Welcome
to my review of TERA The
Exiled Realm of Arborea. Developed by Bluehole studios and published
by En Masse Entertainment in North America, Frogster in Europe and
Hangame in South Korea. This game is a MMORPG with third person
shooter style combat elements. This game is controversial in the fact
that Bluehole studios is comprised of ex employees of NC Soft and are
under accusation to the point of lawsuits against Bluehole because
they stole intellectual property for the Lineage 3 engine. Being a
fan of some of NC Soft's games I'm still skeptical that the entire
truth about all this is out. Nevertheless, TERA reaches PC North
America May 1st
and Europe on May 3rd.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPgM3j1eZzk
Story:
I will
use the official website source as not everything is clear from a
beta test.
“About
a millennia ago two omnipotent titans Arun and Shara entered into
formless voids and for reasons we can only guess, fell asleep. The
titans started to dream. Dream of a world that took form on their
backs known as Tera. The first beings to call Tera home were twelve
godlike beings dreamt up by the titans, but it wasn’t long before
the gods started fighting. As the dream continued new creatures took
place called mortals, they were less powerful but far more numerous.
Arun dreamed of ambitious Elves, clever Humans, honour bound Amani,
powerful Giants, scheming Devas, and mischievous Poporis. Shara
dreamed of sly Sikandari, dark Gulas and Vampirs, fierce Wendigos,
strange Faeries, and serpentine Nagas. The mortals were forced into
the divine wars of the gods, which eventually left the gods dead,
imprisoned, or otherwise diminished. The mortal races didn’t escape
unscathed. Some—like the Sikandari, and most of the Giants—were
wiped out but others rose from the wars such as the Barakas and
Castanics. Now that the gods were gone the seven races; Amani,
Barakas, Castanics, Elin, High Elves, Humans, and Poporis must band
together to fend off a new enemy. A metallic race from the underworld
called Argons; their goal is to take over Tera and wake the titans to
end their dreams and destroy Tera.”
Basically
the usual, gods make mortals, bad guys threaten the world. Go save
the world. The story itself is very RPG cliche and forgettable.
Tera
story score: 2.5/5
Gameplay:
When
you first make your character you get some nice customization options
and with a fairly large race roster you can make a busty babe, a
little girl, a big mountain man or a fuzzy little cat. I myself made
a Popori warrior, a fat little cat named Tartarus.
Like
conventional MMO's you must fight your way through various but
repetitive quests and level up to take on harder various but
repetitive quests. This is not required however as you can just kill
things endlessly for the same results but then you miss out on the
story.
Combat
shines through however, instead of selecting an enemy and watching
your character beat it to death (I call this the Runescape virus.)
You get the chance to aim your attacks with crosshairs which can lead
to the chance you might miss an enemy in a fight not based on chance.
The combat cuts out alot of the random variables you've come to
expect from many MMO's such as World of Warcraft or The Old Republic
or Aion. This adds more of a competitive nature to the game and
stresses that Player vs Player combat is king.
Tera
Gameplay score: 4.2/5
Graphics:
Graphics
in TERA range from brutal to beautiful depending on how much your
computer can handle. Many different environments to explore,
beautiful cities, cool looking enemies and interesting character
designs. Though the armour and weapon variations are very limited.
Rumour
has it that in the next closed beta they will release the improved
graphics update which is said to be an extra 6 gigabytes of higher
resolution textures.
Tera
Graphics score: 4.7/5
Sound
and music:
The
music in Tera has a wide variety of interesting tunes for different
areas and dungeons and cities which adds to the environment of the
game and are very well composed.
The
sounds are pretty clean, nothing stands out as very excellent but its
not as important when a mass of players and monsters are fighting and
it becomes jumbled anyways. The voices aren't very pleasing, the
range is too small and the male and female voices are the same on all
races which is disturbing to hear a little whiny voice on a huge
Baraka or a very sultry womanly voice on a tiny Elin.
Tera
sound and music score: 4.2/5
Overall:
This is just the first closed beta, we were limited to level 22 as
the cap, not being able to do any arena or battleground PvP and it
utilized an older version of the game engine than the Korean one,
many improvements and changes are to come to this promising game.
Total:
15.6/20
Average:
3.9/5
Image
sources:
http://i68.photobucket.com/albums/i22/cali1111/TERA_ScreenShot_20120210_212616.png
(my own screenshot)
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