Tera Begins Early Access – General Release Starts Tuesday, May 1, 2012

After a highly successful open beta weekend from April 20 – April 24, 2012, the new MMORPG (Massively multi-player online role-playing game) Tera began early access for pre-order customers on Saturday morning, April 28, 2012. As is often the custom with MMO’s, players who bought their copies of the game in advance were rewarded with a three day head start before the game begins its general release for North America on Tuesday, May 1, 2012. The highly anticipated action based, hack and slash MMORPG will be released on May 3, 2012 in Europe.

Tera originally debuted in South Korea on January 25, 2011, where it has enjoyed a great success in a country that thrives on computer gaming. The game was localized and reprogrammed for North America and Europe by BlueHole Studios and is being released by EnMasse Entertainment.

The game has created quite a stir in the online gaming community, especially over it’s highly original, action oriented combat style. Most MMO’s use traditional tab targeting, which means that once a target is acquired, the targeting reticule is locked on the enemy and all attacks will go straight to the target.

Tera has totally broken the mold and eliminated tab targeting from combat. When attacking an enemy in Tera, the player must constantly keep the opponent in their targeting reticule in order to attack. This mechanic adds a whole new level of excitement to game play, as skilled players will be able to dodge incoming attacks and more effectively strike their opponent. Many gamers have waited a long time for this innovation to come to online gaming and it should result in many epic battles.

Tera is also chock full of content, all brought to life with gorgeous, state of the art graphics. Unlike many games that originate in Korea, Tera is not a grind fest. There are literally hundreds of quests in a wide variety of lush environments. Players will be happy to know they wont have to kill the same monster thousands of times to get to the next level.

The quests are similar to those found in other MMO’s but they are challenging, well thought out and efficiently executed. The game includes an optional quest tracking system that highlights the location of every quest. At the current time, Tera has a level cap of 60, although that may be raised in the future when new content is added.

Players can choose between seven races and 8 combat classes for their characters. Once they finish designing and naming their character, players will enter into an epic struggle between good and evil in a world of fantasy and magic. The game features several servers that allow open world pvp (player vs. player) as well as pve (player vs. environment) only servers. Rounding out all that Tera offers are 15 monster packed dungeon instances for levels 20 to 60, a detailed crafting system, rideable mounts and an in-game auction house.

If you are looking for a visually stunning, highly playable MMORPG that has, perhaps, the most exciting combat system of any online game, you should defiantly give Tera a try. You may just find the game that will bring new life to your online gaming experience.

Note: Thanks to Aoishe and all the fine folks of the Yakuza Guild on the Jagged Coast Server and a special hello to Gali who reminded me that I was on a pvp server as I was gathering information for this review.