Quote: MowMow on 06/23/2012, 06:07 PM - view

Yes. Yes, I have. In fact, half the gallery I linked to is devoted to my screenshots of northern Shara. :P

http://imgur.com/a/dAiMO

TERA might as well be running on an entirely different engine once you get to Allamantheia. Shara makes Arun look like the map designers started working backwards from the endgame zones and then got bored somewhere around Chebika and passed the job off to the intern who ususally gets coffee and donuts.

Both Velika and Velika Outskirts have no sun in the sky. Just noticed today despite playing since release. Anyone know if this is intentional for some reason?

Quote: SashimiX on 05/17/2012, 02:54 AM - view

And there are plenty of MMOs out there that have both a subscription fee AND a cash shop. As long as the cash shop stays cosmetic-only and doesn't become pay-to-win, complaints about it boil down to petty jealousy.

Quote: Kyitrai on 05/17/2012, 03:08 AM

While I agree that an in-game barbershop for changing specifically hair color and style would be nice, you have to realize that most MMOs don't launch with features like that. WoW didn't get barbershops until the WotLK expansion years after it's release.

And as for the pricing structure, on the contrary. Both Blizzard and EME did consider the value carefully before implementing those features (WoW's premium services cost the same as TERA's). The thing is, their consideration is primarily "We don't want people changing their characters every goddam week instead of leveling an alt (which takes more time and thus means extended subscriptions) so we're going to make the price of a race/appearance change high enough that most people won't take advantage of it and those who do will only do it once or twice." The fact that you took the time to level up an alt rather than paying for an appearance change proves the concept.

Quote: Batwoman on 06/22/2012, 12:41 AM - view

The game didn't powerlevel you. YOU powerleveled you. And, from the comment about "multiple broken story lines" and no attachment to your character, it sounds like you knowingly or unknowingly skipped several quest chains...probably in your mad dash to reach level cap.

The Prologue sucks, there's really no question about it. It's dark, dreary, graphically isn't a good showcase for TERA's engine, shoves 20+ skills in your face without any explaination and doesn't even let you configure their placement, sends you on a bunch of boring "go talk to this guy standing next to me" quests for the first five minutes before thrusting you into combat with ZERO guidance, expecting you to figure out a flow for the aforementioned non-configurable and unexplained skills before throwing you headlong into a BAM fight while you're still trying to figure out the combat mechanics and then ends with a sudden and unexplained fade to black mid-battle. And, on top of that, it introduces some pretty hefty and confusing plotholes into the story, like how and why your character left the Island of Dawn just to come right back again, why you don't know what happened to Elleon when you were fighting right beside him at the end and why your level has suddenly dropped from 20 to 1 and you've lost all your equipment. I literally cannot think of a worse way to introduce a new player to TERA.

I don't understand what people have against the Island of Dawn. It's a starting zone. It has starting zone quests. It's job is simply to introduce you to the mechanics of your class's abilities in a calm and relatively safe environment. And, on top of that, it's BEAUTIFUL. It's one of the more gorgeous areas in all of TERA, making it imo the perfect place to introduce new players.

Had I based my entire opinion of TERA on the Prologue during open beta, I would've canceled my pre-order. That's a fact.

People don't seem to know what a grind is anymore if they consider TERA to be one.

I'll say pretty much the same thing I said on reddit. Right off the bat, the reviewer makes the claim that the story in TERA is uninspired and boring. Then, in almost the same breath, he goes on to say that he hasn't bothered to read so much as a single line of quest text and "just fell into the old MMO habit of clicking through everything as fast as possible". Perhaps if he would take the time to actually read to story presented, he might not find it so boring to play through? That right there pretty much completely invalidates everything else he had to say.

Then he goes on to complain about the same thing that it seems everyone else complains about: the grind. "TERA doesn't do enough/anything to disguise the grind!" I've heard more people than I'd care to count say that. What is "grinding" in an MMO? Grinding is when you literally have no recourse for progressing aside from going out into the field and slaughtering hundreds upon hundreds of the same monsters to level up your character or get a drop. I'm mid-level in TERA (which I assume is about how far this reviewer got) and so far I have yet to *ever* be in a position where I didn't have a trivially easy quest to do in order to level up and move the story along. Are there a lot of standard MMO "go kill x of y monsters" quests? Sure. But you're talking maybe 5 minutes apiece to crack them out and be on your way. Hardly a "grind".

But more than that, it completely misses the point. I hear people say that TERA doesn't "disguise the grind" like SWTOR and GW2 are doing with "dynamic" and fully-voiced "cinematic" quests and fluff content. What they don't seem to understand is that TERA's method for "disguising the grind" is to make combat fun and engaging. Other MMOs need a way to disguise or obfuscate the boring monotony of combat because their combat is, well...boring and monotonous. TERA took the exact opposite approach and, rather than finding ways to minimize exposure to combat, it attempted to make the combat enjoyable so that it wasn't something you desperately wanted to avoid. So yeah, the quest system doesn't encourage avoiding combat. Because, you know, combat is the selling point of the game. It's not rocket science.

Even more strangely, the reviewer docks points because "while group play is insanely fun, soloing can be boring". Did he miss the memo that MMOs are supposed to be about playing with other people? This is an MMO; a Massively Multiplayer Online game. Docking points because solo play is less fun than grouping would be like me docking points from Battlefield 3 because playing on an empty server by myself isn't as fun as a full match with 63 other players. And then, in an even more baffling move, he proceeds to give the game a 64% score while at the same time saying that he's off to play it some more because he's so hooked on it.

I give up.

I'm pretty much in agreement that the Prologue is the WORST thing to use to hook new players. It was almost enough to drive me to cancel my pre-order during open beta, but I blundered through it and made my way to the Island of Dawn where the pace was slower and I actually had time to gradually learn mechanics, rotations and abilties rather than having it all thrown in my face in the most confusing and rushed way imaginable.

God knows, EME seems proud of their Prologue. But I'll be buggered if I can figure out why. To a new player unfamiliar with the combat mechanics and abilities, it's a mess.

Let's see. In the past 4 days or so, my server (Dragonfall) has gone from Medium pop to High pop and there are more people than ever in the starting zones. Sooo...no. I'm gonna have to say that the game is in fact NOT dying.

Quote: holdehamlet on 06/06/2012, 03:17 AM - view

I'm running a Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition @ 3.8GHz. I'd hardly call that "slower/older". For gaming, it's equivalent to an i5 2500K, which is a roughly ~$200 CPU. It shouldn't be struggling with a simple UI - no matter how customizable said UI may be - least of all to the point where disabling the UI causes a 35-50% improvement in overall performance.

It's worth mentioning as well that numerous people have stated they didn't have this problem in closed beta. That it was only introduced in open beta. If true, that means that something along the way changed to make the UI eat up significantly more processing power.

Quote: MonVert on 06/06/2012, 06:29 AM

My "attitude" is condusive to getting an obvious problem recognized and fixed. Yours is condusive to dismissing it as "user error".

Quote: PCPrincess on 06/06/2012, 10:01 AM

I can cycle between UI on and off in-game and notice no change in graphical quality while my framerate jumps by up to 50%.