After years of wait­ing, TERA is finally open­ing its doors to North Amer­i­can play­ers.  This game has been quite news­wor­thy lately: Not only it has promised a com­bat sys­tem of the next gen­er­a­tion of MMO, its his­tory of con­tro­ver­sies both in its coun­try of ori­gin and here in the States attracted a lot of media atten­tion within the MMO sphere.  Yet no amount of good hype, bad press, and other kinds of con­tro­ver­sies will deter the Tera’s impend­ing launch­ing on May 1st, whose suc­cess will then depend on the game’s real qual­ity rather than any pass­ing of words.  As the final beta period wraps up past week­end, it is time to pass­ing down some ver­dicts in before the game goes live.

Con­tro­ver­sies

Before we begin the beta game­play stuff, for record keep­ing pur­poses, I’ll briefly cover the three most sig­nif­i­cant con­tro­ver­sies around this Tera prior to its North Amer­i­can release.

1. NCSoft law­suit drama

Dis­claimer: I’m no legal expert, nor am I able to con­firm the orig­i­nal Korean sources that are involved.  There has been a lot of news report on these law­suits as of late, and it is dif­fi­cult to tell which of them are fac­tual and which of them are gen­er­ated by the NCSoft and Bluehole’s PR machines.

Long story short: for­mer Lin­eage 3 devel­op­ers from NCSoft stole that game’s source code and left the com­pany.  Later they were crim­i­nally con­victed for that.  Some­time along the two events, these devel­op­ers found Blue­hole Stu­dios and incor­po­rated much of the orig­i­nal Lin­eage 3 con­cept to what we now know as Tera.  Not sur­pris­ingly, NCSoft sued Blue­hole Stu­dio.  Although the Korean Supreme Court declared the indi­vid­u­als respon­si­ble for steal­ing the soft­ware guilty, charges against Blue­hole by NCSoft are largely over­turned, so TERA can and will con­tinue to exist (at least in Korea) for the time being.  A brief time­line of the lit­i­ga­tion from mmoculture.com has some basic infor­ma­tion, although it has sev­eral key events only vaguely described.

On the other hand, a report from thisisgame.com appears more cred­i­ble.  It clearly and sim­ply stated the results of the Korean lawsuits.

Years have gone by, and as En Masse Enter­tain­ment (Tera NA pub­lisher) brought the game to closed beta, NCWest filed a com­plaint against EME in a New York court, on ground of the game has been allegedly devel­oped based on stolen source code from NCSoft’s, whose profit will be unfairly breached by Tera’s incep­tion in the West.  NCSoft’s word­ing in the com­plaint, which has been called a thinly dis­guised press release that any­one can down­load and read, made it clear that Tera con­tains inex­cus­able amount of sim­i­lar­ity in its con­cept design to that of Lin­eage 3’s.

Off­stage from the legal drama, an ugly fight between En Masse/Bluehole fan­boys and haters, pre­dictably.  But despite all these drama, the game’s NA launch date will remain firm and unaf­fected.  At last, even though Blue­hole and En Masse may escape the burn­ing breath of NCSoft, Tera will be for­ever branded a “stolen game that was Lin­eage III”.

2. Elin and Censorship

It is com­monly known that many “car­toony” Asian MMO fea­ture entire pop­u­la­tions of player char­ac­ters and NPC look­ing like pre­teens, the loli child­like race of Elin in Tera has brought an exces­sive amount of scrutiny to the game.  Many peo­ple were upset, and the term “pedophile” was fly­ing around insti­gat­ing all sorts of flames.

Here’s a good quote that sums up my feel­ing on the topic:

Posted: Feb 14th 2012 6:03PM

Pri­mal Zed said

I think what a lot of peo­ple either ignore or just haven’t seen in regards to TERA’s hyper­sex­u­al­iza­tion is that it goes beyond what you can get from just screen­shots of the game. Com­bat ani­ma­tions also accen­tu­ate the focus on sex­u­al­iza­tion: char­ac­ters stick their ass out while run­ning and jump­ing, belly dance while cast­ing, engage in full pelvic thrusts while shoot­ing a bow. The extra-controversial Elin race has a very notice­able hip sway as their stan­dard combat-ready ani­ma­tion. It’s that kind of thing that makes me won­der whether the peo­ple who are say­ing it’s no worse than other games are actu­ally doing an objec­tive comparison.

