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Impression from Korean stress test player
stayontarget
Member RarePosts: 6,519
A review of the Korean stress test by neg0tti at Tera-Online.
Note: neg0tti is a FGT tester for the NA/EU client and cannot talk about that, but the Korean client has no NDA and is free to speak about the stress test.
Link to orginal thread: http://www.tera-online.com/forums/showthread.php?t=12176
My experiences of the Korean stress test!
Anvi, Vicia and me taking a little pose shot before servers went down. 
After many hours of awesomeness, the servers went down for the time being, so i decided to write a small review of whats happening in the lands of Arborea. First of all, it was ******** great to get back on track playing some good mmo after a long break, even after 3 days of exping and exploring, i feel rejuvenated from this gaming experience. I ended up with a lvl 21 ½ high elf female archer, a lvl 10 aman female lancer, lvl 5 high elf slayer, lvl 5 baraka sorc. I didnt end up playing slayer or sorc more, because of the issue that i was playing+streaming all the time from Finland, while the servers were in Seoul South-Korea. Latency was a big factor in this test and
i believe the hangame people were driving some stress applications under the servers. I was running on a 8 mb download / 1 mb upload internet connection and i had around 300-500 ms latency, that is basicly horrible for anykind of online play. We must take into consideration that the distances were huge and it was a stress test, our servers will be a quite different story since the distance from your computer to the server will be 1/10th of what i had.
Ok to the point! First computer specs!
Amd Phenom II x4 945 @ 3750 mhz
Sapphire radeon Hd 6850 1gb x 2, in crossfire and overclocked
4x1 gb kingston hyper x ddr 2, cl 5
2x 500 gb western digital hdds
Win 7 ultimate 64 bit
Ati Catalyst 10.11 0xaa, 16xaf,no vsync
Tera resolution 1680x1050 and later 1920x1080
All details MAXED
Game Engine
First i will kill all the speculation from the Crossfire/sli/dual core rumours.
While being online, streaming and frapsing at the same time my CPU was running all 4 cores at 80% usage, meanwhile both of my radeons were at 70% usage. Yes it does support both, so we dont need to argueabout it anymore. Fraps benchmark showed me fps rates from 20 to 70. Without all the treats for your eyes, i could hit average of 60 to 100 fps, but i had a lot of computer resources pulled for the stream + fraps. A few times while loading new zones, fps dropped to 1, but then bounced back as usual. Happens in many mmo games with loaded servers. Nothing special, and i expected it to happen a lot. Hence this was a Stress test.
A lot of improvements from the older revisions of Tera, there was that model bug once or twice on my hardware, mostly in Velika. The bug caused some of the shader models to load wrong or something like that,it caused blurry gfx in some models. Not a big issue to fix I believe. I also got stuck to the ground maybe 2 or 3 times, but i think it was because of serverside lag, instead of the client.
Gameplay
The whole game has been polished a lot, new skills and ui tweaks make the whole experience of the game much more straight forward and I think Tera is easy to learn, but hard to master. Just the way I likeit. I focused on that archer mainly, and i had a huge smile on my face from lvl 10 to 21 while playing, the new skills are just so damn awesome!It was an exciting feeling
every second level, when you could go get new skills. Allmost like xmas.
Even tho the serverside lag caused me some problems with the spammable attacks,i was able to solo nearly everything that i tried, except those fat blue wind elementals ( lvl 23 elites ) If i was playing in a > 100 latency enviroment, as i expect from eu/na servers, things would be much different.
The problem with the spammable attacks was that the latency caused the archers/zerkers main attack to shoot once, allmost put their weapon down and then shoot again, when on low latency you can spam it like no tomorrow. So i´d say most classes attack abilities were at 60-70% performance compared to a normal server.
I wont comment on the class balance because the koreans declined my pvp and pk flags all the time. Had 4 duels, won 3, lost 1, even with the 400 ms latency.
Difficulty
The first 10 levels are quite easy, even in the korean client that will most likely be harder in xp/grind than what we are getting. Monsters dont do any
special gimmicks against you. When you get to 17 or up in levels, you start to
notice how the monsters start to evade your stuns, they try to go around and flank you and they come more and more agressive. I had this feeling all the time that when you level up, the monsters level up with you. Its hard to explain, but you will understand when you get to play in the lvl 20+ areas.
Exp curve is something that i wont comment on since it will be different in the eu/na than in korea, most likely.
Do i read korean or how did i manage to get to 21?
The answer is no, the campaign system for questing is very easy to understand, yet i feel that it gives you the possibility to follow Teras storyline from the beginning. I would see it as a priority to finish the campaign quests before advancing to the next leveling zone. It will make you go to all parts of the Eastern continents of Arborea, so you will actually learn to know the place. Who wouldnt want to go for a Tera sightseeing tour right now? 
I just loved the large desert village in the southern parts from Velika. Outside of Pora elinu was very very pretty too, quite magical i´d say. Also the harbor village was very pretty, and the captains island was looking very cool, i should have tried to go there!
