Guild Wars 2 Pre-purchase became available today, with the way Guild Wars 1 is GW2 is an instant purchase for me. Not sure when the next beta weekend is, but I can only hope it's not too far away!
I managed to sneak away a few hours last weekend to play the Tera US beta and I was overall slightly impressed. Unfortunately they didn't really innovate important mechanics; questing, travelling, skills, talking, running, jumping, it all feels strangely familiar and boring.
However, it's Tera's combat that really shines. There is no targeting, basically you swing your weapon and if an enemy is within the your hit box, the enemy gets hit. It really was a joy to romp through large groups of enemies swinging, slicing and dicing my dual-sword-wielding warrior. I do believe that this is the first mmo where non-magical classes are more enjoyable to play for me.
During the beta I rolled a Warrior (dual-wielder tank), Slayer (BAS tank), Sorceress, and a Priest. The Sorceress and Priest felt very limited at first as I was just spamming the same spell over and over again for the first several levels, however the Warrior classes were immediately fun and engaging.
The game is very pretty, all the character toons are hawt, with armors for both sexes that really dont make any sense as far as protection is concerned, but rather designed specifically to please the visual senses. This doesn't really matter to me, I enjoy looking at a fine female character during my travels in an mmo, that's just me. And, to be honest, that's a pretty big part of an mmo's enjoy ability for me.
Howevery, all of Tera's other mechanics feel very stripped, basic and boring. I leveled up my Warrior the farthest to level 13 and while I learned many skills I only learned 2 new skills, all the other skills were updating my already learned skills to the next level. Questing is very primitive, go here kill that, and even some delivering or receiving quests felt very thrown together as a great many of them were delivering and receiving merely a few feet away from the quest character right next to him, really? If it weren't for Tera's great combat, I would have turned it off way before the beta weekend was up.
What will make or break Tera for me, is the controls. The game mechanics scream for a gamepad, and the game works extremely well with an Xbox controller, however that's the ONLY controller that works with Tera. My PS2 controller hooked up via USB was instantly recognized by Tera and a helpful UI popped up with a button layout and what skill each button was mapped to, however the buttons were all switched around, the right stick for camera controls was switched as well (Y axis controlled X, and vice versa), and the left stick didn't work so I couldn't even move around.
I will be visiting this game every beta weekend I can get to to see how things have changed, but this will definitely NOT be a purchase unless it goes cheap or F2P much later after release. Time will tell.
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