Russell's Tera Journal Day 3: Is everything on this island friendly?

by: Russell - posted: 5/16/2012 6:58:00 AM

If I were to write these like an actual journal entry, this one would probably start out as follows:

"Tera Day 3.  Still on the Island of Dawn.  So many people need help, but if it means finding out Elleon's fate, I'll do what I can.  The inhabitants of this island seem to be entirely friendly.  Even the strange creatures I come across just kind of stare at me until I move away unless provoked." (insert National Geographic theme)

Seriuosly, I'm still questing in the Island of Dawn and have been all around it, and no enemies are hostile when you get near them, only when provoked.  To compare once again to World of Warcraft, unless you actually sit and grind for a bit, you're likely leaving the starting area at about level 4 or 5, hitting your first inn in the next area, and then moving on to hostile creatures.  Here, I'm about halfway to level 13 and I've only had one group of enemies hostile towards me, it was a specific creature I had to defeat for a quest, and I think the "hostile" part was a fluke.  I was gathering loot that one of them dropped and they respawned around me and attacked me.

That is one good thing I like.  If you need to kill a specific monster for a quest, they respawn pretty quickly (I'd say within twenty seconds it seems).  However, I have discovered a new annoyance.  When your quests are listed on the side and on the mini-map, a symbol appears next to the quest to let you know its status: a star means it's ready to turn in to complete the quest chain, a question mark means it's ready to turn in to move to the next quest in the chain, and no symbol means it's still in progress.  Problem is, these symbols can also show up on the mini-map to show you where to turn them in, and the symbols by the quest explanations on the right will overlap the mini-map, so sometimes I think I'm heading to where I need to turn in the quest, only to realize I'm heading towards the symbol next to the quest explanation, if that makes any sense.

I did find out though that while the game said to use a controller it had to be a PS3 or Xbox 360 controller, that's not quite true.  I had my Logitech PC controller plugged in and out of curiosity gave it a shot.  It works, so I'll be likely trying my next session with that to see how it feels, but I'll likely use a mouse and keyboard for the most part.