Tera Online – Is this game still alive?
Tera Online is a true action-combat MMORPG developed by Bluehole (now Krafton), which is almost 10 years old now, but still well and alive. What's the case with this gorgeous game in 2021?
The state of Tera Online
This game was quite popular in the first few years, because of its classic MMORPG-feeling, packed with really exciting and challenging combat, beautiful world, unique races, and so much more. There were so many reasons why we absolutely loved Tera Online, but in the past few years, playerbase started to drop dramatically, servers were merging/closing, and apparently even the console versions are more active, than the PC game.
Let’s talk about the truth and the real reasons, why this excellent game has started to fade away.
1. Game market growth is HUGE
Players have thousands and thousands of games to choose from, also “new” genres started to steal their interests such as MOBAs and Battle Arenas. Tera Online is not that cool or interesting anymore for these players, especially with their high expectations. I mean, who wants to play a lagfest game which was developed in Unreal Engine 3, when we have Black Desert Online, New World, and a bunch of better looking and better optimized games around. Some players love these modern AAA games, and some players are being oldschool and stick to old classics like World of Warcraft, or Guild Wars. But who wants a Tera Online nowadays?
2. Tera’s gameplay has changed a lot
While Tera had a refreshing and unique gameplay around 2012-2013, nowadays it’s old news. Its true action combat system gave players a serious challenge in both PVE and PVP – of course it wasn’t impossible to tackle these challenges, but we needed some practice and teamwork.
2-3 years after the release the game has started to change dramatically. The developers started to release new classes, but only gender-locked ones, they started to recycle older monster-boss models, PVP slowly died, and PVE wasn’t that challenging anymore because of simplifying mechanics.
They made everything much more easier just to get huge amount of new players: Faster leveling, more newbie rewards, strong newbie weapons, and this caused the next huge problem. Once these players reached the end-game phase, everything was suddenly hard to complete or achieve, so they just simply quitted the game.
In order to make these disappointed players stay, they had to rework endgame too. Some of the hardcore content (like extreme difficult PVE dungeons) remained the same, but you could get your best gear without being good at your character, or without ever touching the hardest contents in Tera.
This unfortunate change in the gameplay divided the players: Tera had casuals and hardcore elitists, and slowly the game’s community turned into a toxic environment.
3. Pay to win?
Let me quote from the official Tera forums. A player opened a new topic with this title:
“NOOB 3-step guide to GETTIN GUD (updated to suit 2020 needs)”
The guide says the following:
“1: buy TT
2: sell TT
3: buy gear in broker”
Long story short, Tera is all about gold now, and the easiest way to get gold, is to buy cash-shop currency for real money, sell it in-game for gold, and then buy high-end gear in the market. Back in the day it was impossible to trade or buy any gear, everyone had to farm the required materials and craft everything for themselves.
The process of gearing-up changed throughout the years, crafting wasn’t important anymore, because you could loot your gear from bosses, and nowadays you just buy your best-in-slot armor from Trade Broker.
To be continued…
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