Two things have happened in the last few days over at Enmasse, publisher of Tera in North America.
Enmasse just laid off a bunch of developers.
And they just started a new Rewards Program to encourage more participation among their player base.
First lets look at that Layoff Announcement. They say they have laid off Developers.
I’ve recently been playing the Heart of Thorns expansion for Guild Wars 2. I resisted it for a while. $50 seems like a lot to pay based on all the money I’ve already spent to buy and upgrade the original game. I think that Arena Net could have given the expansion away and made it up in in-game purchases that folks would purchase, or at least have priced it at $29, which would have been a no-brainer purchase price.
But regardless of that, I now have the expansion and I’ve played it enough to recommend it, with a provisio. Don’t try to Solo the new content. It apparently is designed for groups only. And not even one friend is enough. Join a Guild. It is best to run with a half dozen to a dozen folks to get the full experience and avoid the heart break of being left alone in the jungle. The Maguuma Jungle is a very nasty place with groups of powerful Veteran bosses just around every corner.
ASTA from Webzen is in Open Beta, and honestly, there is nothing to see here.
While it’s written by a Korean developer Polygon, it is nowhere near the quality in any dimension as Tera from Blue Hole.
ASTA is / will be free to play. But so is Tera. I would not even spend the time to download the 10GB of game to try it. Let me count some of the reasons.
Recently released in NA by Aeria Games, Echo of Soul is a surprisingly backward MMO. While the graphics are pretty good, it has features that one would have expected five years ago. Maybe there are some reasons for this as we will look at below.
Blade and Soul has just opened it’s doors in North America from NCSoft. It’s a martial arts MMO in the style of Jade Dynasty of a few years ago.
This is not a full review. Those are available elsewhere, I’m sure. But these are some first impressions comparing this game with others that I play and like.
The first impression is pretty good. The game is Free to Play and the graphics look very good. So those looking for Martial Arts with modern graphics, then you may want to try this one. Jade Dynasty is looking quite dated by now, but this game looks much better.
Continue reading “Blade and Soul -Complicated Martial Arts MMO”
How long does it take to play Tera from character creation to level 65? It turns out that the game keeps track, so it’s really easy to tell. Here’s one of the early toons I created, an Elin Mystic. I like Mystics. They solo very well and are in high demand in dungeons so if you want to run a dungeon, you have a short wait. Some times only a second or two, so you better be ready when you queue. But back to looking at play times. 6 Days 6 Hours.
That is total time playing the character, from, for this character, creating it on the Island of Dawn way back when, until I cleaned up some quests back in Habere to get rid of some stale quest items from my inventory, which probably took an hour or so.
Now let’s look at some other characters, since I’m a real Altaholic.
So, the current level cap for Tera is 65. It used to be 60. What happened and what’s likely to happen next time and does that mean anything for how you might want to play this MMO or any other?
Let’s look at what happened:
When the “Fate of Arun” update happened, Blue Hole took a page from the Wow playbook. Briefly, this is what happened in the Pandaria expansion of Wow a few years ago: “A new threat has appeared on the horizon and we need to take a ship voyage to get there. The ship crashes and you begin a new journey on a distant land.” Sound familiar? In case you are new to Tera, this is exactly what you will see in Tera when you reach level 60 and then embark on the Sky Cruiser Endeavor.
I’m back playing Tera and loving it. I played Wildstar for a few weeks, but it didn’t hold my interest. When the Tera Brawler came out, I jumped back and don’t feel like going back to Wildstar.
Let’s look at why I feel that way.
After the previous test, it occurred to me that there were some additional tests that should be done.
These tests have been done. But the results have not been that surprising. They show that:
I recently became aware of a method of fighting in dungeons that seemed quite surprising. Apparently some folks equip Slayer crystals in dungeons in an effort to up their Crit stat. These crystals only increase crit however, when your HP is below 50%. This causes some very strange behavior :
I decided to do a test to see if Slayer Crystals had more benefit than the obvious other choice of Pounding Crystals which have recently been added to the game. I’ve done this test and recorded the video. The video and a PDF file of the data analysis spreadsheet are available for your review.
Bottom Line: Slayer Crystals, under the conditions of this test, appear to be about 20% better than Pounding Crystals. But the difficulty of keeping your health below 50%, and the issue of not being able to use healers, would seem to outweigh this advantage.
Windy Weather 