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| Computer Games: Clearly, it's violent, horrifying images like this causing mass-shootings and vehicular homicide. Being run over by hot-air balloon furniture is no laughing matter. |
So TERA, Enmasse Entertainment's carefully adapted Unreal 3-powered MMO boob simulator by
Korean ex-Lineage III devs. You may remember that said
ex-devs were accused by NCSoft Korea of stealing arm-loads of Lineage III
assets as they fled their jobs to form their own outfit, Bluehole Studio. Final thoughts on that matter can be seen here,
on their own blog, and here,
at good old Massivley.com. But I’m not interested in all that, I’m just here to
spew some thoughts out in-between pages of this boring German thing I’m
supposed to be proofing. (There’s a TL;DR at the end of this piece if you haven’t
got the time or inclination to wade through this sprawling mess).
To be honest,
I wasn’t that interested in TERA to begin with. I really don’t like that Asian
art style at all – it’s either cartoony, big-eyed paedo-bait, or all pseudo-renaissance
mash-up with 80’s pretty boy pop-star haircuts – all of which leaves me colder
than an Eskimo’s eyelids. But, being a devout Massively reader and Longtime Player
of Online RPGs in Good Standing, I followed its announcement and development
enough to know what was going on with it.
A couple of
weeks ago I was reminded of its imminent F2P re-release, and then again a couple
of days before it did that very thing, re-branded as ‘TERA Rising’. So, being
the bored magpie that I am, I decided to give it a whirl. That’s the beauty of
Free To Play – even if you believe the whole system is Satan’s own screwgee
(more fool you), it still lets you try something for free, rather than making
you roll the dice on up to fifty smackers (or 150 smackers over here in
Polarbearland) for something you’re not sure about.
Well, just my
experience downloading the client could fill a blog post, but instead I’ll give
it a modestly-sized paragraph or ten. The client is 27 Gb. Now, I’m a bit of a
freak about client sizes, because I’ve got a raggedy-ass collection of hard
drives that are bursting at the seams, and the 200 clams I’d need to buy a new
HDD are too much in one go to justify most days of the year. So, I spend my
time shuffling and juggling (and rearranging my drive space, haha). And so it took me a fair old bit of fyku-myku
to clear the space for it, and on a drive that’s already lost sectors to time
and service.
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| Not pictured: Various external drives, stacked precariously one on top of the other like those turtles in the Dr. Seuss book. |
So I gets the
thing down the pipe eventually. It goes pretty fast – about one meg twenty most
of the time – but then drops to a crawl when all the local squares come home in
their Audis to surf timid porn and football results. Well fuck me if it doesn't hang installing. So I re-start the launcher and it takes an eternity to check
its work and get its bearings again – much longer than any other MMOG
launcher/patcher I’ve used. Eeeeeeeeventually, I notice that what little extra
space I had on the drive (I think I’d cleared about 30-32 Gigs before launching
this Korean shit-rocket) had dwindled down to the last 6 megs or so!
It turns out
that what you really need is 50 Gb, because the download then unpacks itself onto itself prior to installing, leaving
the original archives in place – thus nearly doubling the space requirement.
Now, on the official forums there’s some debate about this. All the douche bags
with terrabytes of vacant drives they bought because they’re still living with
their parents (or because they’re students) are vigorously shouting down the working
stiffs like me who – after 20-odd years of system reqs listing the total amount of HDD space on the box,
including the unpacking and installing (which usually takes place in a temp
folder somewhere else anyway) – are mildly surprised about the unexpected
doubling of the quoted 27-30 Gb. To further muddy the virtual waters, there is
apparently some difference in client sizes between the direct digital download and the official torrent. Well, I could go on about this, but it’s moot now, so let’s
move on.
Needless to
say, I finally got it installed, patched and booted. The launcher, I have to
say, is one of the prettiest I’ve ever seen, and defaults to a quite stunning
and unexpected full-screen size. It didn’t even occur to me to re-size it down
to normal until I noticed some malcontents bitching about it online.
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| TERA’s awesome launcher. That, by the way, is the whole, entire screen. 1920x1080 of launcherness. |
The intro
video is lo-res, typically cheesy and somewhat underwhelming. But the character
creation is mind-blowing. Character models have that gloriously solid Unreal 3
feel to them, even if they are the usual collection of anthropomorphic
dog-panda-cats, under-age girls, and snooty-looking elves. The human males are
quite well proportioned, although the females are the usual deformed physical
stereotypes – boobs like small Hondas bursting out of postage stamp-sized ‘armour’.
