TERA First Impressions

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.

EQ2 Chronoportal Event, Moonlight Enchantments, and more

There's a few things going on in Everquest 2 this week. One is the annual Chronoportal Event which starts today and runs until the 28th. This event comes around during original Everquest's birthday. EQ is celebrating 13 years this year. During the event you can hop through portals in 8 different zones which take you to an instance that might bring back some memories of your EQ days. The instances are intended for groups but as an Illusionist I found all but the Lavastorm portals soloable when using a tank mercenary like the Shadowknight. Each instance is a different level and you are automatically mentored down to an appropriate level. You will not however have your level raised should you want to do an instance much higher than your actual adventure level. The instances have an 18 hour lock out after you kill a named. The final boss of each will drop a chest containing 2 platinum coins, an adornment and some gear that is appropriate to the level of the instance. From what I can tell all items are tradeable or heirloom so you can give the items from the lower level instances to your alts. You can spend the platinum coins at merchants in Antonica and Commonlands. They sell replicas of the bosses for your home, books, paintings and a harp. HERE is all the details over at ZAM.

Also today and tomorrow is Moonlight Enchantments. This is the monthly event where mushroom rings pop up in certain zones and you complete quests for tokens to buy house and vanity items. HERE's the post I have written about them in the past.

There will be a new backpack on the Marketplace soon. The devs couldn't keep the news to themselves so they gave us a preview. The backpack called the Heraldry Flag Backpack holds a flag which will display your guild's logo on it. No word on the price yet.

I also missed posting about the latest Marketplace items so here they are...

Shadowforged Cinder Gi- 1200SC

Guilded Vanity Set- 400SC

Dragon Fang- 500SC

WoW Mists of Pandaria News.

There was a World of Warcraft Mists of Pandaria press event and the Non disclosure agreement was lifted so we were flooded with news about MoP this morning. We had already heard about some features of the expansion like the pokemon style vanity pet fighting ring and scenarios.

One major point was that MoP is being set up to be the new vanilla WoW. If you're not familiar with the term, vanilla refers to the basic World of Warcraft game pre expansions. During this time there was no major bad guys that gave a goal to the overall game. You didn't know what was going to happen. In the last 3 expansions you pretty much knew what you were in for. There was a goal, Kill Kil'Jaeden, Kill Arthas, Kill Deathwing. Blizzard is making MoP like vanilla, there is no announced final encounter. This allows them to drop whatever they want on us at any time. There will just be general badness in the world that we have to fight until they say "time to kill a BIG baddie". I didn't have a chance to play vanilla WoW in it's most vanilla form. I wasn't introduced to the game until Burning Crusade had just come out so this will be an interesting change to the game for me and may even get me interested in raiding again.

Another thing being talked about today across the interwebs is that they once again have left the old character models...old. We didn't get upgraded character models for the original races like many of us hoped for. Kind of on this topic is reveal of the female Pandaren. She's super cute.

Some other things announced were changes to reputation grinding. From what it seems like you'll no longer be able to throw on a tabard and grind dungeons until you have the rep level you want. You will have to gain the trust of the factions in Pandaria. You'll probably have to grind out quests for them to prove yourself worthy. With this comes a new way to obtain a mount from the Pandaren factions. They will have serpent mounts you can purchase with a certain amount of faction. You will purchase an egg and have to do a series of daily quests revolved around your egg and it's hatchling until it grows into a mount. Starting as a baby which becomes a pet that will fight beside you and then into a ground mount (If you're familar with Everquest 2 think of the griffon quest line in Velious where you have to take your griffon to do certain dailies until it's grown.) To get your Pandaria serpent to fly you need to then obtain more faction. They also announced Challenge modes to dungeons in Pandaria. Similar to the old Zul'Aman timed run for the bear mount. As you run dungeons you will receive medals of bronze, silver or gold depending on how fast you complete the zone. You can receive achievement titles by obtaining medals. There's a ton of other news being thrown around so please go ahead and visit some of my favorite sites so I don't have to retype all of it.

