TERA (NA) - "Dress Rehearsal" Impressions

En Masse decided to host a little "Dress Rehearsal " for TERA before this weekend. It started at 5 PM PST (8 PM EST) and lasted for three hours. With my client all ready to go: I jumped in and played from start to finish. I created a Popori Slayer and leveled my way up to eight.

To be brief: My whole experience from start to finish was a complete, definite "meh". Again, these are just my impressions and not a final opinion since the game is still being "worked on."

The Slayer class I played as felt way too slow and clunky, and not slow and clunky because the heavy weapon. It felt way too slow and clunky in comparison to using a weapon like... say... a Great Sword in Monster Hunter, which is also a bit slow, but feels a lot smoother and had strikes that move the player towards the enemy. Slayer class felt clunky because the lack of basic attacks that move you forward. When performing basic attacks: your character literally stays in one place to perform it, unless you're performing a still attack that moves the player forward, but cannot be cancelled in any way. This is what kills the Slayer class for me. I don't like that I have to let my attack animation finish and walk/re-align myself to the enemy if my swing wasn't close enough.

(really bad shots of melee combat; I didn't take as many as I thought I did.)

When it comes to action games, they usually imply fast/solid action with even the most basic of attacks having momentum in honing in on your enemies, but the lack of attack with movement here just won't do. I'm hoping things for the Slayer class improves later on.

I didn't bother doing PvP. I heard it was unbalanced at low levels, anyway.

The quests were average. I can see the typical kill and fetch quests getting old quick, so I'm hoping that dungeons and BAM hunting will be as good as people say they are. The cutscenes during main story quests were nice, though.

I hope they're planning to improve the initial character creation. It's so horribly lacking. Reasons being:

• Can't change eye color
• Can't add facial features like beauty marks or scars
• Can't modify height
• No body tweaking at all (On the other hand: this is probably for the best, since I wouldn't want TERA to turn into another Aion Freakshow)
• Hairs are tied to head accessories/horns/ears
• Range of colors for most races is pretty much white, brown, black and more white.

I wanted to make my Popori look like this:

....but with the available options, I couldn't even come close. Eye colour, separating some of the extra options from head type and some other colours would be the main things I would like to see added.
At LEAST let me change the damn eye color and let me at LEAST let me get some snow white fur. I'm going to put this in as a suggestion.

Overall: It's not bad, but it's certainly lacking in a few aspects. Hopefully as I play this weekend, my thoughts on TERA will change.

Game sure is pretty, though...