Worst MMO Ever? - Tera

terra feels like you've invaded a victoria's secret fashion show and given everyone a giant medieval weapon apart from the one girl you've given a massive sci-fi laser cannon too terra is a directionless fantasy dress-up simulator with a combat system attached it is the mmo equivalent of playing with barbie's dream house and trying to recreate scenes from jojo's bizarre adventure terror is what would happen if an anime convention and an underwear model convention accidentally booked the same convention center at the same time and both sides got on far too well terra is a complete mess and yet is unapologetically fun because when it embraces what a mess it is it's actually extremely enjoyable ladies and gentlemen welcome i'm josh drivehayes and this is worst mmo ever a series where i play the worst mmo games i can find so you don't have to drop a like on the video or sub to the channel for more mmo stuff ring the bell for all the future notifications and as usual a massive thank you to all the supporters on patreon and twitch who keep the channel alive more on how you can support at the end for now let's begin today we are playing terror or the exiled realm of arboria now i'm willing to bet even some long-term terror players didn't know terror was an acronym and that's because while terra does have lore and history and character writing absolutely none of it matters this is a game where gameplay is the primary secondary and tertiary focus and all of the context and historical in-game info is just a rotting scrap on the pristine boot of the impossibly attractive characters terra is on steam it's free and it's actually sitting at the quite respectable mostly positive review score so let's give it a go now i've played terra before for quite a while actually but this version isn't the version i played because many years ago terra was also run by on mass and game forge two companies at the same time now both versions were basically the same but they had different servers and different monetization methods cash shops sold different stuff monthly optional membership was different prices but then on mass shut down and game forge took over everything so if you played this years ago and you go to log back on now you might find you've lost your character now my steam is actually old enough to have both versions of terror installed and if you go to the steam charts active players page you for some reason see the old terror coming up first with a whopping four people somehow still playing but the real terror has a much more respectable but still not exactly good player base of 476 playing right now so let's dive into this action combat mmo character creation and we're asked if we want to create an ellen so let's address the elephant in the room terra has a few different races but it just goddamn loves the ellen race ellens look like very young girls but they're actually thousands of years old so it's totally fine your honor the defense rests seriously terra is basically ellen simulator he'll see why soon the races in terror fall into two broad spectrums immensely over sexualized that would be your muscular humans sleek high elves or buff warrior lady castanics and the over-the-top anime races like the cuddly teddy bear potpourri or the stoic baraka so let's look at the humanoid races first terror is about style over substance and nowhere does it show this better than in the armor and if you think this is bad wait until we get to the cosmetic cash shop later it gets ridiculous terra men have muscles on their muscles they have negative body fat percentage hollywood a-list actors would look at this and say this is too much and the female characters look like you raided a teenage boy's dream i guarantee more development time went into the player model's legs than the entire storyline along with the impossible proportions many classes are race locked so if you want to be a valkyrie you must be a female castanic if you want to be a gunner you must be a female if you want to be a reaper you must be an ellen who are all female in fact ellen is the only race who can play every class in the game which means terror wants people playing ellen's make of that what you will now the classes themselves are actually quite fun i'm going to play as a brawler a reaction based tank who can block damage provided i block at the right time you can customize the face shape hair ear position and then preview the outfits you'll be able to progress through now this is where my terra is a dress-up game with combat attached starts to make sense terra puts so much effort into fashion it is more than half the game and not only do they have impossible costumes they also have no consistency of aesthetic or style terra has no specific time period no guiding artistic vision the design document is just the word excess written in giant anime font and many times terra actually adds in outfits from other popular culture things a few years ago you can actually get the mobility gear from attack on titan all official and that's still in the game there were a few months when terror was just errands and levi's chopping down massive monsters name my tank miss punchy and get to watch the intro movie let's enjoy this together for a bit the divine war sundered gods and titans destroying the world it was [Music] amid the tragedy a single drop of hope coalesced to preserve