To me, a fun­da­men­tal mis­match in per­spec­tives is what’s caus­ing all these shenani­gans.  Here’s a selec­tion of Tera’s ESRB rat­ing:

Sev­eral envi­ron­ments depict large pools of blood on the ground or cov­er­ing tor­ture devices. Some female char­ac­ters wear reveal­ing out­fits that expose large amounts of cleav­age and but­tocks; their breasts occa­sion­ally bounce while run­ning and jump­ing, and play­ers have the abil­ity to manip­u­late cam­era angles for zoomed-in views.

Although I agree there is an exces­sive amount of sex­u­al­iza­tion of char­ac­ter design in Tera, I am nei­ther both­ered by it, nor am I able to draw a sen­si­ble par­al­lel between Tera and real porno­graphic that every­body (and cer­tain minor­ity) would enjoy.  I wish both sides can accept the sim­ple real­ity that yes, this game sex­u­al­ized many char­ac­ter mod­els, includ­ing Elin, and no, not every­one who buys and plays the game are per­verts and pedophiles.

3. The State of the Game

Ever won­dered what made En Masse to take so long to “west­ern­ize” Tera?  The pri­mary rea­son is that the game was released with (allegedly) not enough stuff to do at high lev­els, thus the Korean and Japan­ese play­ers soon found the game to expressed their bore­dom with can­cel­ing their sub­scrip­tion.  Although lack­ing of end-game con­tent is one of the more seri­ous prob­lems an MMO can have, it prob­a­bly is a less con­cern for me as I rarely reach the end-game level in most MMORPG I’ve played.  Obvi­ously, hav­ing open beta level capped at Lv32 does is not infor­ma­tive on whether En Masse “west­ern­ized” a good amount of high level con­tent for us NA play­ers that will pre­vent this game flop again in here.  Only time will tell.

A related note: Tera will launch with­out Bat­tle­ground, aka pvp arena, until late sum­mer. I found the news quite unnerv­ing, since team arena for­mat in any MMORPG is sup­posed to pro­vide a more orga­nized, ranked, and a level play­ing field for the par­tic­i­pants.  Lastly, due to the uncanny scal­ing of character’s level to their com­par­a­tive strength, I can only hope some kind of nor­mal­iza­tion makes its way to those more con­trolled pvp formats.

 

Beta

Don’t ask me why… I made the exact same char­ac­ter twice: first in CBT4 and then in OBT.  I guess I just really like Popori, and the Mys­tic class.  Got to lv30 in CBT4, and lv32 (cap) at OBT (and with 40/4 crab sup­pres­sion orders com­pleted for those who know what I’m talk­ing about ;)

Aes­thet­ics

Although this game is a gor­geous eye-candy to many peo­ple, I am of the unfor­tu­nate minor­ity who can­not  see the awe­some­ness due to a tex­ture res­o­lu­tion bug.  For some unknown rea­son the game’s tex­ture will quickly dete­ri­o­rate from good qual­ity res­o­lu­tion to an extremely crappy ver­sion.  Efforts gone to tweak­ing both in-game and out­side of the game set­tings did not help.  Nei­ther did the cur­rent knowl­edge base nor the responses from my sup­port tick­ets pro­vide any solu­tion, yet.  I sus­pect the game engine’s auto­matic qual­ity reduc­tion mech­a­nism is bro­ken, as my rig has no prob­lem run­ning Bat­tle­field 3 in high set­tings. (Though with 100% CPU and GPU usage, yet Tera only uti­lizes about 80% of the resources most of them time, yet the dete­ri­o­ra­tion still happens.)

But for the brief glimpses of high qual­ity tex­ture that was vis­i­ble to me, the beauty are in the details–the equip­ment on char­ac­ters have very detailed mod­els and tex­tures.  Every­thing else, such as the color scheme, back­ground, aer­ial and water reflec­tion, cou­pled with fancy post-processing, look vibrant and immers­ing.  Those who played Aion before could imme­di­ately pick up the sim­i­lar­ity in the art style.  How­ever, com­pare to Aion, Tera does seem to lack in equip­ment model vari­ety some­what.  Many armors and weapons look exactly the same except the color.

