Month: April 2012

Guild Wars 2, Day 2

Posted on by Nimgimli

Well after talking to some of my friends on G+ who are just over-the-moon in love with GW2, I decided to take things a little farther today. Once again, my experience was a mixed bag. The good news is that most of the stuff that frustrated me was bug-related and so ought not be there when the game launches.

I wound up playing through the level 10 phase of my Story Quest (which I ended up completing at level 11). I found the story quests to get really challenging “at level.” My warrior just can’t stand up to the beating the swarms of mobs give him and lag makes rolling out of “hot spots” a challenge. I had to just grind out a couple of phases…run in, kill a mob or two and die. Respawn, kill a couple more and die, and so on. The last one I ended up totally cheesing out and equipping a bow and plinking away while the NPCs took the hits.

The story was pretty good, though!

Outside of my quests, I still died an awful lot. For a lot of the time I was playing I was somewhere too easy or too hard for me. The first zone is labeled level 1-15 so really it’s just a matter of learning where to go at each level. I re-did some of the “Heart” events that I’d done yesterday, only at the advice of friends I’d hang out after the event was completed and wait for further (and more challenging) phases to spawn. Ended up in some pretty tough boss battles with swarms of other people. Those are both fun and really demonstrate that ArenaNet still has lots of optimizing to do; things tended to turn into a slide show with all the spell effects and stuff on-screen and it gets really tough to see what’s happening.

It really takes until level 8 or 9 before you start seeing the cooler events, and level 10 before you start seeing the power struggles of the world. I tried to stave off an invasion of Ice Elementals that were attacking an outpost. This was pure combat…there wasn’t an Event with a capital E or anything. Nobody knew where they were coming from or why. Sadly we (myself and a few other random players) got wiped out and the nearest revive spot was a good distance away. I gave up and did something more level appropriate.

ArenaNet, btw, has managed to pull off a miracle: they’ve made escort quests that are actually FUN. Really! In one I was hired on as a caravan guard. We had to fight off robbers and even some belligerent drunks while clearing road blocks and running up to hill tops to destroy ballistas that were firing down on us.

I think the reason Escort Quests work is because anyone can join in at any point. No more standing around waiting for the NPC to respawn and then being on your own. People run up, escort for a bit and if they get bored they go elsewhere and do other stuff. Or they stick around for the whole route and get maximum rewards.

Another absolutely awesome design decision is this idea that anyone can revive a fallen character. You don’t have to be a special class or in that person’s party. And you don’t even have to do it alone…if a few people attempt to revive a down character the process just goes faster (it’s pretty slow in combat, pretty quick out of it). So why is this a big deal? Because it binds the community together. When you die and you’re quietly cursing to yourself and suddenly 2 strangers are there helping you to your feet, you can’t help but smile. And when you see someone has fallen in battle, unless you’re a total jackass you’re GOING to try to save them (bonus: you get experience for doing so).

The only real ‘downside’ today was the Overflow system and how hard it is to get with friends. Hopefully they’ll tweak that out. Combat isn’t as fun as it could be, mostly due to lag. When you have an active dodge system it needs to respond quickly and so far GW2’s sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t. That’s a beta problem though, as are the numerous glitches you’ll encounter. What probably isn’t a beta problem is that the game seems to favor ranged combat over melee, in terms of things being interesting. Even in heavy armor my poor warrior dies left and right while ranged characters hang back and avoid taking much damage.

I also think some of the events are a little too clever for their own good. There’s one where you have to throw snowballs at kids, and dodge the snowballs they through at you. Sounds funny right? It is for the first few minutes, but it goes on for far too long as you try to fill up an Event Gauge.

On the other hand I had an absolute blast in a quirky event that took place underground that was all about helping a dude build an ice sculpture of himself in order to convince the local beings that he was their god. There were a few phases to it, it was both funny and fun to do the fighting, and the rewards were good (not only the usual stuff but the local baddies became friendly once they thought a Norn was their god).

