Russell's Tera Journal Day 4: Finally off Gilligan's Island

by: Russell - posted: 5/23/2012 8:33:00 PM

Seriously, I was starting to think the entire game took place on that stupid island.  However, when I left off after Day 3, I apparently didn't have much else to do.  I finished a couple quests, and then I was FINALLY ready to get off the Island of Dawn...at Level 13.  Granted I probably could have just followed the story quests, but after seeing what awaited me, that would have been a huge mistake.

After finishing the Island's quests, I went over to a pegasus flight trainer or whatever she's called, and hopped a pegasus to my next destination: Velika.  Think griffons in World of Warcraft and you have the basic idea.  However, the comedy keeps coming as I was short on money and had to go to the bank and withdrawl a few silver pieces to catch the flight.  Once in Velika, it reminded me of Stormwind.  In a way, I hate to keep referring to WoW in my looks at Tera, but since I have plenty of WoW experience (pre-Wrath) it's easy for me to compare the two, and when talking about MMOs today, WoW is pretty much the standard.  Anyway, once completing a few quests in Velika (including learning how to do some crafting and smelting), it was on to Lumberton for my next set of quests.  The quest lines there took me to two more areas for quests (all within the same zone), and here's where things get difficulty.

Guess what?  Everything's aggressive towards you now.  It's about friggin time!  Basically, on your radar, if an enemy is orange it's passive, and if it's red it's aggressive.  If you run or ride past an enemy (you get a mount quest in Velika if you're at least level 11) and the radar blip starts flashing, you aggroed the enemy, but it's easy to lose.  However, I've now come across two new issues that drove me batty tonight, and without these, I could have chopped off about half an hour of play time.  First, quests that just tell you to kill certain enemies sounds easy, right?  Well in Tera, not every kill will go towards the quest for that enemy.  I probably killed twenty-five enemies that were needed for a particular quests to get the twelve required to actually register.

The other issue?  Everyone's favorite enemy has reared it's ugly head: latency.  Now I understand that MMOs will have latency, but unless there's an option to turn on that I'm missing, there's no indication of latency right off.  However, it'll soon become apparent.  Enemies and even PCs won't fully show up, but they'll be there for you to interact with, attacks are delayed, and the worst of all, your health display isn't accurate.  Case in point, I had two "boss" fights (well, one boss, one unique quest monster) that I died on, but when I did, I swear my health bar showed at least 1400 HP remaning (and both times, the monster was under 20% HP left, if not much lower).  The latency progressed throughout the rest of the session.  It didn't make it unplayable, just irratating.  Here's hoping Day 5 will go much smoother.