Finally completed my Ranger look:
Pretty much done as far as alts/mains go. Time to play the game now
WvW for life!
Hot! Nice work.
Cheers for the heads up. Will drop a message tonight when I'm back from work. Will have a look at Mics/Headsets, probably pick one up next month on pay day.
Never thought about trying to give this a go with the 360 controller, could be rather easy to play with limited amount of skills being used at once....
call me crazy or blasphemy....but i prefer playing games on a controller, so come next month ill try the game but i really like guild wars world and quest system, i am sure i am going to get hit in the face with old mmo quest design once i begin the game but having a mmo design with a controller in mind helps that is why i played so much DCUO.
This is gonna be a little hard to explain, but here goes...
TERA is designed to work out of the box with a controller, but it is not designed with a controller in mind. Bizarrely, GW2 feels like it was much more of a natural fit for a controller despite all of the great UI support and seamless functionality of the interface in TERA.
To be more specific... first of all, you have way more skills in TERA. I didn't count but there's lots. This requires the use of two toggles rather than the one on my GW2 profile. It's workable, but pretty complex. Also, the slots are all configurable. While this seems like a good idea in theory, it's sort of a nightmare when you want to train yourself to use muscle memory instead of the HUD. I'll talk a little more about this in a sec, but it ended up confusing me before I even hit level 2.
The combat mechanics, while obviously excellent, are also pretty clearly not designed for a controller. You stand in place any time you attack. This makes the contact of any given attack much more concrete, I imagine, but it just feels
weird with a controller. It's probably less distracting for a melee character, but mine is a mystic, the autoattack a ranged attack. I
feel like I should be able to keep a target it my crosshairs, strafe around it, and keep taking continuous shots at it while staying out of range. Nope... I have to pick a spot and plant myself there. Plus, for some skills you lock on with the crosshair but can't move your character to align the reticle. I'm sure it's something you get used to but it just makes a lot more sense from a KB+M perspective.
After adjusting as best I could to the controls, I also noticed- the game has no dodge at all, right? I mean, I assume some melee classes get evasion skills, but there's no universal dodge mechanic, only kiting? Finally, using the controller for mouse work in GW2 is pretty rare and never particularly taxing (usually about as much work as clicking the gear, clicking "Deposit Collectibles" or clicking on the dungeon path I want to vote for. But so far as I can tell you have to manage your quest log in TERA, despite all the built-in support, with a mouse cursor. It gets old.
Against all odds I may actually be switching back to KB+M to try to get the most out of it.
I played Tera yesterday and it is interesting but GW2 has far too many design principles I prefer.
*sigh*
I'm about to log back in, but this is going to be my "ominous sense of foreboding" post and some preliminary info-gathering for my mini-review whenever I decide to either quit or stick with it. I'm keeping this stuff out of the TERA OT for I have no desire to stir up any trouble, so I thank you for letting me rant a bit here.
The game didn't make a great first impression. Pre-launch I had to modify my hosts file and disable my firewall to get the patcher to download, but whatever. The opening FMV seems particularly low-resolution despite having great assets. I don't really get why, the game installation is massive!
Then I for the first time in my life couldn't really find any race/class combo I liked. The races aren't totally uninspired, there were just none that really appealed to me. That's just personal taste so it's not a knock against the design. I settled on a Baraka cause they're all bulbous. Then on the class screen, it has a player difficulty rating per class, which is awesome. But right under that, are notes like "This class makes a good tank, but has limited DPS potential." For people who really love the Trinity and think it's great, this is probably a godsend. But I was really surprised to see the trinity all up in my face before even leaving character creation. To me, that screen felt a lot more like it was asking "Which of the three roles do you want to play in combat?" rather than "What kind of character do you want to make?" Furthermore... where's my class? There's seemingly no speedy-melee-low HP-high dps-evasion-assassin-thiefy class at all.
