As I stated in my earlier post, I downloaded TERA to the Xbox this morning, and after some play time, I thought I would post some of the screenshots I took as well as some of thoughts I had while playing through the initial island-tutorial-exposition level. This beginner area serves to set up the story, familiarize yourself with your character, get you some abilities, etc. Not much different than most MMO’s out there. If you’ve any experience in these types of games, you’ll know what to expect. So here we go!
Well, my first choice was whether or not I wanted to play as a male or a female. After seeing what the females wear in this game, I had to ask myself if its was even a choice. What blue-blooded straight male isn’t gonna want to look at that running around on the screen for 100 hours? (That’s a rhetorical question.) This was the Castanic race, which wasn’t my first choice. Call me crazy, I like my humans.
I have kind of a weird tradition when it comes to RPG’s, MMO’s, or any other adventure game that lets me create my own character. I have to create Arylinna. She’s a human female, obviously, and I usually try to get her to look as similar as possible in any game I’m playing. I know, it’s dorky, but I’ve always liked the idea of a persistent character between games. I would frickin’ love it if a publisher like Ubisoft let you carry your created character between franchises. How awesome would it be to create a character in Assassin’s Creed, then take that character into Far Cry with the same basic look, and maybe even have accessories or skills that carry over as well? It’s a pipe dream, but at least until then I can make Arylinna. She usually has a ponytail, but there wasn’t one in the creator so this was the closest I could get. Which is kind of lame, actually.
This is what Arylinna looks like in “various gear.” I guess she can change between songs? Apparently the “more is more” philosophy that the western developers are adopting when it comes to female attire hasn’t quite reached whatever corner of the world TERA comes from (I’m guessing Korea). Yep, just checked, it’s Korea. Anyways, I’m okay with it. And to be fair, I think the dudes should have similar attire available to them as well. If the ladies (or guys) wanna play as a Conan-esque warrior rocking a steel-plated banana-hammock, they should have the ability to do so. I don’t think games should remove this attire, but I do think they should give options. In any case, I don’t shy away from skin, so there’s a good chance any future Arylinna screenshots will be a bit on the NSFW side.
Moving onto the actual gameplay side of things, the beginning of the game has a fair bit of janky-ness, from some obvious object and texture pop-in to some frame rate issues. I gotta be honest, I was expecting a 7-year-old game to run quite a bit better on the Xbox One X. Perhaps it’s an optimization thing, or a port thing, but when you have prettier games like Elder Scrolls Online (which looks amazing on the X) running smooth as silk in 4K with HDR, TERA should be smooth as butter. Instead, playing it is pretty harsh and you just kind of have to grit your teeth and work through the jank.
On a lighter note, the action does seem to be responsive, though the clipping is a bummer. Not only to do you clip through some objects, like the tree roots above, there’s also no collision detection with the enemies you are fighting, so when you have a big boss that fills most of the screen, you can literally get your character lost inside it. You can get out easily enough, but if you choose a Brawler like I did, you have to get pretty close, and that’s when things get a bit murky. The combos are effective and feel good on the controller, but a lot of times it feels like you’re punching air, and watching an object mildly react to it. There’s something that’s missing here that would make the character and the enemies feel more grounded. It feels like there’s no weight to any of them.
The HUD is a bit on the wonky side as well. Most of it can be edited though. The quest on the right can be collapsed, and the map in the upper right corner can be tweaked to change its opacity. I can say with confidence that anyone that plays this will spend at least a good ten or fifteen minutes learning how to navigate the menus enough to change some of the settings. The health and magic bar being above the abilities menu drives me nuts. I don’t want it there. It’s too high on the screen. As of right now I haven’t figured out if there’s any way to change it. Why it can’t be in the dead space on the lower right hand corner is anyone’s guess. I don’t think I remember seeing anything pop up there. Maybe that’s where the party info would be? The text chat cannot be turned off, from what I can tell. The upper left corner is also available. I don’t know. I just really, really don’t like it where it’s at currently. Maybe a patch could fix this.
For one magical moment though, there was a UI glitch and my entire HUD disappeared after a cut-scene. Unfortunately, it came back after talking to someone a few minutes later. It was but a taste of freedom. And yes, Arylinna’s current attire shows a considerable amount of underboob.
While I’m sure there’s more to this game than skimpy armor and janky graphics, it’s something I have yet to discover. I created another character, a Castanic archer, and will be checking out the ranged combat later tonight to see how that works. So far, the controls are responsive, and I have to admit, I really like the fact that there isn’t a skill tree. You pick your class, and that’s what class you are. Your abilities are unlocked as you level up, and are purchased using in-game currency. There’s no guess-work, no trade-offs, nothing. Just level up, get a new skill or perk, and move on. I’ve been having a bit of skill-tree burnout lately (even fucking Ghost Recon has skill trees now) and I can honestly appreciate the simplicity of this system. My only fear is that the character seems to be progressing so rapidly that I’ve barely gotten a grasp on certain abilities before unlocking entirely new ones. Time will tell if this eventually slows down.
In closing, I’m going to give this game a bit more play time, and we’ll give it some time to see if a patch can fix some of the choppiness, but as it stands right now, TERA does a couple of things right, like offering bank storage and (so far) not slapping us in the face with microtransactions. The controls are responsive, even if they feel a bit disconnected with the world and enemies. The graphics are decent but simple enough to where current consoles should be running it a lot better than this. Other, prettier F2P games on the console don’t run this poorly. They need to work on it.
I can’t wait to do a follow-up on this and see where it ends up.
