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Whether with a mouse and keyboard or an Xbox 360 PC controller, the battle system of Tera is a treat. Clearing 'trash mobs' on the way to a boss is usually tedious and dreary in an MMO, but Tera's combat is frenetic enough that the player always feels engaged.

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However, the real plus of the combat is the way it makes killing regular monsters more than busywork. The game is loaded with larger-than-life monsters, both in dungeons (five man affairs currently-there are no bigger 'raid-style' missions available yet) and in the main world,where 'BAMs' (Big Ass Monsters) can be found. Once players get used to the flow of combat, Tera really shines. Early on, this leads to a lot of whiffing. This adds an element of strategy to boss battles as players must decide when to charge power moves, how much to charge them (they have levels-higher charges take more time to fully prepare), and to make sure the enemy hasn't moved during that time period. The catch is that there's no lock-on targeting and the enemies move as well.

The real-time combat allows for constant movement, with standard and charged attacks at the player's disposal. This is a brief introduction to the combat system-and a few minutes later players are back to level one and situated on what veterans lovingly call 'Noob Island.' The first time through, there's a sort of tutorial level-the newly minted character is suddenly level 20 and has some skills at their disposal. After setting up a character, the game plops the player into a world filled with conflict.

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When I discovered lag wouldn't be a cause for concern, the next challenge was learning how to actually play effectively. Naturally, there will be some variation based on the quality of the individual player's Internet connection, but those with a decent ISP shouldn't have an issue. The game will occasionally (like all online games) suffer from a 'lag spike'-but in almost 300 hours of playing, they've been few and far between. Fortunately, this is almost never an issue in Tera. Using an active, real-time system like Tera's sounds great on paper, but if there are any latency issues at all, the whole thing would quickly crash and burn as players tried to move or perform attacks that became delayed. One of the problems with implementing this sort of combat system is figuring out how to overcome lag between the player's computer and the game servers. Having said that, I admit that I wasn't sold at first. Having spent years playing various games with traditional MMO combat set-ups, Tera's battle system is sublime in comparison-and I'm not sure I'll ever be able to enjoy a 'regular' MMORPG after this experience. This makes the experience feel more like a traditional action-RPG than a standard MMO offering, and it is easily this title's greatest accomplishment. Rather than tabbing and targeting enemies while clicking buttons on a hotbar, Tera invites players to actively move and attack during each and every encounter. Why? In an ever-more-crowded massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) market, Tera distinguishes itself from the pack in one very important way: it features action-oriented real-time combat. Gamers who still crave level grinding and dungeon looting after exploring all the nooks and crannies of titles like Star Wars: The Old Republic and World of Warcraft ( WoW) might want to give En Masse Entertainment's Tera a try. WTF Why do all the female characters look like prostitutes? LOW Spending thousands of gold trying to enchant that engimatic weapon to +9. HIGH Getting a rare enigmatic drop from a dungeon boss.

Tera eldritch academy