Gotten to level 9 with a Warrior now. I really like this game so far. I'll probably buy it when it's out

I'm level 23 right now on my archer. Haven't played much since I have been busy and in much physical pain. Duo'd the first dungeon with HKS again (who's still playing lancer) rather easily. The bosses definitely behave a bit differently with me being ranged than on my berserker, and they also improved drops a lot. As opposed to CBT where we got 1 blue we couldn't do anything with for the whole instance, we got 4-5 blues per boss, all BoE. World bosses on the other hand still don't drop shit all, and they still haven't fixed some of the serious leashing issues a lot of mobs have, where they'll constantly reset if they move out of their spawn point, or reset randomly during battle.

/edit

29 now. 2manned SM without too much problems, though died once on the final guy since HKS tried to tank his ridiculous adds.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Apr 22 2012, 12:34 pm by IskatuMesk.

Apparently there's a lot of complaints about the European publisher of TERA. They've been censoring parts of the game (less blood and something about the Elins, though I'm not sure what exactly) to meet the 12+ rating. Think there were a couple of other things as well, but I didn't bother reading too much into it. I'm kinda considering playing on the American servers though, seeing as I don't appear to have any latency issues.

Americans also censored Elins as well, not sure about blood. I've also read some not so nice things about the Euro publisher and basically everyone is recommending to play on American servers.

About Elin censorship, it should be easy enough to uncensor them. Basically replacing the package files with K-Tera ones. There's probably some sites/forums/blogs with info about that, since it's fairly trivial.

So, is anyone here actually playing this?

We're 37 or so right now. My original predictions for the game are panning out pretty much to spec as they usually do. The game is fairly simple and repetitive, with the combat system being the only real difference outside of every other mmo. Some of the quest dialogue is pretty amusing (we're in secret loli land right now, and there's lots of loli), with surprisingly few, although blatant, instances of Engrish. The voice acting, though they hired big name actors, seems weak at best in its strongest points, with major desyncing in many of the cinematics. I think they just had the actors read from a script and then applied the sound events to the original Korean-made sound events and such. A big waste of talent and effort.

The sounds in general in this game are very weak, particularly for monsters. They all use this same bad flange effect and it washes over any original fidelity. It was something I noticed when I plundered the Korean client when it first came out, but I had hoped they'd had improved the sound work by now. They didn't. This is the worst sounding Korean game I've yet played in that regard. I don't know why they didn't put in any effort. Perhaps their resources were limited.

On the offhand, other than the shoddy censorship jobs, the graphics remain pretty strong throughout. The performance is as expected out of Unreal - excellent. The EXP gain is fairly consistent though I keep wondering why quests at level 37 are giving me less experience than those I was doing at 20, the pacing keeps even and you keep moving. The BAMs are all pretty similar to each other, though, outside of assets. The gameplay mechanics are all very similar. At least as DPS. We've been able to 2man everything we've run into so far with minimal, if any, difficulty (Archer/Lancer). I suspect any hard modes or end-game instances will be not 2mannable, but I don't fancy socializing very much, so that's probably when I'll taper off and wind down my time with this game.

For a launch this has been very smooth. There was one major rollback we ran into of about 5 minutes when the servers exploded. En Masse then restarted the servers a few times the next day to "fix issues" with some of the LFD stuff. A very smooth launch, with the company putting in the time to fix things on the spot. This is more than I can say for many games. There is very little latency, but players do rubberband and teleport quite a bit. I think this is the netcode and not the servers though. Not nearly as bad as Guild Wars at least.

With a Mystic I was able to solo multiple dungeon pulls at once around level 20ish. It took time but it was possible. I see the most enjoyment I'd get out of this game as being "how far can you go solo" kind of like in WoW where I spent the little time I played harvesting legendaries and soloing raids. With Tera, though, I'm feeling burned out far faster since there's next to no customization available and the end-game doesn't seem to be very appetizing to me. This is actually the first time I've played a healing class for more than just yucks outside of the pro team I was healing horde-side in WoW classic, but that was more of a spelunking than anything devoted. I like the Mystic because I can choose to heal or just destroy things, there's a lot of utility in this class. The pet system, however, is rather clunky as your pet buttons occupy precious hotkey slots and the pets normal AI is dumb as bricks.