Even so, I went with a human female, in line with Core Design’s venerable ‘Lara
Croft Principle’ – if you’re going to be staring at a digital avatar’s backside
for hundreds of hours, you may as well make it an appealing one.
Once I’d
named my appealingly deformed physical stereotype, I was then asked whether or
not I wanted to do the Prologue, which presents itself as a kind of tutorial.
Obviously I said yes, and was surprised and delighted to find myself
shipwrecked on a beach in the pissing rain, surrounded by the dead and dying,
with a hotbar crammed full of skill icons. Apart from the hotbar thing, it’s
not unlike a holiday in Gdańsk.
Now then,
when you take your first steps in any 3D MMOG, you’re going to be standing off
to one side fiddling with your UI for a bit, getting all your options and
keybinds sorted, and this is no less true in TERA. The UI in TERA is pretty
damn good, I think. Bear in mind that I am, rightly or wrongly, comparing the
game to the army of Korean-‘em-ups out there, including supposedly AAA titles
like Aion, to which you could probably most fairly compare TERA since they’re
both originally Korean games that were then radically overhauled in conjunction
with American teams to make games that are as appealing as possible to Western
gamers. (For the record, I think TERA edges Aion slightly in overall
presentation and combat, although Aion is more user-friendly with the rest of
its non-combat business – more on that later).
TERA also uses
a Dungeons & Dragons Online-style system of direct mouse-look, with alt or
Esc popping up a shit-load of menus and a cursor to wave around. The mouse-look
is because TERA’s big selling point is its “action combat” (something they’re
constantly shouting about, whilst DDO players quietly grind their teeth). What
you aim at is what you hit (WYAAIWYH – not quite as catchy as WYSIWYG, but what
the hell). I haven’t tried a melee class yet, but I can’t imagine it somehow, in
spite of the fact that I’m quite comfortable with WYAAIWYH melee in other games.
Possibly because I’ve already been tainted by the sight of a Popori Lancer (TERA’s
animal race), which is a furry ball armed with an enormous jousting lance. The
effect is... ridiculous.
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| Action! Combat! Action Combat! |
Back to the
Prologue! You go through about 15 minutes of running around this wet beach
getting your shit together, eventually coming to a boss fight. A really big
boss fight. It's great that they whip out a bit of Epic at that early point, and it’s also at that point that you start thinking about Vindictus and other more
recent online MMO action-‘em-ups. I got pasted by this boss, because to be
honest I was overwhelmed by the number of skills I had for a n00b character,
and by the differing means of activating them – hit-mouse-over-hit, hit-and-hold,
timed release etc. The default LMB attack is okay against regular mobs, but
against a big bastard like this end-of-tutorial villain, it’s quite lame. Still,
you get through it, get treated to more lo-res video and a bit of in-game cutscene,
and rub your hands with anticipation because you just know you’re about to be
dumped into the world proper, to get on with the actual 1 to 60 we all know and
love.
And then –
shock! – you’re there, but you’re wearing crappy gear and have precisely one
skill on your hotbar. WTF? After the in-your-face noise and spectacle of the
Prologue, you’re suddenly reverted to pleb status out of the blue, and frankly it’s
confusing. Opinions on the forums and in-game chat are mostly that yes, it is a
bit strange and that the whole thing could be better. Fortunately, the Prologue
is optional, so when you get going with the alts (default 2 max for free players,
more purchasable from the shop), you can skip the whole miserable thing and
just kick-off your career as an eight year-old telegraph pole-wielding
magical child prostitute in rags, as you should do. Aha.
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| Having a lovely time in Margate, Wish you were here XXX |
Well, okay,
that was weird, but soon forgotten in the absolute magical joy that is running
around killing things in TERA’s world. Yes, the action combat works, and yes,
it is awesome. It begins well, and gets better. Suddenly, your high-MP fireball
can be totally wasted because the mob decided at the last second to blow his
nose or step around an orc turd. It adds a little extra visceral thrill to
combat that lock-on tab-targeting lacks, especially since everything is plastered
with bright, colourful, hi-res textures. Monsters are big and chunky and you
can’t clip through them. The world is pretty good too, although there are invisible
walls around a lot of the cliffs and precipices, and jumping a couple of meters
down from one place to another results in your character being ‘grabbed’ and re-oriented
into a fixed-animation landing. I didn’t describe that very well, but trust me,
it’s quite distracting. On the visuals front, my knee-jerk response was “Allod’s
chunky colourfulness with RIFT’s crispy, detailed textures.”
