Game Watch: Tera

I've been intentionally ignoring all chatter about Tera, a game in development and felt by many to be the replacement for Lineage 2, but I broke my self-imposed media blackout this past weekend at PAX and am now intrigued with what little information is available.

The game is undeniably beautiful. I was able to spy on a game tour given to my left while I was experimenting with the spellcasting character gameplay, and I was impressed. As with Lineage, the cities are beautiful and grand, massive in scale and full of fanciful interpretations of various forms of classical architecture. There are 6 playable races, each with their own very distinct aesthetic, architecture, lore, and clothing. It doesn't appear that there is any restriction on race and character class combination, and it will be a faction-free game. Players will be free to form alliances and declare war on any player as they see fit, and the designers are working on a political system more complex than the simple castle ownership of Lineage 2.

As a former Lineage player, I recognize many similarities between the art in both games. Certain locations seem to be flushed out, polished versions of locations from Lineage and this is not a bad thing. If they are able to extract and build upon the successes of Lineage (the art, the open gameplay, the beautiful music) and correct some of its shortcomings (primarily the combat system and steep death penaltys and extremely difficult progression) this has the makings of an incredibly wonderful game.

The gameplay took a bit of getting used to, but that is the point - wings and flight combat were Aion's revolution and the combat system is TERA's. All previous MMORPG games have been built on variations of the same combat system: select a player or NPC by targeting them with your mouse and select offensive skills to attack or restorative skills to defend. The restrictions on skill usage is primarily range based - each skill can only be used a certain distance from the selected target.

For TERA this has been completely redesigned to incorporate elements of first person shooter games. Rather than selecting a target ("locking on") and mashing skill buttons, a player must mind their range to ensure the selected skills will actually hit the target and aim the skills in order to hit. The player never "targets" anything at all. This is very different than all previous MMORPG games, and requires a bit of getting used to. I liked it, but it was still a bit disorienting.

The funniest part of my time at the booth was, of course, listening to confused World of Warcraft players who didn't understand the gameplay. The first question they all asked was "so is this like WoW" or "What's different than WoW" to which the booth staff would try not to wince and begin to explain all the differences. I don't think I will ever be able to forgive WoW for spoiling the MMO market by flooding it with unskilled players who have no experience other than WoW's quick rewards and easy gameplay. Every game that comes out is compared to WoW as though it's a golden standard, and players expect the same type of experience and level of difficulty. Hopefully the differences in TERA's combat system will be enough to set it apart from WoW so that people judge it on its own merits.