The crafting system seems very pointless when looking at the end-game perspective. The resource requirements are extremely high when all you need to do is get a dungeon group going, even if you dislike people, to get dungeon drops - assuming they are all bop now. I think what's more likely to happen in my case is simply spending the gold to buy crafted gear and avoiding both. Which is perfectly reasonable, but it seems like Tera will be another MMO in which I let someone else worry about crafting stuff because I find it exhausting. I guess I'm just not a crafting kind of guy. Nothing really negative or positive there. I'll wait to see how the end game shapes up before I say for certain. Maybe Loveless I think it was can comment on the crafting system since he has much more experience with the game than I do.

That said, Tera turned out stronger than I expected overall, with the expected weak spots being weak and the expected strong spots remaining strong. There's a lot of comparisons to Guild Wars 2 flying around, but since I haven't played Guild Wars 2, I cannot comment on those. Perhaps if a trial opens up and I get the chance to play it I will make one final review comparing the two - one I expect GW2 to win, if not because of the combat, but because of the rest of the game. I see Tera thriving in the same manner Aion once did - with a niche. Those who hate WoW enough to avoid its many clones like Rift and Tor, and those who didn't quite like GW2 or Diablo 3. Tera offers a challenge not found in Diablo 3, but lacks a lot of polish the older titles have had to catch up on. With a year behind the Korean version and a lot of stuff still seemingly very unfinished, I worry for the longetivity of this game, as I wish it could be all it can be. En Masse is a wild card company, with conflicting actions and mindsets, seemingly hellbent on Westernizing the game but not actually "updating" it in the literal sense (probably have their hands tied to the Koreans). Only time will tell.

There's a lot of stupid things in this game that really rustle my jimmies, though. You don't get any exp for mobs 10 levels lower than you? Fine. But 10 levels higher? Really? I can solo a level 48 puppy at 37 and I get... nothing. Dumb. Not even any drops.

Ultimately, I find that if I don't play an MMO with someone (usually hks) my attention span wanes very fast. Not a single MMO I've played other than Guild Wars 1 has held my attention solo for that long. While my demands for games are very high, it seems to me that the genre is just incompatible with my playstyle overall. However, Tera definitely offers some entertainment for us, particularly in the humorous bugs, dialogue, and the challenge of doing 5man content with only 2 people.

I don't like giving games numerical ratings because I feel that numbers are poor at reflecting a game's overall quality. So hopefully food for thought is enough.

I was about to buy it (the American version), but I went all "WTF taxes are not included in the initial price?!" and didn't get around to it.
I also have the same problem with losing interest in an MMO if I don't know anyone else playing it, and in the past few years I've found it harder to get to know people online than before. None if my rl friends seems to be interested in playing TERA, so I guess I'll stick to EVE till GW2 comes out.

PS: MMOs have sound?

Just because sound is abandoned by most developers doesn't mean it has to be. :3

Got a discount code in the mail, so I figured I could as well buy it. My warrior from the beta is actually still there (on Serpentis Isle). What server are you on, if anyone's actually (still) playing this?

Bump.

So I just got a new computer so I've been trying out all the games I couldn't play on my old one. If anyone wants to play some Tera with me, I'm on Celestial Hills server. Also, the game is now F2P for those who don't know.

More importantly: If you want a free level 58 character, start a new character and end its name with .Levelup by the end of today and on Monday it will be boosted to a permanent level 58. Source: http://tera-forums.enmasse.com/forums/general-discussion/topics/Level-Up-Test-Event-Limited-Chance-for-a-Free-Level-58-Character-94757

Currently I am a level 35 Berserker named The.Count.