Tera Rising

by Aethyna Jan 4, 2015 | 1 Votes | 1 Played | 0 Reviews

Your vote

9 rate

Genres:

RPG , MMO

Graphics:

Labels:

Fantasy Setting , Mounts , Player vs Player (PvP)

Platforms:

Publishers:

Gameforge , En Masse Entertainment , Bluehole Studio There was once a world full of life, until one of the gods went mad and tried to destroy it. You fled through a portal, and so too did as many people as possible, but now a new threat is rising, a cult with unknown intentions and it falls to you to investigate. Play Now Similar Games Played Post a Review

People Also Played

Summary Plotline Gameplay Community Graphics/Sound Conclusion

Summary

Unlike the standard MMO fare of standing like a tree while attacking, TERA: Rising offers a very refreshing new take on the art of combat that is so much more fluid! It places a lot of focus on dodging and avoiding damage, especially if you would like to survive the encounter. However, due to this very uniqueness, the learning curve in the game can be pretty steep and its PvP events can be extremely challenging. The other aspects of the game are rather uninspiring though, with the exception of its truly special in-game election system which appoints players into positions of power, called Vanarchs. There are also cool mounts, amazing costumes and adorable pets that you can collect, whereby most of them can be obtained in the cash shop. There is no pay-to-win element in this game though and is an excellent game to try out, particularly if you love games like Raiderz! So, don’t wait - Download it today!

Plotline

The story in TERA: Rising may not exactly make sense, but it works well for the game. The plotline goes like this:

About a millennia ago, 2 titans, Arun and Shara went into the void and fell asleep. Why they did so, it’s up to anyone’s guess. Anyway, the titans started dreaming and their dream world, Tera, took form on their backs. The first living beings on Tera are 12 immortal gods dreamt up by the titans. They couldn’t get along and fights erupted.

Soon, the titans also dreamed mortals, who were less powerful but are far more numerous. Arun dreamed of the Elves, Humans, Amani, Giants, Devas and Poporis while Shara Dreamed of Sikandari, Gulas, Vampires, Wendigos, Faeries and Nagas. These mortals were forced into the divine wars of the gods and the 12 gods ended up dead, imprisoned or powerless. The mortals have suffered from the war too. The Sikandari and Giants were wiped out while new races, like Barakas and Castanics, rose from the ashes.

With the gods dead or gone, a new enemy, the metallic race from the underworld called the Argons, decides to take the opportunity to ultimately destroy Tera. The 7 races will now have to band together to fend off the Argons and failing to do so will not only result in deaths, but also the extinction of the world!

Gameplay

To start, you will need to select a character first! You have 7 different races to choose from – the race of draconian humanoids, the Aman; the intelligent giants, Baraka; a demon-like race, the Castanics; a naïve and nature-loving race, the Elins; the traditional and regal humanoids, the High Elves, the innovative and clever Humans and lastly, the cute, animal-like race, the Popori! Among these 7 classes, only the Baraka and Popori are gender-locked as only males while the Elins is a females-only race. Each race will have its own set of unique racial skills as well. For instance, High Elves can rejuvenate their entire mana pool every 2 hours.

Besides race, you will need to choose a class for your character too! There are 8 class types to choose from, namely warrior, slayer, berserker, archer, sorcerer, priest, lancer and mystic. Each of these classes has their own unique combination of abilities and will feel different when played. Don’t be afraid to experiment until you find a class that you like! Furthermore, each class has its own level of difficulty as well. The level of difficulty (ranked from 1 to 10 stars, with 10 being the hardest) is to aid new players in avoiding the tougher characters first. It’s better to start from the easier characters and work your way up.

Next, you can customize your character to your liking. Change the hairstyle and color, the skin or fur color, facial features and many others for your character, or you could take the easier way out and pick one of the pre-set characters provided. You can add tattoos and choose a voice for your character as well! However, free-to-play players are only allowed 2 character slots. If you want more, you can buy the expansion slots at the cash shop or you can create a new account!

Now, once you’ve created your character, you’ll be instantly dropped into the tutorial at level 20! This is because most character skills will only be unlocked at that level and the game wants to give you a look at how the character will play out in later levels. If you didn’t like what you see, you can go back, delete the character and start over. It’s no biggie! However, if you decide to keep the character, after completing the tutorial, your character will be dropped back to level 1 and you finally can start your journey in Tera at the Island of Dawn!