one tiny part sheltered from time a mystical tree grew giving fresh eyes the power to see the world as the gods once saw it the world's greatest scholars and magicians came to study the divine tree and protect it they magically erased the island from mortal records but not before the forces of evil sent their own champion i just need to point out this is the first intro movie there will be more and this first section the magical tree the sleeping children the invasion absolutely none of it will be relevant later it is just a completely separate tutorial area you can skip all of the dialogue and all of the emotion and all of the context of this area and you would miss absolutely nothing start the game and we are instantly met with a pop-up asking if we want to join the terror club the optional monthly paid vip service at least let me play the game before you start advertising things at me terra wasd movement spaces jump left click as primary attack right click is whatever your class's secondary attack is for me that's a timed block action camera so you aim where you look chapter glennick he needs me to collect some roots which are literally right next to him so we do that interact with stuff with the f key then we go and sue the crying child it seems the children born on this island have the sight which lets them see creepy stuff when they dream cool plot shame it doesn't matter at all this child anya has lost her doll zozo so we go and look for it in some nearby bushes then we question the other child jedran about why he hid anya's doll i question if the name writer has ever actually met any people with real names and now we collect some grass to fix the broken doll what a thrilling opening with the grass collected we open the inventory and interact with the doll to fix it give it back to anya and we're invited to a tea party we level up and get some shiny wing effects because of course we get a shiny wing effect on level up how else would we know we've leveled up okay so from a mechanical point of view this opening is actually okay we've been shown interaction talking collecting using items in the inventory it's not the worst now we're attacked by ghillie howls because calling them trees wouldn't be anime enough and terra now gets a chance to show what it can actually do really well terra is combat that's basically it it's a combat system with an mmo attached it's a combat system sometimes interrupted by plot it's a combat system with fashion sprinkled on it and as far as combat systems go it's actually really really good i'll show you later what this can eventually become in terror you've got your dodges you've got your iframes and you've got your combos when you gain skills which you'll gain at a breakneck pace you can chain them together and you auto chain by linking them to the spacebar key that way you can just mash spacebar to perform complex skill chains makes the early game fast and flashy but becomes useless when you get to harder bosses so it's a crutch for new players who want the spectacle but a handicap for endgame players who want to grind and don't want to learn what the skills actually do captain amen now tells us to go to the magical tree and we gain even more skills pressing k opens the skills list when you level up you need to go and buy the skills and as you level up you'll unlock upgraded versions of those skills and then glyphs which improve them further and honestly you can ignore this until the end game because the game showers you with powerful weapons and armor so this isn't really as important as it sounds at least not yet and you will always have enough money to buy all the skills you need forever hand in some more quests level up and gain even more skills then some powerful new weapons and armor and this is an important design choice terror never ever wants you to feel weak it will give you automatically and substantially better weapons and armor every other quest you will never need to grind for anything pre-end game you will drown in decent equipment you'll also gain multiple skills between combat encounters in the early games so fast that you don't get a chance to become comfortable with what a skill does before a new one is thrown at you pour some water on this tree and then the village is filled with monsters trust me if you're trying to keep up with the plot just don't you'll enjoy this game much better if you imagine you're a playboy model going on a violent anime themed lsd trip that is basically terror jalka says run it's the argons the argons are attacking as if that means anything to me so we fight back and it seems the argons are actually utterly pathetic because i'm a brand new character and i'm mowing them down with ease and now the game gets close to being fun the first mini boss is an argon predator monster and fighting it's actually really enjoyable but it's a scripted section and we need to lose have a chat with the valkyon federation the apparent good guys and agree to go and save anya seems the argons are sapping the life force out of the magical tree for reasons and this isn't super happy fun times for anyone so we need to go and stop them at least the combat's getting better and my new skill rampage just runs at something and punches it a lot which is simple yet remarkably effective find deplen he gives a speech about how we need to save anya it's all very emotional and then we