I guess that’s enough for tonight. It’s really late and my brain is going fuzzy. I didn’t remember to take many screenshots but here’s a section of one from a courtyard in Hoelbrak. Heroes from GW 1. The statue of the Norn lady in the middle is supposed to be Jora. Click on it for a 1080 pixel wide version.

Guild Wars 2 initial impressions

Posted on by Nimgimli

Well, the servers are coming down for a patch so that’s my cue to write up a blog post.

I started late and only got to level 4. Keeping that in mind, here’s my list of pros and cons so far. Let’s start with the bad stuff.

Cons:
The game is a lot more beta than I’d anticipated it being. It’s pretty janky in places. Attacks lag a lot at times (generally in crowds) and the game is missing that indefinable smoothness that a quality finished product has. I’m sure they’ll get there before launch, but based on what I’m seeing I’m guessing they still have a few months work to do. I’m going to predict August or September at this point. Though maybe they can pull it all together sooner.

Angela spent probably more time than she should have tweaking her character (that’s a good sign for the character creator) and suddenly the game just reset her at the start of character creation with all her changes lost. Overloaded servers probably, but it bummed her out. I think we both thought the game was going to be closer to launch-ready than it is.

Here’s another MMO with a prologue and once again I didn’t like it very much. The character I stuck with was a Norn Fighter and he has to fight a Worm at the end of his prologue. He got knocked on his ass almost immediately, spent the whole fight unconscious and yet in his story line he’s called “The Slayer of Issomir” (or whatever the worm was called).

Not a fan of Overflow Servers, really. I spent all night in an Overflow Server, as far as I could tell. We rolled on a really crowded server, unfortunately.

[EDIT: I think I need to give more detail here… if you only encountered the Overflow Servers on initial login I’d think they were a great idea to avoid queues. But that’s not the case. Whenever you zone there’s a chance you’ll be put back into them. For instance I had a quest to deliver an item to an NPC in the next zone. I went over there, handed in the item and the next step of the quest was back in the zone I’d just left. When I went to zone in I was told the server was full and I had the chance of either queuing for it in-game, or going to an Overflow Server.

With a few tweaks (making sure you and your party end up on the same Overflow server, or lettings friends volunteer to join you on the overflow server you’re on) the system will be fine. Great, even. But in it’s beta state I didn’t like it much.]

Pros:
The game is gorgeous.

The story for my Norn Warrior is actually pretty interesting.

There’s a lot of “organic grouping.” I never Grouped but I fought with a lot of other players. It doesn’t feel like we’re competing for mobs..instead we’re acting like characters should act: banded together against a common enemy. I love that anyone can res anyone else.

Character progression is entertaining. You use a weapon to unlock skills that utilize that weapon. When you get a new category of weapon you get a whole new series of skills to unlock. At level 4 I’ve been working on Sword, Shield and Axe skills. So far Sword looks best for single enemies and Axe looks best for groups.

Combat feels pretty good. If I hadn’t spent last weekend playing Tera I’d say combat felt great, but I’m a little spoiled now. Still, fighting stuff is fun even at level 4. I’ve never seen an MMO where the combat DIDN’T get more fun as you leveled up, so I expect the combat gets really entertaining after a few more levels.

You can get (and I believe send) mail from anywhere. No more looking for a mailbox!

You can travel around the maps really quickly once you’ve done some exploring to unlock teleporters.

Quest rewards are either currency that you can spend on exactly the gear you want, or a select of gear that’s all applicable to your character’s class. None of this typical MMO situation where you get quest rewards that are only good to sell or salvage.

Stuff I need to acclimate to:

Not every event is for you! As you run around the world doing your pre-ordained story quests you’ll see events pop up. If you’re like me you’ll immediately change direction to take part in the event. And sometimes get your ass handed to you. LOL. I was trying to do this one event and I died over and over again until I stopped to look.. I was fighting clusters of level 7 mobs when I was level 2. Well THAT explains it! LOL

In Closing

I probably won’t put much more time into this beta weekend. I’ve seen enough to be comfortable with my pre-order and I’m looking forward to the day I play “for real” but I think I want to save the storylines for launch.

