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:

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.

Last night the Tera open beta started for people who pre-ordered the game. Today everyone can get in.

In my online community the general reaction to Tera seems to be something like “Meh, I guess I’ll try it.” I don’t know too many people who are super-stoked to play but I think people are curious since it’s been in the works for so long, and since it has such a controversial art style (female armor tends to be very very tiny).

I’ve been known to play a game just so I can slag it with authenticity and I think some of my friends are playing Tera for just that reason.

So here’s a report on my level 1-8 experience.

Developer En Masse has added a prologue to the game. They labeled a blog post about it “Improved Early Play” and boyo, did they get that wrong.

The Prologue is done really poorly in my experience. You’re thrown into the game at level 20 with somewhere between 6 & 10 skills that you won’t understand. You’ll be trying to read help text that pops up in different places and formats while all kinds of in-game chaos is happening.

Now in all fairness I was attempting to play with a controller at this point which probably made things worse. MMO players all know that Space is Jump, but they don’t all know that the B button on the controller is Jump (if in fact it is…I don’t remember). So I was trying to figure out that when the on-screen prompts said “Press F to speak to this scantily clad NPC” I needed to pull the Left Trigger, plus I was figuring out the skills at the same time.

Anyway it was a real mess to me and I almost quit. I’m glad I didn’t though. The Prologue lasts a few minutes and then you go back to the original start of the game where you’ll be level 1, learn all that stuff again at a more measured pace, and gain experience with the skills as you earn them.

At that point I went back to mouse and keyboard but tonight I’m giving the controller another go. Any time I can avoid a lot of mousing it’s good for my arm.

I decided to play a Slayer. That’s a melee class carrying a sword that’s taller than he is. He’s pretty fun to play. Early on I just had a basic attack and a dodge. I found I can dodge through enemies, so what I’d normally do is smack the bad guy until I saw he was going to unleash an attack, then dodge through him. The mob would then land his attack on empty space and I’d attack his back. Fairly frequently you’ll knock a mob down, which feels pretty satisfying.

The combat in Tera is a little different from most MMOs. You don’t lock on a target (maybe you can, but I never did). Instead you have to aim and swing. It can take some getting used to but I felt a little more engaged in combat than I normally do. On the other hand, it’s no Kingdoms of Amalur. This isn’t super-fast-paced arcade combat.

The Slayer generates MP by attacking, and then expends it by firing off skills. I have my main attack on left mouse button, dodge on the right, and by the end of the night I had skills bound to 1, 2 & 3. They were a knockdown attack, a forward dash and a whirlwind area of attack skill.

I have the feeling ranged classes will feel a lot different than melee classes, but we’ll see.

Beyond the combat, Tera is an Asian MMO. You’ve got Story Quests that unlocked every few levels, and side quests to fill in the gaps. So far I haven’t had to do any “grinding” but I’m already seeing a lot of mob model reuse. Y’know “Fight 4 Young Foozles” then “Harvest the spleens from 5 Foozles” and then “Kill 4 Elder Foozles” and then “Bring me the pelts of 5 Ancient Foozles” and all the mobs look the same except for the name over their heads.

Everything so far has been pretty linear but it’s early days yet.

There’re systems I haven’t really dug into. Your health is related to your Morale. You improve Morale by hanging out at a Campfire. As Morale drops, you max health and MP drop too. You can find pre-existing campfires or you can carry them in your inventory.

While you’re gathered around a campfire you can toss in Charms that you get as drops and quest rewards. When you do this, you get some kind of buff…and so does everyone else at the Campfire with you. I guess the idea is to encourage people to gather together to max out buffs.

Likewise gathering with friends is supposed to get you more materials. Stuff like that.

We’ll see. So far Tera feels like exactly the ‘tourist game’ I thought it would be. I’ll play it to ogle the beautiful landscapes for a while, but don’t expect it’ll be a game that holds me for more than a few weeks. In a year it’ll go FreeToPlay and I’ll come back and do it all again. 🙂