need to light a signal flare so other valkyon federation soldiers can come and save him so i light the world's most pathetic flair then head into the temple of the great and magical tree another cut scene anya has been imprisoned for reasons and we fight to have her saved we have a rematch with the argonne predator from earlier which is another really nice fight and an example of how tara shines when it stops trying to be anything other than a combat system and then anya sacrifices herself to save us it's all very emotional this leads to multiple quests where we pass messages from one npc to another despite those npcs standing literally meters away from each other i hate this quest design it's incredibly lazy just have them talk to each other they are right there and then there's another cutscene unable to harness the tree's power the argons left content with stopping the divine sight without the seer's warnings the argon assault began in earnest the valkyon federation rallied the races together to defend against the argons but now more than ever they need strong defenders like you we get given an absolute ton of new items and introduced to the flight master now terra isn't one huge overworld it's several smaller apps all connected and moving between them uses the flight manager an actually quite nice preset flight path on the back of a unicorn these flights are enjoyable the first few times because you get a lovely controllable view of the land so you can get a feel for the general aesthetic of the area you're leaving or joining but they can get a bit dull once you've seen them for the hundredth time arrive in the main city of velika via this really impressive overland flight path then landing in the takeoff strip we're then given a flying mount just straight up given one no quest nothing needed just here have a flying horse some areas in terror are flight zones double jump while on a flying horse to begin flying cold shift for a speed boost flying drains your flight meter when it runs out you'll just glide gently down until you land now it's important to note as beautiful as the views from the sky are and as amazing as flying in the game is it was not designed for it the city was meant to be explored on foot and lots of the areas you can access by flying are completely glitched and broken and haven't been updated in about five years i remember when i played terra much more often i discovered in the opening city you could fly down into this jumble of wrongly scaled buildings and find a gap in the floor which lets you run underneath the city i'm amazed this gap is still here they've known about it for five years no one's fixed it this is what happens when you add flying to a game not designed for flying your cleverly designed perspective trick and depth illusions get revealed as badly scaled buildings and gaps in the barriers of the world now the scale of terror is remarkably impressive stuff is big like this giant wheel but it's all for show it's a visual treat but the game is just combat now i know terror fans will say oh the game has flying missions and crafting and faction quest and reputation grinds and yes i know but if someone said to me i want a game with crafting no one would recommend terror because honestly they weaken it terra's greatest strength is its combat it does combat incredibly well you cannot understate how much fun the combat in terror is if it really just leaned into that and advertised itself as the best combat mmo out there it would probably do better than including random unfinished unflattering side systems terror is combat terror is not historical depth or in-game law or fleshed out characters or an emotionally involving world terror is big weapons big enemies big battles and it does that exceptionally well so while we're trapped under the city let's just read some reviews satisfying combat style in mmo rpg still the best action combat after one decade i played tara since launch but i came back only to see they deleted thousands of people's accounts with no way to recover them seriously don't play this game don't give any money stay far away there is no justification to delete accounts it doesn't take much space to store that information the only reason to delete accounts is in hopes the whales spend more money i have played before but came back to the game recently i forgot how absolutely beautiful the graphics and artwork are in this game just gorgeous if you hate your life then play this game boobs good back in 2012. now it's just a mediocre free-to-play mmo i mean the devs don't understand how to develop good content and the community is dead since 2018. all the leveling and stuff is made faster which means the entire story has cutouts now really disappointed after coming back to this game in years my founder account got deleted nice next up is the traditional talk to everyone in town quest and we get to expand that inventory by paying in-game gold which is nice and then we get given some new armor which i can only describe as jiggly if you were playing this video in the background or on your second monitor and you switch to it just because you heard the world jiggle you now have to like and sup this worked before in the skyforge video therefore i'm using it again talk to more people get invited to join the valkyon federation and watch the actual intro movie again this is the third intro movie this is