The questing
is pretty good too. All mob names and items of significance in your quest log
are clickable, which produces coloured dots on your mini map showing their
location. It’s much more elegant than, say, LoTRO’s coloured ‘zones’ on their
world maps. Harvesting resource nodes takes place without the need for extra
tools – your harvesting gear is automagic. This is a Good Thing. You can buy
cheap and varied crystals to plug into your weapons and armour that have
positive effects – also a nice touch. There’s a stamina system in place that
slowly debuffs all your vitals the more it wears out, but it’s tied-in with a
cool campfire system too, and is not at all a burden the way it is in Allods or
FF XIV. Very good. Money flows in pretty steadily, mainly because only about 1
or 2/10 item drops will be for your class, so you get lots of crap to sell
quite quickly. Even better. I made it to the capital city with my first Gold
already in my pocket, which is always nice.
A quick word
on the weapons and armour etc. They don’t change much early on. In fact, apart
from one significant model change, the only other thing that changed in 12
levels was the colour of my bows and (skimpy) clothes. I’m no great loot maniac
myself, but it’s always a little disappointing nonetheless when the itemisation
starts off sooo slowly. One thing a lot of people have said is that level 20 is
the kick-off point for lots of different things that make the whole business a
lot more fun, like more varied itemisation, a glyph system that allows you to
customise your (more and better) skills, and various other fun things. So that’s
something to look forward to.
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| I may have whinged about the millions of gigabytes TERA eats, but to paraphrase Sir David Lean, you can see every one of them up on the screen. The world has weight, everything feels solid and moves convincingly. Even the tiny anime porno chics. |
Overall, I’ve
been really enjoying myself. I got a horse mount for free when I reached the
capital, which is cool, and the city itself looks great too. Nothing can touch the
elaborate beauty of Divinity’s Reach in Guild Wars 2, or even the simple
cosiness of good old IF in WoW, but this place is pretty damned good too.
The biggest disappointment
so far is the crafting. I had picked up a ‘Go and Meet the Crafting People and Make
Some Crap’ type quest just prior to leaving “Newb Island” and hitting the city.
When I got there I was given a box of supplies and told to make a
standard-issue Leather Cuirass (one size fits all). Well, I couldn’t interact
with my free supplies box, so I figured I’d just buy the extra bits from the vendor
and DIY it. So I did – 10s, gulp. Made one Cuirass, realised then that I had to
make 24 more, spent ten minutes
frantically trying to make my freebie mats work (without success), and another
ten minutes Googling before I found one single post
on the entire Interwebz asking about this:
“...[these] quests require you to craft 25 items ...
each one requires 5 of two different items bought from the vendor, one costing
59c, and ther costing over 1s. This means 125 of each to complete the quest,
totalling over 2g spent per quest! The reward, is 1000 XP and 100s. Is this
intended?”
Yes, it’s
mind-bogglingly stupid (almost as stupid as the solitary answer to that guy’s
post). And also, it served to burst my happy little TERA bubble. It reminded me
that despite huge amounts of coolness, polish and happy touches, this is still
a shoe-horned product, with many cultural squared-off edges trying to force
themselves into my soft, round, European hole. I felt annoyed and somewhat
depressed as I ran back to the bank to deposit all my mats and sell off the one
(unusable!) Cuirass I’d made. Unusable! The crafting system is so cack-handed,
it couldn’t even fob me off with a hand-made shirt after asking me to
spend all my money to make something
because my n00b mats supply didn’t work! (Coincidentally – and not to its
advantage – reminding me of many of the dates I’ve had over the years).
A
Peanuts-style black, squiggly cloud hung over my head as I headed off to my
first proper ‘zone’ on the main landmass, and marred my next ten minutes of
half-hearted play before I logged off in a funk to come and write this epic bit
of nonsense. I will come back to TERA, probably in a couple of days, because it’s
got a lot going for it. In short, I feel that it’s at its best when you’re out
in the field, fighting, and at it’s worst when you’re fumbling around trying to
organise your non-combat life. That’s
the part which GW2 does so well. Still, let’s see what the future brings –
although I suspect that as soon Beta Weekend 2 for Neverwinter rolls around in early March,
I’ll be cleaning out a good 27 Gb of space from somewhere nearby...
PLUSY: Awesome (if hardware intensive) GFX; Lots
of classes and races, great character creation tools; Exciting combat (really
exciting!); Anime stylings (if you like that kind of thing).
MINUSY: Typical ‘chainmail bikini’ style chics;
Crap crafting; Stingy loot itemisation; Anime stylings (if you don’t like that
sort of thing); Annoying X-Box pad UI element that I can’t hide.
