TERA Classic is on the way!

TERA was an MMORPG enjoyed by millions of players all around the world. It redefined what it meant to be an MMO, providing players some of the most stunning, expansive, fast-paced experiences at the time.
But it was inhibited largely by its business model: It required players purchase and pay a monthly subscription fee to play it. This lead to the eventual transition of business model to a free to play title, and that triggered its decline.
Sure, I think at their peak they claimed there were 20, 30 million players. But with that transition, saw a sharp decrease in terms of quality, and equally as sharp an increase in pay to win and pay to advance.
Eventually, TERA was forced to shut down on PC. The active playerbase numbered in the low-thousands, and there hadn’t been real content pushed out in years. The game was in maintenance mode and players knew it.
The game honestly deserved better. And TERA Classic aims to deliver that experience to players. But can they manage to accomplish what seemed impossible for the better part of a decade?

TERA Classic could reinvigorate what was once the pinnacle of the action MMO genre. By taking the game back to its roots – a time when the game was difficult. Required team-work. Had a steady content release schedule.
“Could,” being the keyword here. Navigating on over to the TERA Classic website, I immediately notice several things:

1: Pre-registration is currently open. Meeting each individual goal will reward players with some in-game rewards, like bag slot expansion scrolls, pet scrolls, a title scroll.
2: They’re holding some weird.. event? I think? Titled “Triple Wars,” with Streamers, Cosplayers and VTubers all competing for… I dunno. A laptop? A tablet? A phone?
3: They’re incentivizing pre-registrations by giving out additional rewards for “friends” you invite to the game. And I used air-quotes there – which I’m aware you’re unable to see. This will substantially alter the validity of the total number of pre-registered players.
4: They have altered how classes and races function. If you’re interested in playing as a Lancer or a Priest, you’ll be forced to play as an Elin. Gladiator’s are now exclusive to the Castanic.
Archer’s are exclusive to High Elves, and Slayer’s to Humans. Instead of allowing High Elves to be Archers, Sorcerer’s, Warrior’s, Priests, Mystic’s.. they’ve chosen to severely limit not only the total number of available classes, but also which races can play as them. Giving Elin 2 races, and removing several of the others.
You gotta appeal to those pedo-Elin lovers, right? They’re where you’ll make all your money after all.
5: And finally, the game is going to be cross-platform compatible. TERA was a PC MMORPG, that later released a console-compatible client, allowing players to play both versions of the game. Both were honestly largely successful, and the game played even better on console than it did on PC.
Unfortunately, the cross-platform compatibility is not between PC and console this time ’round, rather, it’s between PC and mobile. And even then, if you take a look at their website, it lists the only way you’ll be able to play this on PC is if you use an emulator – NoxPlayer, BlueStacks or LDPlayer.

Within minutes, they have killed any potential this game might have had. After the loss of TERA, many players were left wandering to private servers. I myself was even tempted at one point but opted to steer clear for the time being.
I loved TERA, it was truly an incredible MMO for its time. But I didn’t want to play a private server of it when there are better alternatives out there.

Scrolling down to the bottom of the website they have a list of game features:
Fight big bosses and get epic costumes – Are they referring to BAMs? Big Ass Monsters? I don’t recall them dropping costumes. Relic pieces, yeah. Providing a mass of XP, definitely. Costumes? Not that I remember.
Adaptable and Seamless Skill Combo – looking at the UI of the game – sure, it’ll be adaptable, but the complexity of combat is going to be limited by mobile compatibility, as at the end of the day, this is a mobile game.
Customize costumes and appearance – what does that even mean? Customize what aspects of a costume? Its color?
Stunning atmosphere and environment – alright, scrolling back up to the classes you’ll notice that the character models themselves actually look pretty bad quality. When we have mobile MMOs like Tower of Fantasy and Noah’s Heart that look exponentially better than this – what about what we’re seeing is worth bragging over?
The worst part of all of this is that to pre-register for this piece of garbage, you’re going to be required to enter not only your email, but a functional phone number to verify your account. That’s a hard pass for me.

TERA Classic looks like absolute trash. They had the potential to achieve what WoW Classic did. What Aion Classic attempted to achieve. Yet we get a cheap-ass PC-ported mobile piece of garbage that’s only resemblance to TERA are the models they ripped.
This is not TERA, and most definitely not TERA Classic. This is an abomination that is trying to prey on players that miss TERA. And judging by the 350,000 pre-registered players.. it’s working.