TGIF Gaming Wrap-up for 4/27/2012

Posted on by Nimgimli

This is going to be the shortest TGIF wrap-up yet!

Purchases This Week
Not a thing!

Played This Week
A few minutes of the Dragon’s Dogma and The Walking Dead demos on the PS3
Lots of Tera while the open beta was up and running.
No gaming at all Tues-Thurs. Work’s been sucking.

Plans for the Week to Come
Guild Wars 2 beta weekend tonight and tomorrow, assuming all goes well
Tera head start and launch week starting Saturday evening

And oddly enough, that’s all I have to say. I’ve rambled on forever about Tera already and I don’t yet know much about Guild Wars 2!

Rayman Legends for the Wii U leaked. Skylander influence evident

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’ve been having a hard time getting excited for the Wii U, Nintendo’s next home console. Partly because I’ve just never been a huge Nintendo fan. Partly because I found the Wii to be a disappointment (but see prior point). And partly because that of that big tablet controller. I’m not a fan of touch controls.

But we haven’t seen much in the way of gameplay and I’m hoping Nintendo can win me over. I really do love to love games, y’know.

Now French site Gamkult have leaked a trailer for Rayman Legends. Not sure how long it’ll be online but here it is:

I liked how the basic game looks, but the segment where the girl is using her finger on the tablet controller to drag things around turns me right off.

But what was most surprising is the Skylander-esque system shown at the end, where physical objects are placed on the tablet controller to influence the game (or even to spawn new characters in there).

I think this’ll be really popular with a lot of people but grumpy old me sees it as both a cash cow and another source of clutter on my living room table.

Guild Wars 2 server selection: the worst of both worlds

Posted on by Nimgimli

[Update: See the comments. An Anonymous commentor says that in beta you could roll characters on multiple servers and that ArenaNet’s blog post is just poorly worded. If that’s the case, it invalidates this whole rant. I guess we’ll see on Friday.]

So the social networks are abuzz with the upcoming beta weekend for Guild Wars 2. I’m as excited as anyone…I’ve pre-ordered the game based on the level of excitement being projected by people who’ve had the chance to play at conventions or other non-NDA avenues. [Waves at Jazz]

But before we can have fun, we have to endure the rigors of server selection. Guild Wars 1 had no server selection and I have to confess that even though GW2 is a much different game, I was expecting it to follow the same route. I mean, if EVE, Star Trek Online and Champions Online can all run serverless, why not GW2?

Well, World vs World PVP for one reason. In order to have that, you kind of have to have worlds. So OK, at least there’s a reason for it.

BUT… Guild Wars 2 winds up being one of the worst MMOs I’ve played in terms of picking a world. Why? Because you can be on only 1 world. Once you pick a world, ALL your characters will be on that world. So if half your friends are on World A and half are on World B, it’s time to choose which of these groups are your BFFs and which are the wannabes. You’re going to have to ditch someone.

Now to be fair, you can change worlds once a week and at a cost of 1800 coins (not a clue what the real-world equivalent of that is… if it’s $1.80 then no biggie, if it’s $18.00 then we just found out where their revenue is coming from) but when you change worlds, ALL your characters move to this new world.

I’m really not a fan of this system..I have a bunch of different circles of gaming friends and most of them have little to no contact with each other. It breaks my heart that, unless I suddenly become a master diplomat and coerce them all to be on the same world, I’m going to have to pick which friends I play with, and shun the others.

[Edit: I guess I should mention the Guesting system where you can join a friend on their server as a guest. You can’t do WvW PVP that way, but at least you can play with friends. But why not just let me roll a character over there?]

Glass Bottom Games partners with Logitech on Gravitaz promotion

Posted on by Nimgimli

A couple weeks ago I posted about Gravitaz, a Kickstarter project from Glass Bottom Games. Gravitaz is a futuristic combat racer for PC/Mac/Linux.