An MMORPG is not an MMORPG if it doesn’t have questing. Thankfully, TERA does. Questing in TERA: Rising consist of the standard MMO fare, which include killing a specific number of mobs, escort quests, collect a specific number of quest items and sometimes, you will get to enjoy some small instance-based quests too. Thus, quests can be pretty boring in TERA, particularly when the quests did absolutely nothing to narrate the story in TERA. You’ll probably be skipping quest texts before long.

It is obvious that TERA: Rising does not particularly stand out from the rather over-saturated market of the F2P MMORPG genre in terms of its questing or storyline. So, why is it one of the most popular MMORPG around then? Well, once you encounter combat in TERA, you will surely be super-impressed!

TERA: Rising specializes in providing a skill-based and action-based combat system to its players. Instead of attacking your targeted enemy while standing rooted to a spot, you will need manually aim before you can use your character’s skills, since you can’t tab-target enemies, while actively performing perfect dodges or acrobatics to avoid taking too much damage and ending up as a corpse. It is a heavily skill-based system and has a pretty steep learning curve, but once you get used to it, it won’t feel as hard. However, to master it, that’s a whole new matter.

Moreover, the combat system in TERA: Rising relies on skill chaining or, in other words, performing combos. Thankfully, the game informs you of which skill to use and all you need to do is to press ‘spacebar’ to execute the combo. Being an action-based game, it also allows your character to channel spells while running. This gives players absolutely no excuse to play the game like a tree. Not to mention, since each class is uniquely different, there are multiple strategies that can be incorporate in combat that differs depending on which class you play. This results in a
The engaging combat system in this game provides the players with a sense of being nimble, fluidly mobile and have deep immersive combat that are not found anywhere else!

A way to test your combat skills is by hunting down a Big Ass Monster (BAM) in this game. BAMs are massive ugly creatures that are like mini-bosses in the world setting. There are many different types of BAMs and, similarly to your character, they have their own sets of skills. Most classes can solo certain types of BAMs, but be warned! These monsters are very tough so you should get yourself ready for a long fight. Since attacking computer-generated monsters can be challenging enough, can you imagine how exciting it will be to actually fight against other fellow players?

In addition, TERA: Rising has a very nice instance matching feature that utilizes a gear score to group players into equally leveled groups for dungeons. Gear score depends solely on the item level of your character’s equipped gear. However, this method of determining whether you made the cut or a particular dungeon party can be rather flawed. As some may point out, gear score does not indicate the skill level of a particular player. There is still some debate over this. Nonetheless, if you’re trying to find groups for running instances, please don’t be disappointed that most of the groups will require you to have a certain gear score to join regardless of how well you play your character.

Crafting is another aspect in TERA: Rising that may feel a tad bit common. However, it still plays a vital part in this game because most powerful items in the game are the ones you craft yourself at the creation workshop. The game offers 6 different archetype crafting professions, including armorsmithing, weaponsmithing, alchemy, leatherworking, focus crafting (produces weapons for archers, mystics, sorcerer and priest) and tailoring. You will need to purchase designs and recipes from vendors to level up your crafting skills.

In order to obtain crafting materials, you will need to use the material extraction methods provided. Extraction methods are important for you to gather enough materials from junk equipment that you’ve collected during your adventures. There are basically 4 extraction methods, namely, cloth, leather, alchemy and metals. However, do take note that no matter how high your level is in extraction, there is still a chance, albeit a lower chance if your extraction skill is of high level, that you won’t get anything from the extraction process.

There is also a nifty little shortcut to greatly speeding up the profession leveling process – by completing crafting quests which can be found on billboards in every major city. These quests are easy to complete since most of the needed quest items can be bought from the design and materials merchants. It’s practically free experience points for your profession! These merchants will also have some special reagents that you’ll need for your normal crafting for a price as well.

Once you’ve crafted a couple of stuff, you may want to sell them for some in-game money. Well, TERA: Rising has everything MMOs usually offer in regard to trading. There is an auction house where you can list your items up for a fee and the auction house will take a small cut from your profits when your item is sold. You can also sell your items via chat or do a 1-on-1 trade with an interested buyer.

