Rock, Paper, Shotgun

TERA‘s action-combat and overall ludicrous prettiness has caught my attention on occasional, but the way it ties guild quests to an overall political system is really quite something, as you can see in the video below, via PCG. You can rise to power through either a popular vote of actual players, or through the PvP battlegrounds, and once you are in power you can make life easier for people (or not) via your control of various resources such as shops and teleports. To perform actions with these your guild will need to be perform particularly high-end quests, fighting monsters and so forth. It all looks rather satisfying, at least within the constraints of traditional MMO systems. (Eve Online it ain’t.)
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I’m still not quite sure what to think about TERA. The promise of skill-based combat in an MMO always flickers my interest, and the world seems pretty enough, with some extraordinary characters and gigantic monsters, but it’s hard to be sure about how it will really play, how long that grind will be, whether the world has some real depth behind that prettiness. The edited PAX demonstration video (which is viewable here, as it has embedding disabled for some reason) certainly shows off some impressive scenes in what seems to be UI-free game footage and a bit of FMV. The techno-magical boss monster is really quite the thing. But still, take a look and see what you think.

I was just reading some stuff about forthcoming MMO Tera, and I had assumed we’d posted Brian Cox doing a walkthrough of the game at GDC, but I can’t find it. Must have been imagining things. Anyway, it’s a useful follow up to the interview we did when the project was announced, and you can see what they mean about “action” stuff being included, even if the game does look very much like a whole bunch of traditional MMOs. Also: it’s really rather pretty. That seems to be a theme. Where are the ugly, half-breed mongrel games, eh?
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News of MMO-malarkies breaks. A subsidiary of Bluehole Studio, En Masse Entertainment has been formed. Their aim is basically to select MMOs and make them most suitable for bringing to the western audiences. Hyper-localization! Its staff are alumnis of Blizzard Entertainment, Microsoft Corp., Electronic Arts Inc., ArenaNet and NCsoft, so they’ve certainly worked for some companies. RPS’ similar list would be “Its staff are alumni of that bar on campus, Walker’s Dad’s dentistry, some hop-farming and a big financial mag (which sacked him)”, so they certainly have us beat. Their first game will be – perhaps unsurprisingly – Bluehole’s TERA. We took the chance to talk to En Masse’ producer Brian Knox about what they’ll be up to, TERA and all things MMO…
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