Tera Beta Gameplay Videos

Howdy all, Aesr here.

The last Tera online beta I captured some gameplay of a Female High Elf Warrior. Fun stuff. You can find the three parts below. So far I have had some fun playing the beta. I recommend you check it out.

Its kinda long so I do not expect you all to watch it all. Just briefly watch for Tera awesomeness.

MMOPTICS Youtube Channel

Howdy, Aesr here:

             

 Me and Opollo have setup a youtube channel to upload the videos we make onto it. You can find it here:

Clicky me

As always, Aesr out.

Blizzard is Trolling Bioware

Seems that even Blizzard is jumping in with subliminal torches of anger against Bioware.

Recently with the Supply Depot 2 Starcraft mobile game (Won't spoil it :)), Blizzard posted this:

Source: http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/games/supplydepot/

The "color-coded endings" bit appears to be a stab at the highly controversial endings Bioware included at the end of Mass Effect 3 which were well....nothing more than different colors

Look at this video:

And the "DLC ending" part appears to be an allusion to people expecting Bioware to released DLC with a new more "appropriate" ending.

Warhammer 40,000: Dark Millennium MMO Cancelled.

Well...this sucks.

 Eurogamer reported THQ would not be making the much anticipated Warhammer 40k MMO  but instead a single player / multi-player game due to financial problems after quarterly losses. 

Was hoping to play the MMO but what's even worse is...

...They had to let go 118 employees. 

Hopefully, if things pick up again, these people will be offered their jobs again.

Can We Escape"WoW Syndrome"?

Oh that's right. 

Because every MMO you seem play there is someone that has to bring up something about Blizzard.

And for me, it's gotten pretty damn old. Every. SINGLE. MMO I have played, it is only a matter of seconds after joining a server when you start seeing people rant and rave about either how this game you are playing will kill WoW and Blizzard or why this game you are playing is so much different and better than WoW. 

I used to like WoW (in Vanilla) myself.  Even when I came from  Lineage 2, where they were trash talking WoW while it was in development, I thought it was one of the best games I had ever played and it became my home for many years.  

And I even understand the impact that WoW had on the MMORPG genre as a whole. 

But what I don't understand is why people have to bring up WoW constantly. 

You could talk about anything! Anything! 

And there would be someone comparing it to WoW, usually in a pessimistic way.

I feel it stems from players who don't really hate WoW but more likely had really bad experiences in WoW. Things like not being able to progress or just not being good at the game at all. I mean, even I hated WoW for some reasons such as Blizzard seemingly abuse of "paid services" and constantly changing the game to the point it wasn't even the same game anymore etc.

These things made me dislike WoW. When I played another MMO, the last thing I want to talk about or hear about was WoW. And it appears there are plenty of gamers that feel the same way. Except they can't stop talking about it or bashing it everytime they join a new game. 

Doesn't make me think they have real legit reasons for disliking it by spamming chat with how bad it is. I mean it's at the point where it's no longer about WoW, it's about Blizzard and anything they do. It's as if they think Blizzard is the ONLY company that practices in the way they do. As if their favorite game company wouldn't take a chance to get some extra money out of their fanbase. Some won't, but most do.

Because if you really hate WoW, the worse thing you can do is keep talking about all the time. And if you are going to bash it constantly, at least make it more than "WOW FAILS!" "BLIZZARD FAILS"...

...it's not 2010 anymore.

Tera Online To Prove Interesting

So I recently bought the Tera Online collectors edition from the Enmasse website, (clicky me) and got into the Mach 23-25 beta event. I must say I am intrigued by this game. There are a total of 7 playable races and 8 playable classes and the character customization is pretty thorough to boot. Its not as great as Aion,s, but its a lot better than a lot of others. The graphics aren't as cartoony as swtor which really turned me off to swtor. 

One thing I always liked about mmos is the fantasy setting of them. It may be a cliche setting but lets face it, when has a sci-fi mmo been successful? Besides Eve Online.

One thing I hated about SWTOR is how bad pulling the map up was. You couldn't even move it and I felt restricted as most other mmos allowed me to freely zoom in, zoom out, and explore the world via the map. Well guess what? Tera online gives us two maps!

  The picture above shows us the area map. You can see quest npcs and waypoints of where you need to go to complete a quest. It also shows spots like campfires, vendors, trainers, etc. What is a campfire? A campefire quickly helps you restore your hp if you don't have any potions. In this game you don't quickly recover hp and mp aka swtor style, which made the game pretty boring in my opinion. (SWTOR not Tera.) You can toggle the area map on and off by pressing N.

   Here we have the classic map interface above me. By pressing M on the keyboard it toggles the interface and brings up my area in all its fine glory. *Sniff* I'm sorry folks, its been such a long time since I have seen such a great map interface I got all teary eyed. Time to move on.

     So now we are looking at the world map right above. From the previous picture there is an option called "Zoom out" right next to the "X" in the top right hand corner of the map interface that lets me zoom out of the map. Notice you can see where you are on the map, and its in the center. Charming, quite charming. Also a good thing to note is Tera starts you in a tutorial zone which is in fact the middle of the map where I am. I don't know about you, but I hate tutorial zones. It reminds me of Champions Online all over again.

