It took me a while to convince myself to participate in the TERA open beta this weekend. There was so much drama from the beginning about the ex NC Soft employees stealing trade secrets or whatever. I decided to put all that aside and try out the game. I've spent the majority of the past 2 days running around exploring, trying out classes, and crafting. For the most part I like the game, in fact I like it a lot. I'll do a rundown of my current pros and cons. Keep in mind I have only played a couple days and it is still in beta so there are things I may not have figured out and I have only explored a small percentage of the content the game offers.
Character creation is nice. I enjoy the races though I am sad that some of the races only have male OR female and not both. I love the Elin race even though a lot of people have been discussing how they are borderline creepy. I adore them. They remind me a little of Tarutaru from Final Fantasy though I've never played a FF game. There is only a female version of Elin and they look very much like children with big anime eyes and you get to choose a style of animal ears and tail for them. The reason there is discussion on them being creepy is that they have thick curvy woman type legs and wear very short dresses and high heels. I can see where looking at it from a certain perspective they can be a little creepy but I see them as super cute. The character feature choices are pretty good. It's no where near as detailed as Aion but there's enough variety in hairstyles and facial feature adjustments that everyone won't run around looking like carbon copies.
The prologue to the game is very cool. When you start a new character you begin questing as a level 20 version of the class you chose. You are given a handful of spells and are set out to kill some monsters with a group of NPCs. The reason I like this is because normally in order to get a glimpse at a class you need to level to 20 just to get enough spells to see what you can do. This prologue allows you to play around with the lvl 20 spells and see if you are interested in continuing. When you finish the prologue you are dumped in a newbie land just like every other game and you begin from level 1 with minimal spells. From what I saw once you have completed the prologue on a character any other characters you create on that server get the option to skip the prologue.
Movement and targeting are interesting to get used to. I don't even know how to even describe it but movement is similar to DC Universe Online and combat is sort of like a 3rd person shooter with crosshairs to target mobs. You still get hotbars for spells but like in DCUO you don't have the ability to click with your mouse in normal gameplay mode. You do get a mouse cursor when you are in UI mode like when you open your bags or any other menu. It took me a bit of practice until I was comfortable with it but I'm already a pro. It's a new play style for me and I'm loving it. After 8 years of tab targeting and spamming hotkeys it's refreshing to say the least.
Armor is awesome. It's a sort of cross between Rift and Aion styles. Armor seems to vary in appearance depending on what race you are. The little Elin girls wouldn't be caught dead in some of the skimpy stuff the other female races wear. When I say skimpy I am NOT joking. I am all for sexy armor but some of these get ups might take it a little too far. The game IS rated M for mature.
You get a quest for a free mount at level 11. I LOVE that. From what I can see the world is HUGE and not having a mount from early on would take it's toll for sure. A feature I like about the mounts is that the "grown up lady races" (not the Elin) ride side saddle. One thing I dislike about mounts is that you need to dismount before you can enter combat or gather. Setting your mount to a hotkey makes this faster but it's still kinda annoying.
I spent a little bit of time crafting. It's a very simple minimal combine system and seems to go pretty quickly. I wish it was more detailed personally but it has it's nice features like that fact that you can choose to level up every craft if you want to and are not forced to specialize like most other games. I won't go into too much detail but the enchanting system is fun too. Many items you craft have special bonuses, in order to activate these bonuses you need to enchant the item. The more you enchant the item the higher the base stats go and you unlock the special bonuses.
When you kill a monster if it has loot for you it drops it on the ground. If the loot is coin it's a little pile of coins, if it's a potion it drops a little bottle, they also drop scrolls and little boxes for armor and weapons. It's a nice feature to see actual loot on the ground and not just a sparkling corpse. It's been a while but I believe Guild Wars is similar and actually went as far as to drop the actual weapons on the ground. I like little things like that.
There are PvP and PvE servers which I am very grateful for. Playing Aion I get frustrated because there's only PvP servers. I dislike PvP but I read up on it a little and found out that since there is no factions in the game (Horde/Alliance Good/Evil) the world PvP on the PvP servers is free for all.
One thing I am iffy about is the political system in the game. From what I've read and watched in videos there will be a sort of ruler of the world who is a player. In order to become this ruler you need to be a guild leader and have a guild who is willing to help you along the way. You can choose to fight your way to the top through arena type battles or by asking people to vote for you. The ruler person will get to change things like available merchants and portals and I think even taxes. The journey to the top won't be for everyone but this popularity contest doesn't seem like a very good idea to me. We'll see after release if it effects the general public of the game very much or if you can pretty much ignore the whole process and the "leader".
There's a lot of other little things that please me about the game and because of my participation in this beta I think I'll be jumping on the TERA bandwagon on May 1st or sooner if I preorder. I'm not sure why some game reviewers have such bad opinions of the game but I really enjoy it and my opinion is to try it for yourself. Even if you have to wait for a recruit a friend trial or whatever En Masse will offer to recruit new people after release. Don't let the negative people make up your mind for you. I almost did and I would have missed out on all the fun I've been having.
