TERA's David Noonan talks lore, geography

I really want to like this game... but I'm still a bit gun shy after my experiences with AION. I know the game looks pretty but please please be sure to include enough content to avoid grinding random world mobs in order to advance.

It's not enough to have a large, impressively detailed body of lore. It needs to be cohesive and permeates the essential gameplay. Anyone can invent a bunch of names and prop them up against the pattern of some tired creation myth. It's another thing to make sure that it affects the architecture, gear styles, and the historical narrative of the world.

It is not reassuring that lore appears to have not been one of the first things developed and largely finished. Ultimately, I suspect it will be more of the same: lore relegated to a few public space sculptures, major events, plot twists, or loot, and expansion marketting materials, with world designs remaining be an ostentatious, arbitrary, and mongrel treatment of fantasyscifi-litvid influences.

It should still be a blast. But there's more to lore than writing a world bible. Else, it's lolquesttext as usual.

Aion was more than just a grind, too much of that game was a theme park... but then a lot of MMOs suffer from that problem. Once you level out of an area there is seldom any reason to return. More MMOs need to work on retaining the usefulness of the older zones, but that is difficult when the player character power creep method of advancement is used and old content becomes... trivial.

I have a question. The game is developed in S. Korea. How is the American side working on this game? Are they writing new code to adapt it to our play style here in the US? I understand the translation work. But I have to wonder what the production process is here in the states in terms of development. I use the free UT III UDK tools so I am interested to see how the UT III engine will work in this scenario.

I love the art work. I love the terrain maps. Grind doesn’t bother me because "every" MMO "rpg" has grind. One thing I like about Eve, SWG, AoC, and parts of LOTRO is that I do have to return to zones,plaents, areas, etc.

No whack-a-mole healing is good, but it's funny to read that this game is trying to "go beyond the traditional fantasy tropes" even though it still has high elves and dark elves (of a different sort) playable.