We went hands-on with the F2P MMO Tera on PS4 Pro.
Bringing an MMO to consoles on a controller is always a tricky task, but I was amazed at how much Tera felt right at home when I played it on PS4 Pro this week.
The free-to-play online RPG plays more like an action game than most of its MMO competition, relying on actual timing, dodging, and aim over damage dice rolls. It makes Tera feel closer to Devil May Cry than World of Warcraft, and as a result fits on a gamepad almost naturally.
But making it seem like a simple translation sells short the work developer Bluehole and publisher En Masse had to do to get it feeling this slick. The menus and UI have been completely rebuilt, designed to take advantage of the shoulder buttons and make text boxes more legible when read from your couch across the room.
They’ve also managed to fit a massive amount of items, abilities, and attacks that can be used into a relatively intuitive interface. Your skill bar is laid out at the bottom of the screen with each button assignment labeled, and pressing L1 will swap to a secondary bar for even more options. I didn’t play enough to really feel how limited this might be, but it was impressively easy to pick up and immediately take on some big baddies.
That’s also helped by Tera’s existing combo system, which lets you time sequential button presses to string abilities into each other. It helped me not have to worry about which combination of buttons I had to reach for to land my next attack, instead giving a pre-planned option – that is, until I inevitably had to break that sequence to dodge out of the way of one of Tera’s many telegraphed attacks.
However, I was a bit disappointed to learn that there won’t be the option to make custom combo patterns at the console version’s launch. It’s available on PC, but you’ll have to choose from pre-existing sets to start out on PS4 and Xbox One. In fact, those versions will start a few patches behind as well, but will eventually reach and maintain parity with the PC, which can’t come soon enough.
But it’s not like Tera will be lacking for content, as it initially launched nearly seven years ago and has received consistent updates and patches since. And it still looks surprisingly pretty for such an old game. Sure, it’s not going to compete with the Wolfenstein 2s and Horizon Zero Dawns of the world, but Tera’s huge monsters have such cool designs that I wasn’t really thinking about how they’ve aged in the moment.
Tera is still an MMORPG, and that’s going to be a line a lot of people just don’t want to cross regardless of how it breaks the mold. But it does do some interesting things to set itself apart, and its action-focused combat felt great with a controller in my hand.
Tom Marks is an Associate Editor focusing on PC gaming at IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.