Tera’s game client offers a good range of graph­ics set­tings to cater play­ers using dif­fer­ent rigs.  It looks like cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of graph­ics card, rang­ing from medium to high­est, all have their own opti­mal set of graphic options in the game.  There are sev­eral options to limit amount of ren­dered objects on screen, such as max­i­mum amount of dis­played play­ers, reduced spe­cial effects, and back­ground object vis­i­ble range, to allow even more fine tuned expe­ri­ence.  Sadly for me, though, I’ll have to resolve the daunt­ing tex­ture bug to fur­ther dive into these.

BGM tracks in Tera are gen­er­ally pleas­ant.  Most of them are top qual­ity orches­tral pieces that enhances the mood of the scenery, or bump­ing up the blood dur­ing a boss fight.  Though Tera doesn’t loop BGM indis­crim­i­nately (<- a source of annoy­ance), it does not have a juke­box fea­ture to give play­ers more free­dom on what music they’d like to hear.

About the voice act­ing… Hor­ren­dous in the closed beta, and only a slightly bet­ter in the late open beta.  The biggest prob­lem is the diminu­tive bank of voice clips on any NPC, and the gen­eral bad voice actors whose qual­ity makes me sus­pect that En Masses just invited their employ­ees’ and their rel­a­tives and friends to do the voice act­ing.  Not sure if there is an option to turn off NPC voices, but I don’t want to mute the voice overs in cut scenes as well.

Game­play

Taunt­ing a “true action com­bat”, Tera’s com­bat sys­tem is no doubt more dynamic and action-y than most MMORPG.  Doing away with tab tar­get­ing and put empha­size on play­ers abil­ity to aim is def­i­nitely a wel­com­ing change from the norm.  The sys­tem is extremely engag­ing, and it has the poten­tial to make a lot of typ­i­cal mun­dane and grindy activ­i­ties in tra­di­tional MMORPG more excit­ing.  Although there are not many playable classes to choose from, all of them pro­vide a largely unique play style than the oth­ers.  Start­ing in early lev­els, play­ers are given numer­ous skills to play around with.  Although skills are rel­a­tively easy to acquire and to use them in com­bat, the spa­tial and tem­po­ral aware­ness of play­ers will say a lot about their com­bat efficiency.

Main focus involv­ing com­bat seems to be instances, BAM (big ass boss mon­sters on open fields), and some forms of PvP (which I did not touch dur­ing the beta).  Quest chains lead play­ers into explor­ing new zones and to dec­i­mate new mon­ster pop­u­la­tions; they are pro­vid­ing an extremely stream­lined lev­el­ing expe­ri­ence.  The instances are fun, as even the low level ones can be approached in non-linearly fash­ions to encour­age dif­fer­ent strat­egy and tac­tics.  A del­i­cate bal­ance among soloable con­tent to those that require a full group of 5.  Play­ers on both sides of the casual solo vs hard­core raiders can find their own fun in this game.

Gath­er­ing and craft­ing is worth men­tion­ing.  Gath­er­ing in Tera is much like in Aion, where resource nodes pop up on fields that play­ers can inter­act with.  It is only better–group mem­bers can share the same node, and a suc­cess­ful gath­er­ing applies a ran­dom buff on the player that result in syn­er­gies between killing mon­sters and tak­ing occa­sion breaks while gath­er­ing.  Tera’s craft­ing is also a lot like that of Aion.  Unfor­tu­nately, given the short length of beta, it is still too early to tell how craft­ing affects the over­all economy.

Stay­ing true to the MMO for­mula, PvP in Tera is just as impor­tant as its PvE.  As I stated ear­lier, how­ever, I did not find the chance go into depth on the game’s PvP aspect dur­ing beta.  The polit­i­cal system–a more dis­tinct fea­ture that has been heav­ily adver­tised, was not in beta at all.  It’ll be inter­est­ing to see how it will turn out once the game launches.

Quests and Storytelling

As much as I’d like to praise the game’s com­bat for refresh­ing breeze, the quest­ing and sto­ry­telling of Tera do not share the same praise by any exten­sion.  New play­ers get to expe­ri­ence their class at lv20 right after char­ac­ter cre­ation as a pro­logue and to kick off the main plot.  Unfor­tu­nately, that pro­logue is the most inter­est­ing part of the plot as my lv32 self can tell.  Cou­pled with bad voice act­ing, the cut scenes are way too cheesy and some­times are down­right con­fus­ing.  The main story is mediocre at best, and the cor­re­spond­ing sto­ry­line quests show a min­i­mal amount of effort from the devel­op­ers to the point that I can barely call it plot progression.

