En Masse publishes news at 9 PM EST? I know it's 6 PM in Seattle but, sheesh, it's even later in Europe now. Anyhow, here's the direct link to the article.
Greetings, early fans of TERA!
First impressions are important, so I’ll share mine. Back in December, a long lunch with some old friends turned into a tour of the En Masse offices and a chance to play TERA for the first time.
Brian Knox sat me down and gave me a Baraka berserker. I ran over the bridge and into the forest, where I merrily started cutting down ghilliedhus with an immense axe. Good looking game, I thought. Nice color palette, and the detail work on the characters is fantastic.
Then I noticed two other things: the blinking sliver of red at the top of the screen (my remaining health—less than 50 hit points) and the fact that Brian was right behind me, chuckling. “Dave, there’s a reason you have that block ability,” he said. “You might want to use it when you see the ghilliedhu pull his arm back and get ready to punch.”
And that was my “Eureka!” moment with TERA. It’s a game where you actually have to watch the enemy, not just various health bars, cooldown timers, and messages from your raiding add-on. What a breath of fresh air!
A few days later, I became employee #10 at En Masse, tasked with “Westernizing” a not-yet-done game for gamers like me who want something different from an MMO.
Quick jargon lesson: Westernizing is two steps beyond translating and one step past localizing. The goal is to make the game an authentic experience for a Western gamer—with all that entails. Westernization means building in the right cultural and mythological touchstones. It means adhering to Western play patterns. And fundamentally, it means writing . . . millions of words of writing.
Westernization is also a balancing act. TERA is a dangerous place full of exotic creatures, and we want to retain that sense of wonder and strangeness. This isn’t a game with traditional goblins, trolls, and unicorns, after all. We aren’t changing the story in the Korean game so much as we’re adding to it. I’m in constant contact with my opposite numbers in Korea, and they’re walking with us every step of the way. (That’s good. I need people who can temper my crazier ideas.)
You’ll hear a lot from me as we continue our work Westernizing TERA. I’d like to leave you with two related thoughts in this initial message:
• One of the things we do is rename game elements: characters, places, skills, and so forth. So when you catch wind of something in the Korean version of the game, get excited . . . but don’t get too attached to the specific names. Our “game terminology” efforts are both art and science, and thus the terms remain in flux. Our writers have been inventing everything from Valkyon Federation military structures to Popori name syllabaries—an enormous task we’ve only just begun.
• Now that our writers have reached cruising altitude as a team, we’ll be filling you in on the specifics of the game, the lore, and everything else about the world of TERA. As my friends and family know, I can talk for hours about this stuff. I’m in the fortunate position of knowing which game elements we can reveal, which ones are still in flux, and which secrets are best discovered when you actually play the game. Keep checking tera-online.com; my writers love writing, and that’s where we’ll share what we’re doing with the world of TERA.
Until then . . . as the Amani say, “Walk tall, walk free!”
David Noonan Lead Writer En Masse Entertainment
P.S. Up next... some lore, and an inside look at Bluehole Studios in Korea!
...Well, that's it. Nice enough writeup. It's nice to have En Masse's staff post this kind of stuff, fosters a friendly atmosphere. Let's hope they can stay consistant all the way up until TERA's launch. ;)
