So as of about a week ago, Gameforge has taken over Tera from Enmasse. And apparently Enmasse has shut down and when you go there, Firefox says the certificate is Expired. Not even a good bye.
So I fired up Gameforge Tera this morning and made a new character in one of my “Saved” slots. I saved slots we got over the years by putting dummy characters in them with names like “Place.Holder.A” and so forth.
The startup screens have changed and there is some choice that I didn’t look into. The left choice is the game I’ve played before.
Gameforge Client – of course they do
So after you install the “Gameforge Client”, you can download the game, and at that point you can choose where you want the game to live. So no worries, you don’t have to install it on the same drive with the GF client.
They have changed the Toon Selection screen back to something similar to what it was originally. Toons standing around on platforms. Rather than the “Marching through the Ruins” that Enmasse had.
I don’t know what this choice up front is, but it looks like a whole new PVP experience for those that like that sort of thing.
The startup experience is the same as most recently. But it’s streamlined quite a bit. I think most of the streamlining was done at Enmasse, but it looks even shorter from Gameforge. And right off the bat you are getting lots of Goodies, that all have timeouts – 7 days, 15 days, 30 days, and on and on. I guess this is what you call “Gacha” gaming. I’m not an expert on this subject, but I gather that these “encouragements to buy stuff” rather than buying stuff for style in the game you love to play, are the “Gacha” thing.
Brief History of Tera
I started to play Tera years ago, and at that time, you could only have 2 characters per account, or pay like $10 for each new character slot. I made a few accounts rather than paying money, and since they allowed 10 accounts to log in per day, I was fine. Well later that limit was 6 and that was a pain, but I digress.
There was a good story involving the attack of the Argons and you had to grind a bit to get and enhance your gear to be powerful enough to get to max level. Before I got there tho, they added the 60-65 Expansion which was great fun. You had to hunt down and kill Dakuryon, the wicked Blood Mage that was making trouble for everyone.
Anyway, after that I lost interest since the content seemed to be just high level dungeons, PVP content and simplification of the leveling experience skipping whole areas of the world that they had built.
Gameforge Put Timers On Everything
So it appears that Gameforge has added timers to everything so that rather than have a subscription game, they just sneak in subscriptions by having everything expire.
Notice that the purple dragon mount, and the white llama are both limited time. The butt ugly Tupar Pegasus mount is still free at level 20 and unlimited time. And you don’t have to do a quest to get it, it just arrives in the mail. The quest was level 65 before as I recall.
But notice all the other items with little timer icons on them. The frogs are permanent. Maybe the Bear too, which is new. But the Dakuryon pet is on a timer.
There are two costume items that are permanent.
But they ruined or removed “Fashion Coupons”. I had a bunch collected, but now the only thing that pops up is to trade 5 for a single 1, over and over. I guess you are supposed to do this until you only have 1 left. Bug or not, I was too quick and whittled my 900 down to 500. Oh well. I do have some very nice costumes from those back when they were reasonable to grind for. But those days are long past.
Starting Up Audio Glitch
Audio is silent in the game when you first install it. Seems like they have a problem with the installer that does not check and bring along the DirectX that they need. Oddly, I have a latest and greatest Windows 10, 2004 – April 2020 – release and it fails there. The fix is to just reinstall DirectX.
That fixed the audio when I restarted the game.
I won’t be spending much time in Tera from now on. IMHO, Gameforge has ruined it by “Upgrading” the game philosophy to “Gacha”.
Have a good one. See you in GW2 or FFXIV where Gacha is not a thing.
:ww
Windy Weather 