Doomed to Fail - TERA's beginning and end

This might sound a bit dramatic, but Tera's early development was shrouded in controversy.
It turns out much of Tera's initial code was actually stolen from NCSoft's Lineage III project, as former NCSoft employees took off with the code and made TERA from it in BlueHole Studios. It's probably a contributing reason as to why Lineage III had never been released. This eventually led to the original developer team getting arrested in 2012, after a 4 year long civil suit. Sadly, this meant that the original dev team basically never managed to do what they had intended with the game, such as the housing, bigger social/rp features etc. Without the original team, the game was doomed to be an unoptimized mess of spaghetti code. And an unoptimized mess it was.

Tera went through a few phases over the course of its lifetime, and many will reminisce the most about the earliest phase, 2011-2012/3 or 2014 depending on who you ask, that was actually quite different from the direction the game went in later, combat wise and dungeon wise. Tera got a lot more fast paced and complicated over time, and as someone that experienced both (in 2020 the EU publisher ran a classic server event!) I can say I properly enjoy both types of combat, they both have a spot in my heart. A lot of people will say Tera got ruined when they released the first new class, Reapers, in May 2014, because it started the trend of releasing overpowered fotm classes. Some other oldfags will say the game became shit when it transitioned from sub-based to free to play in early 2013. Others will claim it was when the level 65 patch hit...

Anyway, I stand by what I said - a game that lost its core developer team pretty early on is bound to be directionless and unambitious. It would seem that towards the end of Tera's life cycle, when the devs that worked on Black Desert joined some of that ambition was brought back and a clear direction appeared, however sadly in only a couple years the team said they practically gave up on the game and decided not to work on it anymore, BlueHole Studios, well at that point KRAFTON, decided to shut Tera down. Its death was actually quite unexpected if I'm being honest, I predicted it would go on certain life support at least for a few more years because of whales and because a lot of MMOs go down this route but it would appear that was just pure copium.

Despite this negativity, it's not all doom and gloom in Tera, after all why would I even love this game so much? Rather, this was just an outsiders perspective from a very broad and wide angle, I believe this game had a lot of ruined potential - yet despite that it managed to keep me addicted all these years.

My personal history with the game

Part one:
Written on 24/04/2024

I first heard of this game in 2011 while it was still in BETA. It was on /v/ that I first encountered threads thirsting after the loli race of this new and hot Korean MMO with beautiful graphics. What I focused on wasn't just the unignorable thickness of the elin's thighs, but on how their ears bounced as they ran, and how floaty and light the animations looked like. Ever since childhood I would default to using female characters in games because they had vastly superior animations that felt light, elegant and quick. It seems like a small detail, but it's the first thing about TERA that caught my eye.
The next thing that I noticed was the combat. Up until this point, all I've known of MMO's was the tab target gameplay with less of a focus on i-frames and your own quick reactions, and more of a focus on careful positioning, planning ahead and slowly rotating your spells. TERA seemed to carefully combine these gameplay features synonymous with MMOs, remove the tab targeting and add action RPG combat with iframes to the mix. The fusion of all these things created a perfect combat system, that, for me, hasn't been topped ever since.

As soon as I found out about this game, I went to apply for the EU beta.

And I got in! Sadly for me, there was no way my 2005 PC could even dream of running this game. I was crushed. I shared my key on /v/, and helped some anon get into the game instead of me.
Afterwards, I followed a few of the beta /v/ threads, that eventually turned into /vg/ generals. I witnessed the first 4chan Tera guilds being born, and I was incredibly jealous seeing everyone having fun so I slowly stopped following the threads.

Fast forward to 2015, I got my first ever laptop in my 3rd year of high school. It was partially a gift for passing with great grades, and partially paid by myself. I got the laptop in May, and the first thing I wanted to do was download and install Tera.
I made my Steam account and noticed Tera had just released on Steam, what a coincidence. I looked around to see which region to play in, and I decided on NA because everyone said the EU publisher was awfully p2w and unenjoyable, meanwhile the american region seemed to have great publishers that were a subsidiary of BlueHole Studios (the korean publisher/developer) and therefore had preferential treatment and good staff.

The NA region introduced me to my biggest enemy - ping. I had never played online games that were so network dependant before, and sadly in Tera my ping was around 150, due to the servers being in Chicago and me all the way in Europe. This led to issues down the line - as I became a better player I couldn't be competitive with my dps since the combat was incredibly ping dependant. When I realized this I mostly stuck to the role of a healer. Before I got gud though, I was mostly trying to find my place ingame.

I was too shy to join an active guild right away, but I chose the most active pvp server for some reason, called Mount Tyrannas. MT was pretty fun, but the atmosphere was too elitist. To begin with, I wasn't too enamored with pvp but as a learning player I wasn't afraid of trying it out either. At that time when I started playing - the gunner class was released which means tons of noobs are bound to join the game (that included me!), coupled with the Steam release, it was a noob fiesta. That led to one of the most entertaining parts of pvp servers - ganking. There was a specific spot ingame fairly early on, right as you leave the newbie island. You are greeted by a town called Lumbertown (otherwise known as Lubetown in the ERP server... guess once why) and in that town you have a bridge that you need to cross. Naturally, the bridge acts as a bottleneck and since it's right outside of the safe zone, the gankers would group right at the bridge and kill everyone and anyone. I quickly joined the gankers and made a few friends, it was all done in good fun.

In my humble beginnings I shortly made a name for myself in Corsairs Stronghold (pvp battleground) as a pvp sorcerer. I don't know how I managed to be that good and get a high ranking so early on, especially at my high ping. Actually, I think the high ping was a contributing factor. Either way, I was still a massive shitter. I still felt very intimidated by the rest of the server and I lurked around for frendlier communities.