        The above picture just shows what the game looks like without the area map. (N.)

 This is a unique feature I really enjoy in Tera Online. Walk near an aggressive mob and they don't charge you and try to kill you. Instead, they warn you with that exclamation mark above their head and the monster itself takes an aggressive stance and faces you the entire time. You can get away from the monster and it will no londer be hostile towards you. Stay near it too long and it will attack you. You can also just attack it.

Thats all for now. Before the beta ends I will play some more and give more thoughts on the game. This playthrough was only 30 minutes of goofing around and exploring the features. Could I been more in depth? Sure I could of but I wasn't. Until next time, Aesr signing off.

Quit SWTOR. Sucked Then, Sucks Now, Will Suck in 1.2 PT.1

Seems alot of SWTOR players have forgotten the rocky road torwards SWTOR's launch which stilll continues it's jagged path today but I'll try to refresh their memory. It's kind of hard to say anything good about the way Bioware handled all of this because most of it was bad.

I followed the SWTOR development on and off since 2008. Coincidentally, I was in my "star wars fanboy" phase and playing Star Wars: Jedi Knight Academy a ton. So you can imagine I was pretty excited when I heard about Star Wars: The Old Republic being in development.

Not only this but I was a huge Bioware fan after Mass Effect and Dragon Age: Origins.

I never paid attention to the forum that much except for a quick peek to see what the community was talking about. It's better to stay away from the forums before the game is released since it's mainly filled with people dreaming and hoping (sometimes dictating) about what will be in the game.

Some years later with Bioware releasing small amounts of content /information on the game, I start to get the feeling the game isn't all it was being hyped up to be.

 Well, that along with the EA Louse thing and Warhammer team working on SWTOR...

Fast forward. Bioware dodging questions, still barely any info on SWTOR, strict NDA beta.

 I actually managed to find more "information" on SWTOR and got into beta. I pretty much went along with the whole "It's beta! It will get better!" idea people usually use to justify their favorite game looking nothing like what they imagined.  And though I turned my hype meter off long ago after disappointing games like Warhammer and APB...There was something about this game that was...wrong.

Fast forward. Bioware focusing more on hyping SWTOR, launching with tons of bugs and broken features, Wiped forum of past evidence.

SWTOR is launching with it's "early access" plan over a seven day period. Not only was this probably the worse idea ever, but it made it the worse MMO launch I have ever experienced.

Basically, people who paid the SAME PRICE for the game had to wait in a "que". This que was Bioware letting players into the game in order by which month they bought the game. Now I hope you can imagine how much the forums were on fire at this time. It was the people who were already in the game proclaiming how well a job Bioware was doing vs. angry customers who were...well..angry.

Biowares' whole reasoning for what they label as a "staggered release" was you create a "smooth launch". In other words, they wanted to pretend the servers were stable and would NOT have player ques by letting players in slowly...

That would have been acceptable I suppose...if it actually worked. Which it didn't.

Not only were the servers dead and empty because of this, but there were STILL huge ques. I'm talking, "Wait three hours to get in the game." ques. Then I get into the game and there is barely anyone to play with for group content.

Fast Forward. Leveled up, dealing with tons of bugs (some game breaking, some just annoying) and forum wars continue. Also, tons of exploiters either getting rich off the Slicing. Which nothing was done. In fact, there is a post on the official forums asking how many are millionaires.

Bioware gets tons of negative feedback on the forum about the amount of bugs and broken content. My guild is literally raging, myself included, about how much of the game is either not working properly or just frustrating. Bioware seeks to remedy this by releasing patches.

Now...normally, patches are supposed to "FIX" the game. Most of the patches released either didn't fix what they claimed to be fixing, made things worse or went into the game in what appeared to be untested states.

They claimed to had fixed "ability delay" (When you attempt to click your skills, it won't work if it's right after you do another skill. This leads to you not really being able to time attacks or have fluent effective combat responses) which was still very much in the game. They released the notorious "Ilum patch". Now, EVERYONE knew this patch was going to completely destroy Ilum content. There were so many post about it on the forum Bioware just seemingly ignored.

Well, not seemingly, they DID ignore them because they went ahead and patch it anyways. And sure enough what happened? Here's a clue for those that don't play SWTOR:

There are two factions. One Empire and one Republic.What used to happen was these factions would take turns destroying each others "war assests" which I agree should have been changed. However,
 on almost EVERY server, the Empire outnumber the Republic about 3:1.

The patch Bioware added to the game was one that would FORCE players to fight each other OR collect these "armaments" which have a slow respawn, are only in ONE place and you have to gather 30 of them.

Not only did this destroy Ilum as a "world PvP" zone. It helped most of the Empire players max out their valor ranks in ONE day. They did this by camping the Republic base due to sheer numbers. The guns that were SUPPOSED to keep them out were not working properely (go figure Bioware) and there was low FPS.

What did Bioware do to fix this? Nothing. What did Bioware do to fix the fact tons of Empire/Republic players gained max or near max valor in one day? Nothing.


To be continued....I'll discuss how linear the game is, how broken the end game content was/is, how there is no soul to the game and why legacy 1.2 will not fix the core problems with the game.