Something else
It was awesome, waiting for OBT to continue my adventures, maybe with a different class though. ( crosses fingers that there is no wipe )
If i had time to play tomorrow, ( servers will be up 5 am to 5 pm gmt+2 aka my time) i would have gotten the horse mount, it costs 210 000g, i had 170 000g saved up. It required lvl 20 to purchase, didnt see any quest for it. I am very dissappointed in myself because of this, if i had skipped one armor from the auction house, i´d had the horse.
Links and other information
Stream/vod URL : http://www.livestream.com/neg0tplaysstuff About 8-10 hours of gameplay footage and bad music here.
760 pictures from the stress test : http://s1026.photobucket.com/albums/...0t/neg0t/tera/
ps : dont bother to comment on the 50 viewer limit/horrible stream music or any other weirdness that might have occured during the streaming.
pps : there will be plenty of language errors here, but disregard those.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
Comments
the greatest game.. ever made.
Thank you so much for posting your experience with the Korean Stress Test! I had a couple of questions out of curiosity. I was wondering now that the Korean closed beta test phase 4 is done, do you know if there is going to be a phase 5 or 6 in the works or maybe even possibly moving to open beta testing or if the company has listed a tentative 2011 schedule for the Korean beta testers? The other question is can you alt tab to minimize the game?
Oh and one last question. Do you have a favorite zone/music and if so why? O:
High Elves all the way!
Blue hole studio stated that open beta in Korea will start in Dec if the stress test goes well. The stress test are over so we should expect the results in a few days.
Tera is still on track to launch in NA/EU 1Qtr of 2011.
Alot of the zones have not been seen yet (there are 80 of them so far) but you can find a few video's of them here. http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tera+kor+-+zone&aq=f
Field Music can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/user/TeraMusicGuru
or Tera ost here: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tera+online+ost&aq=f
Yes you can alt-tab out of the game & can play in window mode.
Sadly I did not partake in the testing but you can find the org poster link my 1st post.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
Uhm, I feel like purchasing this game and play it
Yanno I keep looking at the TERA models, and I can't help but feel that while pretty, they're not particularly special. And yet, whenever I see screenshots, there's a bit of a Wow factor ('Wow' as in, gasp, not the acronym) and I think I finally figured why. The world is stunning. It's bright and colorful without looking like it came from a coloring book (this time I AM referring to the acronym). Still not entirely sold on the game, but it's insane amounts of pretty o.o
Hopefully there will be some kind of beta or trial for NA/EU version. I'd enjoy running around looking at stuff.
"Forums aren't for intelligent discussion; they're for blow-hards with unwavering opinions."
EnMass is planing on having another FGT test first, then they will move on to CB and from there OB and launch. They have not given the start dates yet. So us NA/EU peeps have to wait a few more months.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
Spiffy! Thanks for that.
"Forums aren't for intelligent discussion; they're for blow-hards with unwavering opinions."
you worry about graphics too much
Awesome thanks so much for the OST, field and themes music links. You gave me a much clearer picture now on what steps both the Korean and NA/EU beta phases might be like. I am kind of shocked that the release for this game is on track for 1st quarter 2011 for NA/EU folks. I thought it was going to take longer somewhere around the 2nd or even 3rd quarter 2011. This is amazing news to say the least, however I really do hope they take any extra time they feel they might need, even if that means late 1st quarter etc. I do not mind waiting.
Thanks again StayonTarget
waiting for what? what looked like it needed to be pushed back for? don't understand you people who think it being pushed back a few months means anything, only thing they could do is fix some text translation in that time.
NP, From the begining BHS hired translators to do the English, German, and French translation. Granted the translation team was small but when they picked EnMass for the NA publisher that made a big boost in the translation team.
EnMass is mostly made up of english writers, I think they have around 10 writers on there team and they have been working on tera for about a year now. What they are doing is not a stright translation of the Korean version, but are totally changing the quest lines and story lines so in that respect the Korean & english versions will be totally different.
BTW: BHS has over 200 personnel and most of them are Developers so I expect there will be a lot of content. They mentioned at G*Star what when the game launches they will have over 8 months of content ready to added to the game after launch.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
Well to be honest PsychoPigeon, All prior Korean game did take aleast a year to two to translate and ship the game to the west, so seeing tera being launched so soon after the Korean launch is kinda shocking and new.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
Prior Korean games were never made specifically with the West in mind, they always waited to see how well it did in Korea first. We've known for ages they made Tera with the mindset of releasing it in the West asap.
The Korean version isnt even in open beta yet and you expect English retail in 4 months?!
Give it more time to beta test high level content. Have the high level zones, dungeons and PvP been tested yet? Ive heard and seen a lot about the level 20 content but very little beyond that.
Tera is pretty much the only MMO of 2011 that I am anxiously waiting for so I would rather it be complete and awesome not rushed out the door and half finished.
Very much still on my list of things to play. Great review. It is refreshing to read something positive about a game, especially Tera since it is on my list.
Again, thanks for this.
Veritas Vos Liberabit- The truth will set you free.
Thanks you for boosting my hype for this game even more! : )
It is a quest based open world game.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
Ah sorry, i didn't realize you knew the game was half finished.
Again Tera is on schedule and is THE GREATEST mmorpg ever made.