Today Glass Bottom Games and Logitech announced a new promotion. If you pledge at the new $65 level you’ll get not only a copy of Gravitz but a Logitech Wireless Gamepad F710.

Now to be clear, this isn’t saving you big money or anything. You could just buy the F710 for $50 and pledge $15 to Gravitz and wind up with the same swag, but by doing the whole thing through Kickstarter Gravitz gets all your cash to put towards developing a kick-ass game; Logitech is content to walk away from this deal with the good feeling of having supported a small game developer.

If this new deal interests you, act fast. They started with 20 of these gamepads to give away and as of the time of this writing, 6 are already spoken for.

Here’s a dev interview where the team shares a bit more about their plans for Gravitaz:

Tera, End of Open Beta

Posted on by Nimgimli

Imagine my surprise when the Tera open beta was still running this evening! Sweeeettt!!! I jumped in and took Bart to level 23.

I’ve been learning about Enchanting since my last post. Some gear can be Enchanted (it’s indicated on the tool tip) and here’s how you do it.

First you need to know that all gear is separated into Tiers in Tera. At level 23 I just got my first Tier 4 gear.

OK so to enchant an item, you open the enchanting interface and stick the item to be enchanted in the middle. To the left you have to put a piece of gear of the same type and tier. So if you’re enchanting a Tier 3 Sword you’ll need a 2nd Tier 3 Sword…it can be any Tier 3 Sword… non-magical (“White”) is fine. Then to the right of the item you have to put in 3 vials on Enchanting Juice that Merchants sell. I forget the name of this stuff…it’s the very first thing in the inventory of the merchants I’ve seen.

OK now you got all your pieces, just click the Enchanting button. Spin the wheel and wait. If you succeed, your item is now +1 and gets some small stat increases. The 2nd weapon and the juice get used up. If you fail they get used up too. You can enchant things up to 9 times and at the bottom of a piece of gear that can be enchanted you’ll see extra bonuses that you get at +3, +6 and +9.

But there’s a catch. Once you’ve enchanted an item once, if you enchant it again and you fail, there’s a chance you’ll LOSE a level of enchantment. I suspect that chance gets higher with each successive enchantment. When people get to, say, +6 enchantment on an item, a zone-wide message goes out: it’s kind of a big deal.

So that’s what I know about Enchantment so far. Back to adventuring.

At level 20 you can do the first instance in Tera, but I never got around to it. I’m really wary about joining PUGs in any game, though this is the time for me to do it if I ever am, since no one can expect everyone to be an expert already.

Instead I kept on my questing journey…until I met the Basilisks. I got a quest to get 5 Basilisk eyes and merrily went out and smacked a basilisk with my giant sword. What followed was a long and ultimately catastrophic battle. I died for the first time (other than once in the Prologue).

When you die, you can lie there in the dirt and hope someone comes along to res you, or you can Resurrect back at town. I chose the latter. My Stamina was at 0, so I had to pay a Cleric of Restoration to recharge it. I coulda waited by a fire…probably will next time. I also had a minor piece of gear break (vanish). Not something I couldn’t live without, but one of the Emblems that you can attach to larger gear. I -assume- you’ll never have your weapon or a major piece of armor break. Losing an Emblem is a minor setback (they drop all the time). Losing your sword would be heartache.

Anyway, back into the fray. I check my quest log and notice that this quest is meant for a party of up to 5 people. Doh! Also Basilisks have a little Icon next to their name to tell you that you can’t solo them. Doh! Again!

At this point I did something that I have never, EVER done in an MMO. I used the LFG tool. No one was looking for this quest so I started my own request for a party. And pretty soon someone joined and huzzah! She was a healer. So off we went after a Basilisk. It was a long fight but OMG was it ever fun, and we won. Tera combat is lots of fun solo. Tera combat with two people is GREAT, and soon enough I found out that Tera combat with 3 people is insane fun!

I only needed 5 basilisk eyes, but I spent the rest of the night fighting the beasties, with other party members leaving and new ones joining. Healers of course are awesome (in what game are they not, right?) and I learned that I really want an Archer in every party I’m a member of. They just do a great job of pouring on the damage.

