TERA

[Shrinweck]

Was never really all that interested in this game, but I managed to grab a head start serial number, so I get to play during head start this weekend for free and see what it's like. The combat certainly sounds like a breathe of fresh air and the art design is somewhat reminiscent of Aion, which is a positive in my eyes.

There are a lot of interesting mechanics now that I've bothered to read more about the game. Might not be able to get out of this one without buying it and playing out the first free month. At least I get to try out the finished product before plopping down the $50 for it, though. Damn it, if Diablo came out this week this game wouldn't even be on my radar. First world problems *sigh*

[Shrinweck]

This game was pretty cool and I ended up buying it. I played through the first instance yesterday and had a blast. I'm not sure what it is but for some reason grouping in this game is a blast, even if the moment to moment questing is about as formulaic as MMORPGs get. The combat is, as advertised, very involved and fun.

SWTOR has left me somewhat spoiled for quest collection, but then again it's kind of nice to just skip over a wall of text that's basically a standard fetch/kill quest. I do really miss the storyline branches and there aren't any factions in this game that drive the PvP or split quests.

The game runs really well and the graphics are the best out of any MMORPG I've ever played. I like the way that in crowded areas that instead of completely destroying the experience with lag or frames per second drops by forcing your machines to load everyone's model, it just doesn't draw them until it can do so without affecting gameplay. While this sometimes makes for some awkward moments in battle where you're smacking around an invisible monster with a name above it, it is also good at prioritizing and it gets drawn in a couple seconds.

[Don]

Um every game since WoW already does what you describe. For example in SWTOR take your speeder and just go into an instance and keep going, you'll often physically run past something without even seeing it because it hasn't rendered it on your screen (models for whatever inside the instance is not loaded until you go inside). In WoW when you heartstone to your bind you often don't see any NPC for a while even though they're there because it hasn't rendered them yet. You might see this more often if the game is more intensive on graphics but it's definitely there.

TERA looks like a pretty standard MMORPG. I think having to actually aim your swings or whatever they're doing might get tiresome after a while, though it's a Korean MMORPG so it probably at least has all the basics down. Probably not going to have time to play another game with Diablo 3 and Civ 5 expansion coming soon so I'll pass on this one.

[Shrinweck]

Having to aim gets old only as much as it would in any third person RPG. Which is to say not at all if that's what you're into. It's integrated like any action game, rather than clunky like you would expect in an MMORPG.

Also I know that has been done in every MMORPG. It just hasn't been done very successfully because having tons of people forces some kind of degradation in PC performance in these other games. For example, TOR and Rift were fucking terrible at this, and with Rift's emphasis on 30+ people fighting huge monsters this was a deal breaker for me. I'm saying in TERA there is next to no performance loss.

Oh and in a strange oversight by the devs something as innocuous as "looks like" gets caught by the profanity filter but you can tell someone to "go fuck themselves in their shitty assholes" and none of that gets caught.

[Don]

I think the invisible stuff is models that hasn't even been loaded so there's obviously no performance issues since it's not even there. If you don't care about getting hit by invisible stuff it's no big deal, since since you can usually fight back.

When you got like 30 players presumably the game always has these basic models loaded but displaying 30 player's worth of polygons is probably too much to handle.