizzard were truly the titan on the MMO market which meant that new MMOs hardly stood a chance against WoW and often ended up going down hill after a matter of weeks. Back then when a new MMO tried to get into the MMO market it was pretty much like trying to enter an Elephant sized room WITH and Elephant inside it, which means it was pretty much impossible.

But after Blizzard had sort of cheated and grown less and less worried of what their so called “loyal” fan base want and need, they have truly lost a lot of followers and that means that a lot of new MMOs actually have a chance to somehow survive the first week. So I took myself the pleasure of trying the Asian MMO “Tera” which will be released on the 3 of May 2012 (as far as I know) And this Monday I tried to look into this game.

I had first heard about it from The CynicalBrit (A.K.A TotalBiscuit) Who is currently down in Germany to test the game himself.
The first thing I noticed about the game was that the download, install and patching time was very long and went very slowly along. This is perhaps due to the fact that the game was download form the Asian servers and also that when I decided to download it some people were given a sneak peek key so they could try the game for one day. When I finally got the game down an tried to log in, the game had a lot of trouble finding the log ind server and after 10 tries I finally got into the game. There were only two servers to pick from and both were PvE which I would much rather play on that PvP (I pretty much hate PvP, haha).

So I tried to select a server and all of a sudden my game froze. I first thought that the game was trying to load but all of a sudden then game threw me out of the game and I was back at the log in screen. I tried to log in again but the game kept getting errors for a long time. Okay well this is a sneak peek so it’s not uncommon for a new gave to have some server trouble during a beta test or sneak peek.

The clock was around 13:00 and this problem lastet the entire day so people started to grow very angry with Frogster studios. Apperently there had been some troubles with the server somewhere which ment that the planned event did not proceed according to plan. well this was not a plus in my book but at least we were promised a compensation for the time lost during this event.

Later during monday the servers were up and I logged in to finally see what the game was about. The first thing that struck me was that the server screen was really beautiful and again there were only two servers. I choose one a proceeded to make my character.

Now a thing that truck me was that the characters were really beautiful but VERY Asian. You could choose from an arrange of different races and some were very Asian to look at. The character creation is very neat but sort of lack more options to make your character since there are a lot of preset choices from the beginning. Now one thing that struck me as annoying is that the some of the races were too androgynous to my taste, or they were overly sexy so that you know that lonesome guys will choose these female creatures just to look at the slutty design and wank to it. Now another thing stat stung my eyes was the choice in armor. The androgynous, sexy, and cute races only had anime armor, now what is an anime armor? An anime armor is an armor that would NEVER have any protecting function in real life and is only meant to look cute, beautiful or bad ass, which means that a lot of thighs, stomach and cleavage will appear (again too much fan service to my taste. Yes I know “lol! Dat Bcuz U iz W0man. U fnd it sexist!”)

So I finally chose the Popori race (A series of different animal heads and tails which you can combine to your liking) and now I had to choose the class. Now all races in here can be all classes ans I personally don’t mind that. Again the Asian fell shun trough. All the classes had overly prettified armor (or lack of in some of the women’s cases) and big fucking weapons, again a classic trait of the Asian world (you also see it in a lot of animes). I end up choosing the archer since I am normally more secure in the role as Rage DPS rather than Magic user or the role of Melee dmg or Tank.

So when you are done with all this you see a little cutscene with some of the races you can choose from, but the cutscene itself is short and a waste of time. It doesn’t explaine anything and you don’t even get a reason to why the hell YOU are a part of all this and what you are doing here. You just get dropped down somewhere and start the game.

Now the sceneries of this game is breathtakingly beautiful and even on LOW graphics setting the game was stunning.
The UI is REALLY weird and and I couldn’t really handle the way you had to talk and loot. All of that was bound by the F key and it felt very awkward. Plus all your attacks were bound to left and right mouse button since your camera is automatically locked to your mouse. The UI all in all was very unpleasant to look at and it just felt like this game was more ment for the console users rather than the PC user.

So I went on to my first quest and the very first thing you had to do was grind. Wow… grind? You have to understand that I mainly have a hard time with Asian MMOs since their main way of leveling is trough grinding because apparently Asians loooooove their grind fest and I didn’t like it all. All the quest I tried contained of “kill X of those things. Now Kill X of THOSE things” and I hate grinding. I know it is part of an MMO but it it’s almost the ONLY way to level, then I don’t like it at all.

Okay… grinding yeah… So as I grinded my ways trough the quest I noticed one more thing. The quests were terribly boring! I didn’t even BOTHER reading most of then since they all seem bland, boring and like the didn’t really want to do much about. Okay.. well… that’s a bunch of bull crap to give me served on a silver platter.
The game also did an amazing job of makng me feel like I weren’t the hero who is suppose to save the world here but more like you are your own little hero in your own little game, much like WoW did, and that just made me feel like weren’t part of the history of the game at all. Like the entire story of the world wouldn’t care a crap-ton if I was part of it or not. HUGE minus since an MMO has to make you feel you are either the hero of the game, or your actions WILL actually change the fate or history of the world you are in.

Wow. Well maybe it’s just me so let’s move on. Now the Map is just horrible! It’s hard to see where you have to go to complete or accept quests, and where you have to go to kill the different monsters (hey I’m one of those who like that) and that made me run around in circles more than once in order for me to try and find that one stupid mob had to kill on order to get a small amount of gold and some crappy item. Also they are HORRIBLE at making one measly mark to show “Trainer is here” so I could get some new skills and I used a lot of time trying to find that ONE trainer. Now also A better description the the quests would really do wonders. Some quests were so badly written that I had to abandon some quests purely because I couldn’t find that ONE thing I was looking for.

One thing that also hit my eyes was the animation when you attack. Some of it it’s just too flashy and sparkly and I didn’t really care much for the little blood splatter dmg note that showed over the head of your enemy as your attacks hit them. And again the availability of your special abilities was hard to access and was places very weird compared to the mouse control. One of my attacks mas locate don the space bar (I didn’t put it there, the game did that itself) and it was just so misplaced for me that I often ended up activating it by a accident.

One thing I did like about the game was that the emotions of the Poporin is very cute and I like how they react to a successfull gathering of minerals or herbs, or if they fail it. I tried that just to see how it wen’t and can’t say much to that other than it’s very bland.

So I reached level 10 and decided to stop for now and hope for a beta testing. But all in all the game lacks a lot of stuff. Sure the game IS beautiful but it seems like it’s trying to make the game appear interesting only by it’s beauty instead of its actual content and that will probably end up killing the game in the long run. The quest are boring, the history ins bland and you don’t get the feel of you being a part of a huge event nor does it give you the impression of you being the hero that is suppose to save the day. The outfits are ridicules and only meant to look pretty rather that being functional, and some races are just too fan service oriented that It’s just stupid. I hope that this game doesn’t go P2P since I am pretty sure that it won’t last a month with so many features missing. Again this is still in production so I do hope that a lot of the issues I have mentioned will be taken care of. If not, this game is doomed to end in the gutter.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of boys ended up playing the female characters, so they have some polygons to jerk off to. Lol.

Promotion Video for Tera.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFlTEZELrbw

Just ONE last note to Tera.
WTF IS UP WITH THOSE WEIRD ASS TITS IN THE GAME!
How the hell do the jiggle so much!?
Have you SEEN real breasts? (I would say no) They don’t MOVE like that.
It’s not like they fly all over the place when hit by the tiniest blow of wind.
Fix it, it’s just plane stupid, no really, it IS.
I saw boobs clapping together on a woman who just stood there.
BOOBS. CLAPPING. TOGETHER!

Totally Okay if you said TL;DR