Producer Letter: Happy Holidays!
by Chager.
Happy Holidays, TERA Fans!
As I write this, I'm using our new launcher to log in and patch up to a fully-localized version of the TERA Evolution patch. I created an account, entered game codes and login authorization, patched, and launched TERA. While this sounds like a normal day for a gamer, this represents a huge leap for us here at En Masse. Let me explain.
Over the past year, we've worked on several areas that will influence our launch. We've worked directly and intimately with the Bluehole development team to tweak, fine-tune, and add features that appeal to western gamers. I've talked about some of these collaborative ideas before, but to recap, here are a few ideas that En Masse Entertainment originated or pursued: dungeon finder, western leveling curve, controller support, western key bindings, and revamped (and resizable) UI. The list goes on and on. We've also built a new account management system, launcher/patcher, and all of the back-end systems it takes to run a game from the ground up in record time. We've had folks working weekends and late nights for months to reach what we've come to define as the "end-to-end player experience" I'm enjoying right now. It is a HUGE step forward that this system is not only running, but fully functioning and integrated. I know I always say it's a very exciting time, but to be honest it's always exciting here because we're always taking steps forward.
We've also been supporting alpha for about 4 months with a combination of hand-picked community influencers, select partners, and En Masse Entertainment employees (with their gamer friends/family). Not only have our customer service, QA, and network operations teams earned experience supporting a live service, but we got a lot of great feedback from the alpha participants, which have led to fixes and tweaks. This week represents our last week of alpha testing, and we're looking forward to the next step in TERA's journey toward launch next spring.
We still have a long way to go, but TERA's foundation is now solid. Over the coming weeks and months, we'll continue to polish the game, its launch features, build-out of our live production servers and our new voice-over recordings while we begin to focus on our post-launch schedule and update content planning (got to start planning early!). We're also close to launching a new TERA website and new forums (I've seen them and our web team did an awesome job designing them).
I want to take this time to thank all the extremely hard work our En Masse Entertainment teams put in (I'm calling out Platform, Operations, QA, CS, Writing, Marketing, and PR) and, most importantly, to thank all of you for hanging in there while we make the best player experience possible—from start to finish.