also the original and has not been updated graphically velika city of wheels capital of the valkian federation and bastion of civilization on the continent of our room we've gathered here human high elf aman baraka kastanek popori and ellen to withstand a menace we could not face alone the argons across the sea on the continent of shara our armies are fighting the argonne threat to a standstill for now [Music] but the argons aren't the only danger not by a long shot with our army on the argonne front monsters on our frontiers have become bolder they've plundered entire towns and we can't let the home front collapse now we chat to sumail and this always blows my mind every time i return to playing terror see if you can recognize this voice [Music] everyone is asking me about what you did on the island of dawn don't get cocky impressive to them but it takes more than that to impress me and i have little tolerance for glory hounds like you these days no sense of proportion samael is voiced by michael hogan a fantastic actor best known for playing colonel's soul tie in the rebooted battlestar galactica tv show one of my favorite shows he tells me to get the frack out of his office and sends me to crescentia to solve some local problems crisentia is the traditional forest village settlement you start every other mmo in we're shown the local teleportation system to get from place to place within a map and now the grind begins early on in this incredible kill x amount of enemies storyline we are given a relic weapon this will be our weapon until we are given another you upgrade the relic weapon with relic shards you'll find drops nearby the relics system was designed to help players catch up to end game and get to the real content but it also completely invalidates all weapons or armor drops before max level the game knows that what you're doing now does not matter this is essentially an extended and unnecessary tutorial the entirety of the early game is talking to npcs you won't remember to kill enemies you won't be scared off to push through a storyline you won't have a revisit you could complete every early game quest spamming left click i'm only using skills because i like the flashy animations and the nice solid sounds any plot line any storyline any character emotion that is built up in this early game will be completely irrelevant when you change maps kill some enemies loot some chests and gain some levels early game terror is as mindless as they come so let's break up the monotony and look at the complete insanity of the in-game shop terra is a game forge game and game forge like being consistent with their in-game shops all game forge games use the same shop layout and all of them sell the same things so let's start with some cosmetics terra is a dress-up game and it's extremely important you understand this terror has zero aesthetic consistency in its game or its shop designs you've got complete outfits weapon overrides helmet overrides back slot items even mounts and pets with absolutely no through line of design stability imagine that you asked every single edgy teenager in a high school to draw what they saw was the coolest strangest or dumbest cosmetic override they could think of and then you added all of them that's how tara is want to make your brawler gloves look like foam dinosaur heads you can do that want to look like an ancient chinese warrior princess yeah that's in there or how about a swat team police officer or a school girl or a waitress or a giant panda they're all in there how about wearing a cool flowing cape or a tiny backpack yeah they're both for sale and for your mount you could have a giant fire-breathing dragon or a pig which looks like a motorbike or how about an actual car just a straight-up car complete with tire marks and a horn in all its dumb anime glory or a sci-fi spaceship looking straight out of wipeout or whatever the hell this is if you can think of it it's in terror terror is a dress-up game with combat you could remove everything except the cosmetics and the actual combat and you would still be left with terror so how much is this going to cost you well the premium currency is called fowler and a decent amount will set you back 299 farlas you can buy the 480 pack for 25 pounds or the 5100 pack for 200 pounds and once you've finished buying your overpriced cosmetics you can spend the rest on some pay to win stuff because of course it's got mechanical advantages in the shop you want experience boosters movement boosters teleport scrolls items stat boosting stuff unsocketing re-socketing binding unbinding upgrading stuff it's all there for you to buy some of the expensive pets even loot for you or provide passive buffs and bonuses it's pay for advantage city if you've got the money tara's got the costumes and the boosts for you so back to the game we begin to grind toward the dungeons because dungeons are honestly the only thing you'll be doing once you unlock them because they give you insane amounts of experience gold and items thankfully the early game quest all handily marked on your map showing a number and a general area to find those enemies and the quest enemies have an exclamation mark by their name if you ever get bored with an area by the way press m to open the map and you can see each area and zone broken down by level recommendations you at least have a general guide of where