Today, we’re starting a new article series supposed to determine what we think could be changed with different MMO games in order to result in an enhanced, more fun and interesting gaming experience and a title that is better on the whole. And we’re also interested in your opinion, of course.

Our very first episode is dedicated to the heavy hitter The Exiled Realm of Arborea, better known as TERA. We’re convinced that a lot of our readers have already heard about that title, so just for those of you who haven’t played it yet: TERA is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game that is playable for free and thrusts players into a vast fantasy realm.

One of TERA’s most intriguing aspects is the game’s combat that tasks players with manually targeting their attacks, resulting in more challenging fights than most of its competitors have to offer, as well as an enjoyable and intriguing combat experience. Other remarkable things about TERA are its great graphical quality and aesthetics. Despite the fact that the game is around for some years already, there’s nothing the newest MMORPGs could be envied for in this context.

TERA additionally incorporates an intriguing political system that enables players to select a Vanarch as their leader who’s able to make decisions that will affect all players on the server. The title also boasts high-quality content for player vs. player and player vs. environment interaction, allowing players to engage in pretty varied PvP battles, ranging from small-scale skirmishes to massive faction battles with a large amount of participants involved, as well as to tackle tough dungeons, go head-to-head with various foes and battle demanding Big Ass Monsters (BAMs) that are giant, extremely mighty and pretty lush.

Having played TERA and emphasised its quality features, we posed the following questions to ourselves: Which aspects could be modified in order to result in an enhanced game? In which fields would the game need some improvement?

Story
TERA’s story is extremely linear, meaning that every character lives an identical journey, which doesn’t result in much replayability. We would find it much more interesting if players were able to make decisions that had an effect on their character’s story. This would lead to each user’s gaming experience being different than that of their fellows.

Missions
TERA’s missions are pretty monotonous: They don’t set themselves apart as being varied; NPCs typically task players with killing a specific amount of foes in a specific zone or to find a further NPC that again asks you to complete additional missions that send you killing a different sort of enemies. We would be interested in more variety in regards to missions, which could ask players to solve some puzzles or at least wouldn’t just task you with simply going there and killing a certain number of demons, as this makes the levelling process quite tedious.

Characters
Characters aren’t sufficiently different: In spite of the fact that players are able to customise their characters’ exterior, the modifications they are able to make don’t result in characters that differentiate themselves much from others belonging to the same race. Wouldn’t it be fascinating if TERA allowed players to adjust their characters’ complexion and details like this? We find this would help to appear more unique and not just like clones with slightly different skin colour, hairstyle and face.

Social
Enhancement of TERA's social aspect: It’s not that easy for players to trade, form a group, or just communicate with each other due to the chat channels being constantly filled with spam. Moreover, many players seemingly just wish to quickly reach the level cap, meaning that benefiting from the game’s social aspect and assembling groups plays a secondary role for them. In our humble opinion, this aspect of TERA also needs some enhancements, for socialising counts among the most essential aspects of MMOs.

Guilds
Enhancement of the guild management: At the moment, the guild mechanics are rather antiquated; a guild leader is given pretty few tools for the management of their guild members’ ranks of the bank. In order to maintain the guild level, continuous farming is required and apart from Alliance Dailies, stimuli to join a guild a pretty scarce to non-existent. A complete overhaul of the guild systems could make them more intuitive and provide them with additional features and options to improve and make better use of the social aspect. Also, permanent farming has to be avoided to gain an improvement.

Interface
The game’s user interface counts among those things that most need to be improved, as it currently is clumsy, slowing down the game and giving lots of trouble, among other things. Since the pre-beta phase, the UI has barely undergone any enhancements, thus it would be an extremely vital task regarding the game’s improvement.

Farming
It’s almost compulsory to constantly do farming: TERA pretty much forces players to fritter lots of hours away to hunt monsters in order to obtain the items they need for enhancing their equipment and weapons. This impedes those who neither have enough patience nor much time to spare for gaming. However, when the required items are finally collected, you will at least not lose the items invested in the enhancement process of an object in the case that you fail due to the x% chance of success.

Respawn
The respawn rate of monsters is disturbingly elevated: In TERA, players have to get used to nearly immediately respawning monsters when farming or completing quests. In addition to the annoyance, this may make them die more that it should while being engaged in battle against other enemies. We think it would be as simple as defining the respawn time by the amount of players being present in the zone in order to solve the issue, this way avoiding that players constantly find themselves surrounded by enemies.

Dungeons
Restrictions regarding dungeon entrance: Those who are interested in doing raids and entering dungeons more often than just 2 days per week are forced to pay, resulting in a major obstruction for players who want to play for free, as it restricts their options. In our humble opinion, this is a somewhat needless measure, for lots of other MMOs also manage to get their benefits from only selling items via their in-game shops. It’s moreover annoying and prevents a huge amount of gamers from playing TERA.

Those are some of the aspects we would change about TERA, but what is your opinion? Would you put anything else onto this list? What would you change? We’re looking forward to get to know your points of view! Share them with us!!!

This entry was posted on Friday, November 14th, 2014 at 10:55 am and is filed under Articles, MMO News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Puedes dejar una respuesta, o un trackback desde tu sitio web.