The closest based on the descriptions was Slayer, but they use a damn greatsword! I made a mystic because a bulbous stone giant with a tiny stick healing people sounds funny.
So then it plops you in the game and you're off. The graphics engine is gorgeous, by the way, and the performance is fantastic. It definitely has the technical edge on GW; higher poly models, higher-res textures. I think the animation quality is actually well below GW2's, but the TERA animations also serve more complex, action-gamey mechanical purposes, so they're more than adequate.
First thing I noticed was how many skills they started you off with. It was overwhelming, but I thought TERA just must be a more hardcore RPG than I realized. I was impressed that they gave you so much to play with right off the bat. A little tooltip popped up and was like, "hover over your skills to read what they do." So... I did. I spent a little while reading all the skill descriptions and learning the button combo to activate them reliably on my controller. I didn't have any clue when to use any of them, but I at least learned what they did and how to perform them.
Cue a few waves of grunts that I got rid of with the autoattack and then a boss. It's clearly and ludicrously obvious that this is where the game shines. Beyond the control caveats above, the boss fight felt not like an action-RPG but just a straight-up action game, even with my ranged caster class. I felt like something of a badass even though it was the first encounter, firing off my most damaging spells and healing random NPC fodder until the thing fell with a great death animation, and then in true action-game style, a bigger baddie bursts the fuck in for a "supposed to lose" fight (which I wasted way too much time on thinking I could win). Just a cool intro to the combat system overall, where while not knowing what I was doing it still felt cool.
Then... I popped out after the load and all my skills were gone.
What.
I had been the victim of a trick embraced by far too many singleplayer action-adventures. "Hey here's how cool you might be one day, isn't this fun? NOW GROVEL ETERNALLY FOR YOU ARE WEAK." The game didn't even explain it, really. No "woops! An evil fairy has sapped your badass powers! do favors for the villagers to earn XP and grow stronger!"
I instantly regretted having spent as much time as I did learning the skills and controls. The only skill it let me keep besides the auto-attack was a heal, and it changed it to a completely different button slot on the gamepad. So whenever I tried to do the old skill that was there, I did the heal. I tried moving it back to the slot it was before, but now the initial slot was just blank and I got even more confused. This is definitely one of the ways in which GW2's design shines on a gamepad. Pressing the button combo for heal
always heals my character in GW2, regardless of what character I'm playing or what level I am or what skills I have equipped. I hadn't realized how much I'd come to count on it.
Anyway, what I'm getting at with all of this annoying lead-up is this:
how long is it before I get those skills back? Just a rough hour range would be amazing.
I am totally willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, and stick with it. Tons of games don't really click for a while and that's more pronounced than ever in Korean MMOs. I just have a sneaking suspicion about various other things that I don't want to believe...
For those that have played a lot, some answers on these would be super awesome and helpful:
Does the game have loot- or kill-stealing?
Is the primary travel walking, mounts and flightpaths?
Is there a loot treadmill?
Will I be managing my quest log up until the level cap?
Do you have to backtrack to NPCs for rewards?
Skill obsolescence? (I talked to a trainer and it looked like there were skills with the exact same name but different lvl reqs)
Can mystics use more than one kind of weapon?
I'm trying to decide how long I want to devote to something sort of not-very-fun for me in the pursuit of "getting to the good stuff." What I want is to be able to just fuck around with the boss combat in a real way and be able to explore the depths of all the classes without feeling like doing a bunch of tedious chores to get there. I'm starting to think I'll almost definitely wind up feeling like TERA should have been a hub/excursion model action-RPG like Vindictus or Monster Hunter (mechanically, not art design or anything). It clearly justifies the existence of its glorious combat; it doesn't do anything to justify its identity as an MMO.
Hell I think I'd even pay real money for an arena mode or something, where it just gives you a high-level character to play with in controlled boss fights and no persistence whatsoever, it seems like it's that deep.
Alas. Aaaaanyway.