you could go to oh good an escort mission everyone loves those about an hour of mindless grinding later if you put a gun to my head and ask me what the plot of this whole section was i would just tell you to pull the trigger i don't know no one knows not even the writers remember what the plot of this map is and i guarantee when you get to the end of the game none of this will matter at all there will be no callbacks and nothing will be relevant later level up and get an unreasonable amount of skills all thrown at me at once thank god for those auto spacebar chain systems because without that i'd probably not even know i had some of these check the in-game mail and get showered in free gifts the game just cannot help itself it has to give you things to make you feel valued and loved and wanted and hope you stay and oh look a free immersion breaking cosmetic it's the jumpsuit from squid game everyone gets this what fun more proof terra is a dress-up game with absolutely no idea what its own internal law or culture or aesthetic even is oh we're also given a free limited time griffin mount for good measure finally we get a quest to go and kill some bams or big ass monsters and i didn't make that up that's actually what the game calls the bams show up as diamonds on your minimap and are much harder than the trash mobs they're also the only thing that's actually quite fun to kill all the big attacks are telegraphed either by the red on the floor or the red flash of the eye giving you the chance to dodge if you're not a tank or block if you are you'll also notice while fighting these orbs called moats fall off the enemies they can refill my health and mana so the best way to recover in a fight is to attack more which is an excellent feedback loop for encouraging aggressive gameplay the same thing doom did with giving health and ammo for more brutal kills if you want the player to be aggressive reward them for being aggressive finally after another few hours we unlock the first dungeon the bastion of loke you can enter each dungeon with a party or choose the solo version the plot line requires you to do the solo one and i'm fine with this i think all mmos should cater to both groups and solo players makes the experience more inclusive and here is where terra actually really begins dungeons the trash mobs are pointless you can just run past them every dungeon is several bigger more set piece boss fights they are what matter and more often than not they're actually really really good the first dungeon sees us fighting a huge rock elemental who attacks by spinning his own body around meaning we need to block or dodge often and then an area of effect attack which switches sides rapidly meaning a party would need two tanks and then later a giant charging minor tour with a ton of smaller mobs swarms us the boss fights in terror are great there is no denying that this is why you play the game if all you want to do is log on smash some super over the top anime style boss with a massive weapon in a party of overly sexualized flashy adventurers some of whom may be dressed up in attack on titan gear some in squid game jumpsuits some who look like school girls and some who look like sci-fi pandas then terror is absolutely the game for you with the first dungeon down we head back to velika and get treated to yet another cutscene we've noticed your valor on the home front soldier you've saved countless lives military and civilians and exposed a conspiracy that threatened the entire federation you've gone above and beyond the call of duty so on behalf of the federation i hereby promote you to centurion go forth soldier and bring us victory for valkyon [Music] so we're now a centurion in the valkyon federation probably much to the annoyance of the soldiers lining the path for us they've been working for years and are still guards we turned up smash some minotaur and get a promotion within three hours now we need to do about six or seven more hours of pointless story grinding to hit end game and start grinding the dungeons to unlock relic fragments to get the better weapons to grind some more this is terra have fun you know what upsets me most just how many fantastic environments have been lost to the increased grinding speed and the end game focus of this game there is no reason to leave the forced linear path from start to finish despite the fact that leaving the path is actually amazing i remember leveling through an abandoned magical school infested by evil clowns and jugglers and it was fantastic a crystal cove filled with rock worms a lava minefield with giant flying wasps the environments and visual extravagance of terror is just sublime and it's worth playing if you're a graphical tourist just to see how over the top something can be terra looks and sounds interesting and excessive and it's worth seeing for this video i made a new character to experience the start but out of nostalgia i decided to hop back onto my old main brawler to see how things have changed at the end game and they've advanced a lot i attacked this enemy who i used to just grind for experience and because of the excessive power creep and the level cap increase these stupidly high numbers terra now deals with show that even though i'm hurting the enemy it's not even registering as 0.1 percent of its total health this is power creep to the extreme so i check my mail and the game