I just had a hell of a good time. I’m really going to miss Tera while I wait for launch. I just can’t remember the last time I had so much fun playing an MMO. What a total surprise this game has turned out to be.

So as I say goodbye to open beta, I leave you with this, my death:

RPG and MMO players: What does Grinding mean to you?

Posted on by Nimgimli

One of the more charged terms in the lexicon of gamers is GRINDING.

MMO players almost universally hate grinding, though there’s a certain breed of single-player RPG gamer that enjoys it. But what exactly IS grinding?

I think it means different things to different people and I think that leads to some confusion when we’re talking about games. So I’m hoping we can have a discussion about this. Let’s hear what YOUR definition of grinding is.

I’ll get things rolling:

To me, grinding is when a game forces you to kill the same mobs in the same place over and over again in order to progress. In the worst sort of grinding, there’s no quest or other reward involved: you just need to kill the same monsters over and over again to get combat experience to take you to the next level (or until a mob drops a required item) in order to move on. So kill, wait for respawn, kill, wait for respawn.

Substitute in similar monotonous tasks for grinding in crafting.

The best (worst?) example of grinding to me is any circa-2005 Asian MMO where you’d get 1 quest every few levels and in between you’d have exactly 1 type on monster that you’d have to kill at each level and no way to move forward except sitting there and killing that 1 mob every time it popped.

Conversely, if a game gives you a series of quests that require you to kill the same mobs, I see that as the ‘best’ kind of grinding since the monotony is broken up by returning for quest rewards that hopefully make you stronger. If there are alternate quests you can do instead, I don’t even consider this grinding (or maybe grindy) since you have other options that will let you move forward.

So that’s my long-winded definition. What’s yours?

Tera, Day 3 [video]

Posted on by Nimgimli

I kind of wanted to get to level 20 before I wrote this post but alas, it was not to be. Since my last post I took Bart from level 15 to level 19. So what did I learn?

Biggest thing: skill chains. Turns out you have to set these up yourself. Hit K to bring up the skills window and at the bottom is a Skill Chains button that opens a second panel. The ‘starter’ skills seem to be predetermined but you can drag whatever ‘chained’ skill into the various slots that seem like they’ll fit your style. At my level all the chains are 2 links long.

I also learned a new skill, Overhead Smash, that ‘auto-chains.’ When I spam my main attack a few times (which IS called a “Combo Attack”) I’ll get a prompt to chain (ie, hit Space) the Overhead Smash (don’t shoot me if I have the name wrong).

My friend Gwyn, who you see commenting here now and then, formed a guild with her sister and they invited me to join. OK maybe I begged them to let me join. Either way, I’m member #3. I wanted to check out the Guild Quest system. Turns out this is very similar to the repeatable kill quests that you can get, with the one exception that you can ‘store up’ extra kills. For example there was a Guild Quest to kill 12 Foozles. I killed 12 but as I continued with other quests I had to fight more Foozles. The counter kept going: 13/12, 14/12 etc. By the time I turned the quest in I had 17/12. As soon as I turned it in, the quest reset and restarted at 5/12. I assume that others in the guild will find those same numbers and can take up the baton where I left it.

I finally stopped to do some crafting and my sense is that it’s mostly a money sink in low levels. I opted to work on Alchemy in order to make some potions. To make a healing potion I started with some leaves I’d gathered. I bought and learned a recipe that turns the leaves into an intermediate material. To do that requires the leaves and a reagant that I had to buy from a vendor. Then to make the actual potions, I needed to buy the recipe. Then I combined the intermediate material I’d crafted, another reagant I had to buy from a vendor, plus some glass vials, also from the vendor. It got expensive fast.

You can skip that first step by extracting from items that have dropped from mobs. So the question is which is more lucrative. Here’s another example, this one using metals. I can gather ore, then combine it with a vendor-sold reagant to make Ingots which I can then use to make gear. Say a pair of metal armor boots drop and I don’t need them. I can sell them to a vendor and use the coin to buy reagants. Or I could Extract Metals from the boots, which should provide an Ingot, bypassing that initial combine. At low levels you probably want to sell gear and buy the reagants since you’ll skill up making Ingots but later it’s probably cheaper to just extract your Ingots.

