So ends the second weekend of beta testing for TERA. I'm still in a mild amount of awe over how great it is thus far. It's everything I was hoping it would be, though it bums me out to hear it's been out for a year or so in Korea already. Tera makes me think of a game I've been following since before the 360 came out called Huxley. It runs on the same engine and has a similar goal technologically. Bring real time combat to the MMO landscape. Both run on the Unreal 3 engine and both are struggling like mad just to survive and see a serious release. Cause let's face it folks, until you release in NA and Japan, you haven't touched the real gaming market.
For those of you, you true gamers, who grow weary of the tedium of normal MMOS I recommend you check out TERA. I've been hearing a lot about Guild Wars 2 (GW2), for all the chatter about it I am thus far entirely un-impressed. Then again after I bought Guild Wars long ago I thought it was over hyped junk too. I guess the series just doesn't grab me, mainly the being able to start the game at level 20 or whatever killed it for me. Probably because I'm an RPG guy, not a PvP guy, so I enjoy the grind to a degree. I enjoy leveling up, getting new gear, new abilities, etc. IMO PvP, especially in MMOs, seems to be a competition of who has the most free time and the largest credit line for ebaying in game gear and buying gold. I also disagree with the philosphy of turning something that's supposed to be fun and relaxing into a teeth grinding competition.
If I had to rate TERA as of right now, I'd go with a 7.5/10 probably. Maybe 8. It's good, it's beautiful. But a majority of people won't be able to run it on max, outside of the real time combat and a LOT of MMO tedium being abridged to focus on gameplay it really isn't all that mind blowing. Still I do love the real time combat. Chances are I'll buy it and play it for the first "included" month of gameplay, just like SWTOR. I'm in the process of trying to upgrade my PC to get some crazy performance, maybe once the beta test gets the HD textures in and I'm cranking the game on max at a smooth 60fps I'll have a higher opinion of TERA, of course my opinion as of right now isn't all that low. Especially considering my opinion on MMOs in general. So let me correct myself. As far as games in general goes TERA is about a 7.8, but when rated as a MMO it's a 11/10 easy.