A friend of mine informed me a while back that the massively multiplayer online role playing game
Tera by
Bluehole Studio for the Personal Computer finally offered a 7-day trial to test out the game. I had been holding myself back from checking out the game because I just started playing
Diablo III at the time and I didn't want to be distracted away from that 7 days worth of access. Well, I have finally downloaded the game client and if I knew back then that
Tera is this horrible, well, I would have just done this a lot sooner to get it out of my way.
The game started off nice enough with great looking anime style characters and gorgeous Unreal Engine 3 technology (complete with the engine's trademark texture popping issue) but things took turn for the worse as soon as the gameplay kicked in. This game reminded of the disgusting
Land of Chaos Online with its flawed control design. At the tutorial stage, you are bumped up to level 20 and you are given access to an obnoxious amount spells that must be triggered by a press of the assigned keys instead of clicking them with the cursor. The mouse controls the game camera and the target reticule and sure, with practice, you could probably be good at pressing all those number
plus F keys but with a combat this clunky, I don't think anyone would want to. Sure, you can always use the X-Box 360 controller and it did control a lot better than the keyboard and mouse scheme but it was a hassle to use because you still have to use your keyboard and mouse to make everything else outside of combat manageable so the controller implementation was truly half-hearted. This game should have been designed entirely around the game controller to make it work but unfortunately, that is not the case at all. I don't think I have been this annoyed with a game in a long while.
Yeah, it's more action oriented but long boss fights mean never-ending skill-triggers.
Then comes the game story that makes little to no sense to me. A mysterious island suddenly appeared in the middle of the game world and adventurers are sent to check it out. So you arrive there as a level 20 character and then without any explanation, you are now level one... I was like, hey, wasn't I part of that initial team sent to investigate the mysterious island so why is it that my very same character with the same name and same armor set all of a sudden become someone else who is just now arriving at the island? Perhaps there's an explanation for this but I wasn't willing to subject myself to any more punishment for that mystery to be potentially solved. Don't even get me started on that super low quality, badly compressed intro video: Uh, it would have looked a lot better if they just used the real time in-game graphics since the video was composed using the in-game graphics assets. What a disappointment. I deleted the game client immediately after spending about an hour on Tera. The game is so bad, after I uninstall it, it even left a remnant of 25GB worth of files on my hard drive. It was like a headache that just wouldn't go away!
It's so pretty, you just know that something ugly is lurking underneath the game.
Why are people still playing this game? I am not sure... But I do know why the developer is going to be
merging the game servers soon and I can tell you it had nothing to do with giving the players a more "unified community" so that players can easily find people to play with. If you are really itching to play this mess, don't pay the monthly subscription, save your money, and wait for it. The free-to-play option is coming very, very soon, and you can thank me then.