Last thing to hit on for today: the difficulty level of the game. Yesterday I mentioned how easy Tera is, and it has been up until now. But all of a sudden battles are becoming more intense and more interesting. Suddenly dodging and avoidance are becoming essential as I’m encountering baddies that exude poison as their special attack (all mobs in the world of Tera have the same tell; their eyes flash red before they unleash their special attack).

Granted this is just combat difficulty that is ramping up a bit. The rest of the game is still very clear cut. You always know where you need to go next, and what you need to kill. Mobs that will help you towards fulfilling a goal have an icon floating over their heads: yellow for a personal quest, blue for a guild quest.

A limitation of the Unreal engine (I think) is that all zones are essentially very wide corridors, so there’s really not a ton of exploring; it’s more like sight-seeing as you travel through the world.

And yet…I’m REALLY enjoying the game. Maybe it’s because my expectations were so low, or maybe it’s the progression hound in me who is so delighted at doing quests that give great gobs of experience and help you level up quickly. I still don’t know how much fun an alt would be, but I’m finding myself bummed to think of the open beta weekend ending and it’s going to be tough waiting for the game to re-open next week.

Here’re a few short videos I captured of me fighting. They were captured at half-size using Fraps so they don’t look as great as they might. Apologies to those who’ve already seen some of these on Google+.

Tragically, these corrupted unicorns must be put down. This fight has a good example of the great ‘staggering/falling down’ animations that mobs have. You almost feel sorry for the poor thing when it goes down. Almost.

You’ll do a lot of fighting against groups of enemies like this one. This demon thingie is surrounded by a bunch of fairies. The fairies die really quick to AOE attacks but if you don’t take them down they will suck away your health in a ‘death by a thousand needles’ kind of way:

A similar battle. I pop my Shout that gives me some MP to use, then charge into the fight. After a couple of swings I fire off Whirlwind — that double circular attack. That takes out most of the fairies and then knocks the ‘boss’ on his butt. Just before he dies you can see his eyes flash. It would’ve hurt had he gotten his special attack off in time.

I included this one because I love the creature design. Tera has a lot of really weird creatures and I’m enjoying seeing what they all do. This guy spits a nasty poison, though he never did in this battle. You’ll also see me do an overhead smash…into thin air. No auto-targeting in this game and you can get caught in a combat animation facing the wrong way. Just part of the challenge!

Tera, Day 2

Posted on by Nimgimli

Between Friday night and a couple hour session after the dog got me up early for her walk this morning, I’ve taken Bart The Slayer from level 8 to level 15.

In the course of this, I’ve left The Island of Dawn (the starter area which takes you level 1-12 or so), explored the main city of the world, the name of which just went out of my head, tinkered a tiny bit with crafting and finally moved on to the next zone.

Overall the game continues to be fun, mostly because of combat and having a new world to explore. I’m not sure how fun an alt having to do the exact same quests would be. I pine for the days when games like EQ2, WoW and LOTRO would launch with several different starting areas for different races. I suppose that’s much too expensive it today’s game development economy though.

I’ve been switching back and forth between using a controller and using mouse and keyboard. I find the controller to be a lot more fun when it comes to combat, but mouse and keyboard is much more efficient and much easier to use when it comes time to fiddle with your inventory and stuff like that. Mostly I like combat with the controller because I do a lot of moving around and moving a character (in a 3rd person game) with the left stick and moving the camera with the right stick just feels more natural to me than keys to move character and mouse to move camera. What makes the mouse and keyboard feel odd is that there’s no way to turn the character with the keys. A&D strafe and Q&E are bound to non-movement tasks. So you move the camera to turn the character. It’s hard to explain, but it all feels more natural to me with a controller.

Tip: Type /controller or hit the Back button on an Xbox controller to bring up a set of controller-specific options.

