TERA worth and related
For what it’s worth, I have played TERA, getting through basically half an encounter at GDC. Visually and viscerally, I thought it was pretty nice, but it wasn’t enough to make me want to check it out further.
“Media people just hate TERA. Especially you Gamebreaker folks, who never do their research and always get their facts wrong.”
This is somewhat related to my overall point, but us media folks do play a lot of MMOs. Just like an increasing number of fans, we’re getting tired of seeing pretty much the same stuff in games — and we’ve probably seen it in more games than you have.
As for the fact-checking part of things… you might be right on that, at least some of the time. I’d refer back to my “generalist” post to explain why we don’t know about every detail in every press release or every set of patch notes, but that’s only a partial excuse.
But it’s not like we treat TERA any different from any other game; we’re just as likely to make mistakes covering it as we are for anything else. There’s no hidden agenda, no TERA hit job that we’ve all secretly planned, not among the GBTV crew or any other media sites that I’m aware of. Sometimes, when a large number of people — particularly professionals in the field that they’re covering — say something bad (or good) about something, that’s because it actually is bad (or good).
That said, I think game developers could do a better job overall to make people aware of when they’re changing things in their games that people previously didn’t like — but that would be too much like admitting a mistake, which some people Simply Cannot Do.
Some companies, like CCP Games, are better at that than others, but the TERA PR seems to be in pretty much full-bore “Everything about our game is incredibly awesome” mode, which screams “BS” to people who’ve heard that kind of thing countless times before from countless other MMORPG developers.
And if I actually told you some of the things TERA‘s PR team told me in our meeting at GDC about the incredibly basic, “MMO Design 101″-style changes they were making because of player feedback…
Hey, if TERA looks good to you, that’s great. I hope you enjoy it. I’m just a gamer, like you are, and we’re going to have different likes and dislikes. Deal.