Out of Pod Experience

I work 12hr shifts on weekends, so I don't really know as many details as I should when starting a thread like this but I wanted to see if anyone else here was in on this.



Was able to get in and try this briefly before work. Ran up and did the first three or four Kill X quests. Trees, deer, bigger trees, and munchkins. It seems -and I know this is an early judgement, but somehow it does not seem unfair- like a standard fantasy MMO that I've bought a dozen of and regretted playing, but the aimed combat with active blocking is JUST enough that I could enjoy playing it. If some other people I know played and had a group going, or I found a good guild.


I did a female elf berserker and everything is pretty and fantastical but at the same time 'meh' and there are lots of sloppy elements like weapons that clip with clothing right there on starter uniforms, boob physics make metal chest armor flow like cloth, stuff like that.

The animations are FANTASTIC though. The spell casting I saw other players doing, jumping, running, attacking, being hit, it all looks very smooth except for the clipping on the armor and weapons. The thin girl with the huge axe looks really good moving around and staggers a little when she lands from a jump or swings the weapon like you would expect, and that's a hard thing to animate because typically when a person staggers they are slowed down or they change directions, but here it doesn't break your stride, doesn't actually slow you down compared to other races, and still looks good. I was impressed with this.

I would say the biggest weak point is the camera. You have no air control in a jump, and when strafing your character ignores your crosshair and will attack towards their side, but the camera does not react to this. You can still camera-turn without turning your character. You can be turning/jumping and then land and your whole orientation is suddenly different or strafing and trying to hit something and then it snaps to a new orientation when you finish the animation. I can't remember if character orientation wins, or if camera orientation wins. I'm going to submit this as feedback after a little more testing to make sure I have my facts straight.

Had to leave for work just as I was getting some skills. I had two of them, an AoE stun that hit like a truck and a whirling PBAoE. At first it was a bit awkward hitting #keys for aimed attacks, but I got used to it pretty quick and once, right before I logged off, it prompted me to press the space bar to do the PBAoE and I thought that was interesting. Going to look into what caused that and see how intuitive it is using that system.

One of my coworkers has been in the Beta for a while now as well as running a Korean account that he won. He has stated that the twitch combat has been quite fun. Been trying to get him to test it with a controller to see how smooth a player can run it like we could in DCUO.

Pretty much this. When they first made it available I paid the 4 euro fee to have access to beta. I played the first day during the beta weekends, got bored and haven't looked back since. GW2 will be the last themepark MMO I play.

KTera is coming back actually since the release of some extra content and tweaks. The game did badly on release but is slowly getting back on its feet.

NCSoft doesn't really have a case to shut down the game. They are claiming too much in their suit (NCSoft will go bankrupt is one of their arguments), which makes judges a little weary to start with. They're claiming that Tera is causing the drop in subscribers to Lineage 1 and 2, but of course, those games being 14 and 9 years old respectively doesnt have anything to do with it ;p

Unless the case is presented to an idiotic judge, the worst that will happen to En Masse/Bluehole is that they'd have to pay a settlement or royalties for use of original L3 assets. Given that Epic actually licensed the engine seperately to Bluehole, even this is on very shaky legs as it means the codebase cannot be claimed by NCSoft as theirs. they have little to not proof that Tera is the game they worked on as L3 and almost all the art assets they use as arguments look nothing like what's been used in Tera.

One piece bears a resemblence to the race lineup, but it's the only half-way valid link between Tera and L3 and still has massive differences in design.

NCSoft cannot actually bring any prior art or other proof that Tera IS L3. The game now presented as Tera has little resemblence to the original design of L3 in the first place, the latter was supposed to still use a traditional combat system, which was one of the reasons why the devs left in the first place iirc as management was getting far too involved in the design process.

I very much doubt that Tera is in any real danger. While Bluehole is not entirely without guilt in the matter, presenting NCSoft as being right on every count is not exactly correct either. They sunk a lot of money into L3 and despite cancelling it are now trying to earn it back by sueing the people who did all the work, basically it's management trying to cover up their mistakes by shifting the blame to someone else.

Edit: The case in Korea is appealed and still going. NCSoft may not have been entirely clean in this case and forced some premature rulings.