At level 15 I still only have a few skills and I think this is just the way the game is going to be. New since level 8 are just a shout that gives me 100 MP and a Retaliate command that only works when I’ve been knocked down. When that happens the game prompts me to use Retaliate by hitting the space bar (or the X key on the controller) so I don’t even think I need that one parked on a hotbar.

Once I got off the Island of Dawn I turned on general chat. Most of the idiocy was gone [side note: the new “I’m gonna prove I’m cool by telling everyone that a popular MMO sucks” target seems to be SWTOR, giving WoW a bit of a rest from the abuse] and I mostly eavesdropped on what was going on. There was a lot of talk about Chains (skill chains) and I remember Chains from the prologue but I still either don’t have them or don’t understand them. I do know the “hitting space to trigger Retaliate” is the Chain mechanic at work, and one time my Charge move ended with the option to do a chain but I missed it and haven’t figured out why it did it in the first place. So that’s a mechanic that still eludes me.

One thing I haven’t done AT ALL is customize my character. I mean I get better gear and use it and every 2 levels I go to the trainer and buy all the skills available (most of them upgrades to existing skills) but I haven’t had to make any decisions yet.

Between that and the controller-friendly combat, Tera just feels like a nicely casual MMO so far. I don’t say that in a derogatory way…sometimes it’s fun to have a game where you can just beat up on things while pretending they’re the CEO of your company or something.. 🙂

Yesterday I mentioned repeatable quests on the Island of Dawn. Once you get to the ‘main game’ you’ll get these too only so far they’ve all been based on kill tasks. Rewards for these are either a couple of Lucky Eggs (containing random loot) or some Tokens that act as a currency on special vendors. This kind of mechanic is fairly common when it comes to dungeon running in other games, I’m told (since I never group I never do dungeons/instances in MMOs) but I haven’t seen it often in the solo-able open-world parts of many games. These repeatable quests are nice “filler.” You get exp from fighting the things, exp from completing the quests and these tokens which I hope will offer nice gear. Combat is pretty fun in Tera so I was always killing random baddies anyway…now I have a reason to do it. There doesn’t seem to be any limit to how many times you can do these quests (they’re not Dailies and have no cool down), except once you out-level them they stop being offered.

I guess I should talk a little about crafting. Gathering is available from level 1 to anyone. You don’t have to train or buy tools..you just start gathering from nodes sprinkled around the landscape. Gathering gets you raw materials, of course.

Extraction lets you get raw materials from gear you don’t want. You can opt to extract Metal, Cloth, Alchemy Reagants or…um, magic bits? Or was it leather? There are 4 things anyway. Before you can extract you have to buy or find a scroll that teaches you how. There’s a scroll for each type of material and each tier of gear. So your first Metal Extraction scroll teaches you to get ore from Tier 1 gear. If you want to extract Metal from Tier 2 gear you need a Metal Extraction Level 2 scroll, which of course costs a bit more than the level 1. If you want to extract Cloth from Tier 1 gear then you need a Cloth Extraction Scroll to learn how to do it.

Finally there’s crafting. I haven’t done much of this but I believe we have Weaponsmithing, Armorsmithing, Cloth Weaving, Leathercrafting, Alchemy and Magical Essences… I think that’s right. 6 of them anyway. In order to make something you need to buy a pattern/recipe/blueprint which then teaches you to make that thing. All I can make is Ingots and leather. In both cases I have to combine gathered raw materials with a reagant I buy from an NPC.

There doesn’t seem to be anything preventing you from learning all 6 crafting skills; maybe there is at higher levels, but newbie stuff seems open to all if you’re willing to buy the patterns.

And I think that’s enough of a Wall of Text for level 8-15. If anyone has any questions, ask away, though I there’s still a ton I don’t know!

But my feeling right now is that Tera would make a great F2P game. It’s fun and easy (I died once in the Prologue but since then haven’t really felt in much danger) and pretty. I just don’t know that people are going to be willing to shell out $15/month for fun and easy and pretty.