TERA now F2P

So, I'd been poking around, looking for a game to play to keep my brain occupied. I wanted something free to play, mostly because with my crappy internet, there was no way I would want to pay a subscription for something I'd only be able to play a handful of hours a week. Someone had posted a comment on my Blade and Soul review that the game was super awesome, so I decided to check it out.

On Blade and Soul's FAQ, one of the questions asked if the game would be implementing game play features that are in Guild Wars 2. The answer was, of course, that Blade and Soul, like Guild Wars 2, offers innovative mechanics and such that basically change up and revolutionize the MMO industry. That got me thinking.... TERA was pretty interesting, too, with it's action-oriented combat. The graphics were pretty, questing wasn't bad. What was the cost of it again? Hell, how was the game even doing since my original pre-view of the game and my review of it during its CBT testing. It'd been over a year since I pre-viewed the game and at the end of this month, it'll be a year since I participated in the CBT testing.

So, I poked around at TERA's site. And, much to my surprise, it became free-to-play. I really do mean that I was incredibly surprised by this. To me, TERA was going to be one of those games that would have remained subscription-based like World of Warcraft. Or, at the very least, would convert to that pay-for-the-game-but-pay-no-subscriptions model that Guild Wars 2 uses.

"Why the sudden jump?" I had asked myself as I looked at different forum threads and such discussing this. Evidently TERA switched over to the F2P model just over a month ago on February 5th. I know that there is a push in the gamer community to remove subscription costs in MMOs; hell, it was part of the reason why a) I stopped playing WoW and b) found private servers after a while. So, I'm not terribly surprised by this information.



I was initially very, very happy about this. I enjoyed TERA when I participated in the beta testing and if it was free, hot damn, count me in! However, there was definitely some grief among the players with this switch. The reason? A different type of subscription. Not a necessary one but one that gave you significant bonuses if you did pay for the subscription. Forget a cash shop system (though people do complain about that because you can get reputation, experience, and other sorts of boosts in-game through it), there is now a difference between F2P players and "Elite" (aka VIP/subscribers) players.

Why the gripe with this Elite status? Well, you get reduced cooldowns for entering dungeons AND can enter dungeons twice as much (evidently there's a cap in-game as to how many times you can run an instance in a day)--which seemed to be the biggest complaint, aside from the previously-mentioned boosts (which are for one hour per day). You also get some free consumable items and a free mount and discounts for various services in-game. Others worried about their subscriptions that they bought and are now worthless; En Masse is compensating players for that with giving them Elite status for the same amount of time as their remaining time on their subscriptions, rounded to the nearest 30 days, which is pretty cool.

If you already had an account prior to the F2P launch, you get to be called a "Founder" which basically means your account doesn't change at all. There was a character slot limit in-game, up to 8 characters, originally. Now, Elite and completely-F2P players start out with 2 character slots and can purchase more, while while Founders keep their original 8 slots. Founders also get the Founder title in-game and other small perks, which is nice, in my opinion, for En Masse to offer.

Most of the players are worried that this will create a huge gap between the F2P players and the Elite players and that this new system will create a "pay-to-win" environment. I redownloaded TERA last night and, so far, I haven't seen any evidence of it. Then again, I AM only at level 9. There has supposedly been new content released with the F2P launch but I haven't come across any yet. So far, things seem just like the same ol' TERA that I tested in CBT almost a year ago. I hope it doesn't become a pay-to-win game as the developers seemed really interested and invested in making TERA as appealing to as many players as possible.

Is it worth a shot? Absolutely! Especially now that it's F2P. If a subscription or base game cost deterred you from playing this back then, you have no reason not to play this game. If you'd been curious about it or had heard good things about it, I can tell you that it's definitely worth checking out at the very least. I definitely recommend you at least download it. With the F2P launch, En Masse also offers a smaller initial download. Called the "Happy Cloud" (which I personally approve of), the cloud downloads the bare minimum necessary to start the game and create a character-- 2.6G of files, roughly. After that, you're good to launch! The rest of the game downloads in the background, which allows you to [hopefully] get up and running quickly so that you're not stuck downloading the total game files, which is over 25G.

So, unless you just don't like MMOs (Which, if you don't, why the hell are you reading this?), definitely give TERA a try.

Have any questions, comments, etc.? Have a game you want me to check out or review? Feel free to let me know! Drop a comment below, send me an email, tweet, or FB message--links are on the left for those! You can subscribe via email on the left, too! I love hearing feedback from people! This is Little Miss Squish, happily playing this game when my internet allows me to.

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