has given me some welcome back items including armor and weapons which boost me up by millions of damage points and hundreds of thousands of defense points remember when i said terror doesn't want you to feel weak it wants you to feel powerful and get you to the end game quickly enough so you can just start grinding for even more slivers of power this is proof i also discovered starting a new terror character is much easier than returning when you return to tara after a break the systems will have moved on the items you have will be obsolete and you will be worthless you're basically as worthless as a fresh character and it'll take you as much time to gear up your old character as it would if you just start a new one terra is the video game version of a dessert shop they do one thing really well desserts sweet sticky sugary desserts if the dessert shop suddenly started offering things like salads or selling shoes or art or chips or chinese it wouldn't work and that's how terra feels with its crafting and flying missions and fishing and faction influence and all the extra bells and whistles stick to selling desserts stick to combat it's what you're good at out of pure nostalgia i took my high level character for a fly around through all the locations i so fondly remembered and i discovered something even sadder terra's world is gorgeous and vast from the deep forges of the massive metal mines to the open plains and snowy vistas terra has a huge detailed world but because the focus is on end game dungeons no one will ever see this there is no reason for this world to exist anymore the quest lines which used to take you to these areas are now replaced with dungeon cues and blitzing levels to higher level dungeon cues and when i did manually walk over to my favorite old dungeon the labyrinth of terror i felt even sadder the enemy design is so good it's over the top stylized creepy excessive terror is a visual treat but it's now just languishing in obsolescence 95 of the game has no reason to be played no one has any reason to go to this dungeon no reason to see this huge creepy sci-fi guardian the giant clown boss halfway through or to take on the ancient god of murder and even if you did the game is going to give you items so powerful you kill them all in one hit terror through releasing expansions has actually reduced the size of its game and it's a real shame because a lot of it was really good there is no one left to marvel at this generator or look at these twisted sculptures of torsos screaming terror is an exercise in visual excess and it is without a doubt a fantastic combat system which unfortunately over time has become streamlined to such a practical degree they've designed the variation that they have out of being worth playing it's less of an mmo adventure and more of a dungeon based line and all this has been happening as the visual style becomes suffocated with the cosmetics becoming more and more wacky and zany it follows the path so many other desperate games have followed trading in its original unique visual identity for the quick sales of stupid immersion breaking garish over-the-top cosmetics terra stopped being a world a long time ago and it's now a vehicle for cosmetics and when your entire existence becomes warped and molded around selling whatever looks nice you become a dress-up game with a beat-em-up attached terra used to be a decent mmo with an interesting world and great bosses and engaging combat with some actually quite punishing difficulty spikes and a thriving player base allowing parties to form quickly plus when you get your class to max level you can follow a complex apex quest to unlock even more powerful versions of your skills pushing the combat system even further terror used to be great combat inside a great fantastical world now it's barbie dress up with linear combat based paths which end in grind which is somewhat ironic because the steady stream of gameplay catch-up updates each intended to keep the player in the action to get the players to the end game fun bit did that by removing a vast majority of the adventurous enjoyable bit the world you so lovingly created doesn't need to be explored the items which are so varied don't need to be found the armor which has such great graphical consistency based on the actual area you collect it in doesn't need to be worn the quests which all actually have unique writing to them don't need to be followed terror was so focused on making you feel important and keeping you in that important moment it removed any and all reason for you to go and want to do anything that would make you feel important terror is the equivalent of being given something and not earning it so to end the review i will award terra anime obsessed underwear model martial arts masters playing dress up out of ten cheers for watching thank you again to the supporters on patreon and twitch who keep the channel alive you can support from only one pound a month check the video description for links to the patreon twitch twitter discord and the new second channel josh drive plays where i review classic video games voted on by you and as always have a great day you

Channel: Josh Strife Hayes

Views: 1,176,708

Keywords: mmo podcast, mmo discussion, mmo design, mmorpg youtuber, mmo news

Id: PLQJ8sStYlg

Length: 31min 7sec (1867 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 12 2021