GW2, BnS, TERA

If you’re looking for something to play this summer, and you’re into MMOs, here’s some previews and a bit of (more) commentary on 2 Korean MMOs, and a bit more commentary on GW2.

Korean ones being BnS and TERA.

So, kicking off with BnS, this game is called Blade and Soul, and is currently still in the beta stage in Korea, so we won’t expect this in North America until 2013 – however, you can try out the game by googling atomix bns, a team that reverse engineered the 2nd closed beta and made a private server out of it.

I tried it – it’s very solid, but there’s only content until level 15, until they manage to fix the quest and let us progress until level 30.

The game is very beautiful to look at, more eye-candy for guys than anything… the best examples:

Environment very pretty too:

The main mechanic for blade and soul comes down to combos. You combo your skills to get a chain going to deal damage. The play-style for each class varies a lot. As of right now there’s 6? classes with 4 races. 2 look like human, one’s a chibi, and the other one has dark skin and are really, really tall…

There’s Kung-fu master, melee hand to hand combat that relies on blocks to continue combos, assassin, who can dash in and out, behind the enemy for combos, force master that uses mana charges and spells for combos, destroyer, who right click and win.. etc. You get the point.

Forward to about 7:00 to see the classes, some Slayer gameplay follows.. there’s top lane renekton in League afterwards.. skip that.

I went with the force-master, the rough translation of a mage.

Another key mechanic of the game is the ability to run:

For the most part in combat though, you’ll be stuck walking like this:

._.

As force master, basic spell-set:

Choking people to death:

What a standard character looks like with the first armor set you receive…

The zones vary a lot, from a zombie graveyard to tropical landscapes:

So of course, there’s swimming, but it’s not as deep as some other games.. just a novelty.

You can however run on water, and glide (double-tap space):

So you kinda fly..

Another reason why swimming sucks in this game, the water physics is dumb as bricks:

The NPCs in this game are kinda weird at times, and if you talk to girl shop keepers their boobs bounce up and down.. it’s weird.

And of course, your standard Korean quests: kill x, gather x, move x to this y.

During fly mode you can dive to get to the ground faster:

So yeah, if you want to try it out for yourself, atomix bns, look it up, get the client from the torrent (tpb search) and get their custom launcher. Check out the forums if you’re having trouble.

The game is like 10~ hours of gameplay max, provided you do the sidequests and solo the bosses.

The second one I wanted to talk about was TERA. This was recently released in the United States, and now that they offered a free 7-day trial… why not?

First thing I have to say is that this game has so many races and classes, it’s unreal. But more importantly, it looks gorgeous.

With unreal engine, wow.

Now again, because it’s a Korean MMO…

Quests galore, a la MapleStory style, collect this from this, return to me. Deliver messages from one NPC to the next. Get exp. YEAH.

You can use bombs in this game to start your fights, it’s pretty funny:

I went with the mobile warrior this time..

So TERA is basically your standard MapleStory turned into 3d with nice graphics. But don’t expect more – it has swimming and all that jazz but it’s just a very pretty grindfest. There are big and epic boss fights but what game doesn’t have those these days?..

It’s worth trying, but for 60$ purchase price + 15$ a month subscription… I just don’t see how it’s worth the money.

Video of me playing TERA, you see all the classes, etc. Skim a bit. SKIP TO 7:00

Now Guild Wars 2 on the other hand, is 60$, but no subscription. And you get great swimming fights, which is huge:

I hate sharks. Sharks OP.

I finally got to level 31 after grinding it out, doing all the Renown Hearts (quests) and a lot of dynamic events..

Got that set of armor with all the karma from events. 8D Too bad it’ll all be gone once the actual game launches T______T.

^video is great on covering all of the ways to level up in GW2. There’s so many options – if you just quest, you’ll find yourself really underleveled, but if you do all of that while exploring, you’ll be in the perfect zone/slightly overleveled in terms of exp progression…

Oh, been also playing a lot of League.

Can find videos here: twitch.tv/dervd

A special one concerning league:
Jungle lee sin, top lane renekton