If you plan to start a ‘business’ in this game, one of the things that you’ll need to know is how limited is the inventory slots that are given to you. In TERA: Rising, besides your inventory, you will also have access to a bank for storage. Each storing option is, unsurprisingly limited, but you can easily expand them using, thankfully, in-game gold! Awesome, right?
.
The game also features a very intricate in-game democratic election system that is built around guilds. Guilds that are popular or have plenty of positive feedback from the players will be able to contest a zone for the coveted seat and title of “Vanarch”. Then, the ‘fans’ of the guild will be able to vote for them. These elections are very competitive, so before any guild submit their name for the election; they must ensure that they fulfill all the criteria to be eligible for candidacy. Some of the criteria include the character being nominated is level 50, the guild level must be 3 and above as well as a registration fee. Furthermore, they should also have a loyal base of voters to ensure that the election will be a breeze. However, if your guild is more war-like, you may even take over control of a province through a massive and epic guild-vs-guild battle!

Although these elections are mainly guild-based, technically though, only 1 person, the guild leader will be elected to be the Vanarch of a zone. That province in question will also fall under his or her guild’s protection and rule. Vanarchs function primarily to set taxes on vendors, set up special shops, place skill trainers or other allowed NPCs in villages, open new teleporting paths and many others. Any edicts of the Vanarchs will cost policy points which can be obtained through popular vote or extremely challenging Vanarch quests that will definitely involve players from more than 1 guild.

No free-to-play review will be complete without a look at the cash shop in-game. The cash shop items in TERA: Rising does not provide real-money spenders any significant advantage over free-to-play players in terms of gameplay. Most of the items here are aesthetic in nature, for example, the different types of cool-looking character costumes. There are also name changes, server transfers and other items that you can purchase. This is truly a free-to-play and not a pay-to-win game!

There are also plenty more other features in TERA: Rising, but to round up this review, let’s talk about the amazing mounts and pets in this game. Mounts are very useful to increase your movement speed in the game and it can be instantly summoned. There are a variety of beautiful mounts that you can buy, but most of the more pretty ones will cost you real money. Pets are functional in TERA: Rising as well. They can help you collect loot from mob corpses automatically and there’s one particular pet called Totes that can even help you carry stuff. The pet pocket or inventory can be expanded with a price, similarly to your player inventory or bank space. There is also no limit as to how many mounts or pets that you can have, so you can “collect ‘em all”!

Community

The community at TERA: Rising is very welcoming and friendly. They, more often than not, are willing to give you tips on how to play, considering that TERA’s combat mechanisms can be rather hard to learn. There are even players who are willing to help you with the BAM that you’ve having trouble killing even though he or she is not in your group! Besides the lively banter on the in-game chat, you can also meet fellow TERA players at their very active forums.

Graphics/Sound

The graphics in TERA: Rising is undoubtedly one of the best among all the MMORPGs! Your mouth will probably be agape at how impressive the in-game scenery is! The monster models and character models are astonishingly detailed and realistic-looking, in its special way. Due to the game’s emphasis on its combat, the spells and skills that you use will have accompanying animations that are absolutely fluid and flawless. A 10/10 for sure!

The music in this game is of high quality as well! They mainly consist of instrumentals with choir to give out that inspirational feeling, but there are also softer-toned sounds that may be perfect to lull you to sleep at night!

Conclusion

To say that you’ll play TERA: Rising only because of its amazingly fun combat would be an understatement. Yes, its quests are a bit repetitive and dull, and the story is halfheartedly written, but that’s just a small part of the game. Besides the fast-paced and challenging combat, TERA: Rising also has an immersive PvP and PvE system.

The in-game political election system to appoint the Vanarchs is one-of-a-kind as well and its crafting system can be rather fun to do. The game has one of the best graphics and sound among other MMORPGs, particularly among free-to-play ones. The best of all, the cash shop does not provide spenders an overwhelming advantage over free-to-play players and instead mainly provides cosmetic stuff like rare mounts, pets and costumes.

The only downside would be the huge hard disk space that the game requires – you’ll definitely be spending quite some time downloading and patching the game up, particularly if you have a slow internet connection. Nonetheless, if you truly love action RPGs like Raiderz, all the trouble you went through to get TERA: Rising will be more than worth it… that’s for sure!

New Game Added: Tera Rising

by Aethyna Jan 4, 2015

There was once a world full of life, until one of the gods went mad and tried to destroy it. You fled through a portal, and so too did as many people as possible, but now a new threat is rising, a cult with unknown intentions and it falls to you to investigate.

Read More Be the First to Post a Review!