Tera (PS4) Cons

I had previously written about the upsides of this Free-to-Play, Free-to-Download game on the PS4. There are a lot of good aspects of this game to be honest but I think you would need to be interested in fantasy MMO's for it to interest you.

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The game functions in the same way that a lot of MMO's do. You start out with very basic skills and gradually they introduce you to more and more of them. The combat is pretty decent and where you happen to be standing during a fight is crucial to your ability to avoid damage. There is also a block button that can mitigate a lot of the damage that you otherwise might suffer. It does take some practice to get this down but for the most part it is pretty intuitive.

_{stay out of those red circles to avoid damage!}

Con 1: difficulty level

The game is extremely easy to pick up and this brings on my first point of what I consider to be a down-side: It might be considered too easy.

I am currently level 45 out of a total of 70 levels and I have never died in combat. Most of the enemies that i have faced die in my initial barrage. The bosses haven't posed much of a challenge either and the one time it looked like the boss might win this was only because I neglected to bring enough healing potions with me. I was running the dungeons solo as well.

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I have only been in a group twice and the first time i was nervous that I was not going to be good enough only to discover that I could have basically intentionally stayed in the "damage zone" and just hit my basic attack button and likely would have never died. Between my own potions and the fact that one of our team was a healer there was no chance anything was going to kill me.

Now I'm not saying I want it to be a lot harder. In Guild Wars 2 dungeions almost anything one-hit kills you and that isn't fun. However, when my group of pals can easily clear everything in a dungeon without even a lick of strategy, I think there is a problem. Not a single word was spoken in my group, which is good because 80% of the players were Chinese.

Con 2: "Fetch" quests galore!

In the progression of the story (which I don't even read) the game forces you to go to various maps all over the place and for the most part you can not "fast-travel" to these places. They do have "Pegasus flights" that you can take between the various regions, but then they actually make you watch the entire flight, rather than just fast-forwarding to the destination.

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The first 3 or so times I witnessed this I was thinking "wow this is really impressive graphically for an MMO," but 30 flights later I go and do something else in my house when I activate it. It should be an option to skip it if you want.

A majority of the quests consist of go over here, talk to that guy, kill a certain number of the mobs in the region that that guy told you to kill, then run to someone else and tell them you did so, then he gives you a new place to run to, pick up some rocks, fight a few easily-killed mobs, then run to another place, etc etc. This process continues on and on and on until you are slumped over in your chair barely even playing.

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To make matters worse, your "headquarters" is in the far reaches of the capitol city and you are frequently made to return to this one room that is AGES away from everywhere. Sometime you will go talk to the boss, who sends you to the other side of the damn world to kill this one thing (again, you easily kill it) and then the quest tells you to walk all the fuck the way back to the guy who gave you the quest in the first place. Urgh!

Con 3: Terrible AI

The AI of the enemies is quite possibly the dumbest I have ever seen in an RPG. Since it is so easy to kill them, it is very possible to enter a room filled with 20 or so of them then run around and make them all follow you so you can get them all into one location, then use a volley of skills that kills all of them at once.

Also, you can be in a room and be killing some guards within sight of other guards and since you are out of their "detection range" they don't even react to you killing their friends. In some areas it is extremely easy to simply bypass the mobs altogether because the area around them that triggers them to chase you is very predictable and simple to just avoid altogether.

Very few enemies have any attacks that do any meaningful amount of damage anyway, so there is very little reason to employ any sort of real strategy. Combat becomes quite boring, despite what I consider to be great "real-time" mechanics because of this.

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tl;dr

Tera is a decent game and I haven't made it to endgame content yet so I can't comment about the entirety of the game. However, at this point I can see that this game is very casual and perhaps it is a decent game to play every now and then. The scenarios are so easy that there really isn't any particularly good reason to team up other than the fact that certain areas are only accessible in a group (which thankfully the interface sorts out LFG for you.)

While it is a beautiful game graphically and the controls had good intentions, there are some bad aspects of the game such as monotony and terrible enemy AI that makes this game quite easy to skip. The fact that there is very little incentive to team up (I can solo everything I have encountered with relative ease) kind of negates the entire reason why you play an MMO in the first place.

I hope that this changes later in the game, because if it doesn't, I feel as though I wont be able to really recommend this game to anyone. I feel that by halfway through the total number of levels that exist in the game that there should have been some level of challenge or maybe a bit of strategy necessary, but so far there hasn't been.