• GamebreakerTV
• MMORPG.com 
• MMO-Champion.com
• WoWhead
• PC Gamer
• WoW Insider

Everquest goes Free to Play Today

About 6 years ago I did that Coke rewards points thing. I turned in my bottle caps all the time and eventually had enough points to get something cool. I decided to get an Everquest game. They had both original EQ and EQ2. I asked a friend for their opinion and they said since EQ2 was newer it had better graphics etc. so I should go with that. Because of this decision to skip the original and go right to the sequel I have no freakin' clue what is going on in EQ2. For 6 years I've done my best to enjoy the game ignoring lore for the most part. But today original EQ went F2P. I now have a chance to play the original game and maybe understand what the heck is going on in the world around me when I hop back over to EQ2. I have been playing Aion and just got Minecraft so not sure when I'll do it, but it's nice to know the option to play for free is there. http://www.everquest.com/free

Aion NA F2P and 3.0 April 11th

Aion's North American Free to Play model will launch on April 11th along with the release of Game Update 3.0. The game update will increase level cap, introduce mounts and player housing along with a ton of other stuff.

The F2P model for North America will be different than the current Euro F2P model. Instead of having different tiers of subscription level the game introduces C.U.B.E. Customizable User Bundling Experience. You will be able to purchase a C.U.B.E. from the Aion store. You fill your C.U.B.E. with the game features YOU want. You want more goodies? You buy a bigger more expensive C.U.B.E.. As of now I haven't found a list of the features that will be accessed through C.U.B.E. but I'll post more info when I do. C.U.B.E.s will be on the Aion store April 4th and available for use on the 11th. Purchasing a C.U.B.E. will get you bonus items as well, you get bigger and better bonuses with bigger cubes. I was personally hoping for the Euro Free to Play model. Hopefully we aren't forced to purchase too many features in this NA model like character slots or bag space.


Also announced is a new Atreian Atlas system. A sort of guide that will help you through the game. It will offer a customized gaming plan for your play style. It will offer maps, video guides, and extended quest information like difficulty. I'm really curious and excited to see how this works. Hopefully I can tell mine to avoid all group instances and PvP. *snicker*


You can read the full Massively article detailing these new features HERE. 

EQ2 Game Update 63 Skyshrine. New Level cap and content. April 17th

A lot of people were upset when they found out the latest Everquest 2 expansion, Age of Discovery had no new content. It implemented a lot of new features instead. The folks over at SOE explained that it was because new instances, zones and other playable content were now going to be added in game updates instead. So with the expansion came mercenaries, design your own dungeon, beastlords, and tradeskill apprentices and coming April 17th the next major game update will add all the content people have been waiting for.

If you have Destiny of Velious you will get...

• a new level cap of 92 (up from 90). 
• A new zone with over 100 quests. 
• Multi mode instances, so now if you can't find a group, heck, do the solo version. 
• Heroic group and raid instances. 
• Prestige class talents and all new tradeskill quests. 
• New drake mount

If you have the Age of Discovery expansion you will get...

• a new dungeon map and items with a Poet's Palace theme. 
• New dungeon maker adventurers. 
• Tradeskill apprentices with new recipes including one ELITE recipe. 
• Elite Mercenary
• New warders for beastlords to tame.

Here's the whole scoop on Everquest2.com

Guild Wars 2 Pre Order Announced. SWTOR Free Trial Weekend.

Guild Wars 2 has announced that Pre-Orders will begin on April 10th. The standard game is $60, Delux Digital is $80, and Collectors is $150. All pre-orders will get access to the weekend beta events and a 3 day headstart. You can see all the other goodies that come with the pre-order packages HERE.

In other news Bioware is offering a free trial weekend for Star Wars: The Old Republic. The trial weekend begins Thursday, March 15th at 11am PST and ends Monday, March 19th at 1am PST. It does not apply to players who have a previously active account. The new players who sign up for this free weekend will have access to all 8 classes, the starting zones, the capital cities and PvP warzones and Flashpoints (instanced dungeons). Find out more info HERE.