Side quests are a big­ger dis­ap­point­ment.  80% of them are “go kill 10 x/retrieve 10 x by killing y” type of quest that pro­vide a lack­lus­ter back­ground set­ting for why I have to kill what I need to kill.  Yes, I’ve read all the NPC dia­log and that’s why I’m say­ing this.  Mak­ing the mat­ter worse, all races and classes get the same set of quests with vir­tu­ally no deviation–one less to cre­ate alts in a class-restricted MMO is… bad.

Any­way, this may or may not an issue to every­one, as most MMORPG (espe­cially the F2P ones) have equally dull story and quests.  I’m just throw­ing it out here so peo­ple can prop­erly lower their expec­ta­tion in Tera at this department.

Com­mu­nity and Cus­tomer Support

Except for the out­lier MMO games, such as Eve Online or WoW, reviews, be it casual or pro­fes­sional in nature, rarely dis­cuss the qual­ity of the game’s com­mu­nity.  When the com­mu­nity is men­tioned, most of them are praises (unless, of course, it is Eve Online).  I find it strange.  I would not hes­i­tate to crit­i­cize or praise a game, and I cer­tainly would not hes­i­tate to do the same to eval­u­ate its com­mu­nity, since the com­mu­nity is an inte­gral part of all MMO games and should be part of rea­sons that any­body would play an MMO in the first place.

A less-than-pretty com­mon belief is that we, the MMO gamers, are not an exem­plary help­ful bunch on the Inter­net.  (Is there any­one?)  So far accord­ing to my obser­va­tion, Tera is no dif­fer­ent in this aspect than any other MMO, which fea­tures a full spec­trum of flam­ing trolls on the forum to those who qui­etly help­ing strangers in game.  It is inevitable for a heav­ily antic­i­pated game like Tera to attract a lot of unde­sired ele­ments to its forums.  Apart from a few good guides and infor­ma­tive posts, most threads are filled with replies involv­ing trolling, flam­ing other users, and flam­ing other games.  Unlike Eve Online, Tera’s forum posters are more likely to defend and sup­port EME and Blue­hole (some­times in rabid fan­boy manners).

Noth­ing spe­cial here, of course, as I’m fore­see­ing once the game goes live and the free­load­ers are off the wagon, worth­less posts will reduce in ratio to the ones that are actu­ally worth reading.

Again, it is not sur­pris­ing to find the in-game com­mu­nity is much friend­lier com­pare to the forums.  Once out of the begin­ner island, I found myself doing much less /faceplam at the Area Chat.  When peo­ple are ask­ing ques­tions, they are gen­er­ally answered.  The few pug dun­geon and BAM groups I’ve been to are cool and offered polite feed­back on how to improve people’s game­play.  How­ever, I would imag­ine PvP server would be a whole dif­fer­ent story.

On terms of cus­tomer sup­port, I am glad to see that EME spent some effort build­ing up a knowl­edge base of offi­cial answers to fre­quently asked ques­tions.  I ear­lier men­tioned the tex­ture bug; I have been com­mu­ni­cat­ing with a GM via the tick­ets.  Although I got a first response quickly, it was a semi-automated mes­sage and only after a few back and forth, the GM finally under­stood my prob­lem if he was to thor­oughly read my ini­tial ticket, and the link to the sim­i­lar prob­lem from another user’s report.

 

Con­clu­sion

I actu­ally by pre-ordering Tera’s Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tor Edi­tion after open beta regard­less of its flaws, and I am fully intended to spend time play­ing its first month, despite the oncom­ing final exams and Guild Wars 2 beta week­ends.  Tera is a col­or­ful game with clearly defined strengths and weak­nesses.  Being an Asian game in art style will def­i­nitely alien­ate some but attract oth­ers.  It is a game that has been pol­ished over and over again via the (rather cheesy, imo) “west­ern­iza­tion” slo­gan that may or may not change some people’s prej­u­dice against Tera.  I sup­pose it’s not entirely a bad thing to make a swift deci­sion on whether to pay for a game only for its few prop­er­ties.  Hope­fully any­one who was not sure had a taste in one of the beta week­ends, or gath­ered enough infor­ma­tion from other ways to make an informed decision.

Lastly, for any­one who is curi­ous, my char­ac­ter name is Dog­gystyle, and I’m in the Drag­on­fall server.