Let me start off by saying that I personally played TERA Online from the 2nd closed beta test up until one month after it's launch. This article isn't meant to force you into not playing TERA just because I said so, but instead inform you why it's a bad idea to play TERA. I will admit that there are a few aspects of the game that are really fun and it's combat was the only thing that kept me playing for even as long as I did.

It's disappointing that I am writing this article to begin with. I put in countless hours per day on TERA during the time I did play it. Looking back now I feel like I was blind-sided by the few positives of the game and refused to see all the negatives. I felt like if I just ignored the problems for long enough, they would go away. Eventually this approach fell apart all at once and I was suddenly not playing TERA anymore.

My overall observation of TERA is that it's a skeleton of a game. Painted over with pretty graphics and action combat. I'm not claiming that En Masse lied to me about what I was purchasing. After all, they do advertise "True Action Combat" and mention nothing else. It's a one trick pony of a game and once your done being mesmerized the pony dies.

Questing in TERA is one of the biggest complaints that players have. It's an extremely repetitive, collect this quest and kill this mob experience. It's surprisingly easy to ignore at first, I personally leveled every class to at least 35, some of them multiple times due to changing race and a couple to 60. Though once you get into the levels such as high 40's and all through the 50's you begin to see the same things over and over. Monsters you fight are recycled to the point where it feels like you've just started the game all over and now you're forced through the same rotation you just did multiple times over the past 40 levels. Beyond the repetitive kill quests and monster recycling, I must admit the most frustrating part of questing was the courier quests. The ones that force you to run back and forth between multiple NPCs just to give them the "message". At times the NPCs are all standing next to each other, but sometimes you are forced to run across the map and back multiple times for one quest. It just never flowed with the rest of your quests.

There isn't any customization of your class in TERA Online. The closest thing that comes to giving you a personal twist on your character's skills are glyphs. The only problem is that your choices are extremely limited, and most of the time non-existent. There are a few certain glyphs which are a must have while the rest of the majority are the most practical of all choices and highly recommended. There are several glyphs left over that are so bad, you will gimp your character entirely by choosing them. Choices on your class customization are so few that it's very easy to look up what glyphs you should be using on your character, leaving the player very few choices to make in progression. When you look around at all the other players who are using the same class as you, it's painfully obvious you are all exactly the same and easily replaceable by anybody else who rolled the same class.

TERA Online may look absolutely stunning, but if you're computer isn't top of today's line then you will have issues running it. There are many situations where my friend, who's computer is more than capable of running TERA, had FPS issues. For the length of time I played the game, I ran at average 15 FPS and would often drop down to 9. It was painful to play like that but I ignored it. It wasn't until about halfway through the first month after TERA's launch that I found out why it was so difficult to run TERA. It's their User Interface (UI) that was causing all the FPS lag. It turns out that their interface was so poorly designed that it ran entirely off of your CPU and if that wasn't good enough, you're facing severe bottle-necking. Once I realized what was killing my FPS I tested it. When I turned off the UI, my FPS would shoot right up to 45 where it was 15. The UI was such a factor in your FPS that you could severely lag out your client by opening all the UI options you can at the same time. This issue was most noticeable when you were doing work with menus such as options, inventory, and merchants.

I will be short on the last major issue I found with TERA, as it's the number one already complained about. There is no content at end game. Yes, that's what most people are disappointed about when it comes to playing TERA. I personally didn't stick around end game content long enough to be bored out of my mind with it because I was too busy leveling multiple characters. I only experienced the end game up to level 60. Once I got that far I logged off and played another character. This was mostly due to the fact that I knew there wasn't any point in playing the end game content. I did however have a close friend that tried to stick with TERA after I quit and he began his end game grind of 2 dungeons and a few daily quests. After he poured countless thousands of gold into item enchanting only to have it continue to fail, he eventually uninstalled TERA and moved on. He told me that the game is simply a time, item, and gold sink. That's it's only purpose and I tend to agree.

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