Closed Beta Test 4 Recap

Howdy, TERA fans!

Hard to believe that we're less than a week away from our last Closed Beta Test and PAX East! Time is flashing by, and we are a few scant weeks away from early character creation and launching our live database. We're moving at a furious pace, and we have some great surprises in store (more on this in a bit).

Closed Beta Test 4 started with the epic return of the Dragonfall server (Closed Beta Test 1 veterans may remember its short-lived appearance). We were also able to make some incremental tweaks to PvP, improve our behind-the-scenes moderation, and reduce player hit points from levels 1–15 by 30 percent, and then restore those hit points gradually in levels 16–20. The idea behind this experiment was to increase the excitement and difficulty of the new player experience. After looking at your feedback and analyzing our internal data, we concluded that it didn't improve the excitement and difficulty enough. Our next tweak will increase the difficulty of named creatures to see whether we can get people's pulses racing! We'll be looking for feedback on this experience in our mid-April Open Beta Test, so stay tuned.

On deck for Closed Beta Test 5 is a new event that we are trying out for the first time here. I can't spill the beans lest the community and marketing teams hurt me, but it will involve BAMs, invasions, and a lot of bad-guy ass-kicking.

We've also been working for months on determining what will be in our open beta and launch build. This means weekly and often daily conference calls and communication with Bluehole Studio. It means scheduling build deployments to meet testing, patching, and development milestones. This planning and work by En Masse Entertainment and Bluehole Studio gets results, such as these features:

• Enchantment Changes: We are removing the failure aspect of weapon and armor enchanting. We'll have more specifics on what the changes will look like, but after countless forum posts and a lot of internal discussions about this issue, we feel y'all are going to be very happy with this change.
• More Gear/Skill Options: Who doesn't like more options? With the addition of new green crystals that you can attach to accessories and advanced glyphs to further customize and tune your skills, you can now create an even more personalized—and powerful—character.
• New Prologue Zone: We want to teach people about the lore behind the Island of Dawn (and throw them into some action), so we created an entirely new tutorial zone that serves as the precursor to the current Island of Dawn experience.
• Voice Additions: We've gone through the entire game and added new and distinct voices to NPCs, reworked cutscenes for better quality. We also added a few voices you may recognize for Samael and Fraya…
• Sealing Enhancements: We're introducing the ability to lock the random attributes earned from identifying enigmatic items. This chant will let you pick which attributes you like and lock them for your gear, while at the same time letting you change the attributes you don't like until you get the combo that is right for you.

Life is moving pretty fast around here these days, but everyone is geared in and focused on making TERA the best open beta and launch it can possibly be. See you in-game!