Free to Play Game - Tera (PS4) Pros

Tera is a Free to Play and free to download MMO type game on a variety of platforms. I am playing it on PS4. I would imagine I have sunk 5 hours or so into it and it has some good points and some bad ones. The fact that it is free kind of doesn't allow too much criticism, but I'm going to anyway.

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So the game is quite a large download at nearly 50GB and this surprised me but also made me happy because this indicated to me that most of the game must already be contained in the base download. This is something that irritates the crap outta me about other MMO's I have played. There are so many patches not contained in the base file that the original download is just the tip of the download iceberg.

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Next comes the character creation and I gotta say that this is one of the most streamlined processes in an MMO that I have ever seen. The descriptions are great and it is quite easy to understand what the role of your new toon is going to be in a group. They also describe the "complexity" of a class on a scale, which is an excellent thing to include for new players.

You can choose the sex of your character (as you would expect) and the artwork on all the classes is extremely well done. The women are particularly emmmmm.... attractive and it should come as no suprise that a vast majority of the players characters you encounter in the game are female... and they all look like strippers.

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I chose a tank class because in the past I have always gone with ranged DPS of some sort and this usually means you have to wait a while for groups while tanks don't have that issue for some reason. Plus I have never really been a tank in any MMO so i figured I'd give it a whirl.

The introductory levels are nicely made, but you still spend a bunch of time learning the ropes and figuring out what the hell is going on. Your skills are introduced to you slowly (as you would expect) and it takes some getting used to (again, this is normal).

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You quite easily dispatch all enemies for the first couple of hours without any real difficulty. This is the way it should be. I have played some games out there where anything beyond the tutorial is honestly too hard for new players. This certainly was true with Guild Wars 2.

The thing that is really great about the game mechanics as I have discovered so far is that they are quite simplistic and this is necessary for a new player to not quit but there does seem to be a real art to it as well. There is a great deal of spatial awareness necessary in order to dodge enemy attacks and this is indicated by the orange space that lights up on the ground. Stay out of these and you can dodge a great deal of the damage that might be headed your way. While your skills do have cooldowns, they are not all uniform in the time it takes for them to do so. Therefore there is some real diversity in combat that is available almost right from the start.

This is something that the makers of the game refer to as "true action combat" and it is a welcome feature to these sorts of games since many other MMO's are pretty lacking in this, including GW2, which is my favorite of all time up to now.

I'm not jumping on the fanboi bandwagon just yet, because I have only been playing for a few days and I am still yet to join a party. Obviously typing is not going to be much of an option for chat so you are gonna have to overcome your shyness and use a microphone to talk to strangers when this happens. Of course this can introduce language problems for many people (me) because at least where I live, most of the players are speaking Chinese during normal gaming hours.

Since the game is free and so far the stuff that you can pay for appears to just be more and more slutty outfits for your stripper-toon, there isn't lot of instances that I have seen where real world money could offer an advantage. Perhaps I will find out about this later.

Although I can't say for certain, i believe that you must have PlayStation Network in order to participate.

So far I think it is pretty fun and is well worth the price of nothin!