MOGS

Tera is a new “Twitched-based” MMO that is scheduled to launch this year. A twitched based game is one that has it’s combat focused on positioning and timing your characters attacks and dodges around your opponents attacks and dodges. When you dodge an attack you physically have to dodge it, rather than you getting lucky RNG and text scrolling stating you dodged the attack. Essentially your skill of controlling your character will determine the outcome of a pvp battle rather than your gear being the prime factor. The game is aiming on appealing towards 2D fighter gamers and skill-based gamers rather than watering it down so anyone can easily pick it up and play. In fact the game is even being developed so you can play it with an arcade game pad along side a keyboard. You will have to keep your keyboard close at hand, but it may have it’s advantages depending on how the game plays.

While many recent MMO’s have gone towards the instance based set up; i.e. Guild Wars and Vindictus. Tera is an open world MMO like WoW with instances placed throughout the game.

This game has already been released in Korea and has been met with a solid following. Currently the developers are working on westernizing the game to be more appealing to the western mmo crowd. For those who are unfamilar with the terms, the Eastern MMO’s are almost pure grinding. So they are working on fleshing out the game with with more quests and objectives to keep the western hemisphere’s attention.

One interesting thing to note about this game is the character class spread. 4 out of the 8 classes are melee based. With 1 healer, 1 ranged phsyical dps, and 2 casters, the game is definately pushing towards hand to hand combat. With that spread you begin to wonder if the game is going to be diverse enough. But how many healing classes do you honestly need? This summer we are about to find out. WoW with 4 healers, Tera sporting 1 healer and Guild Wars 2 with 0 healers a balance will be found. Hopefully with the twitch-based gameplay that only one healer is needed and melee is balanced by the other melee classes.

Tera is definately a game to look forward too and to add to our MMO collections. A release date has not been confirmed yet, but is scheduled for a US debut by the end of this year.