Both Gameforge (EU) and En Masse Entertainment (NA) preview the upcoming content update for TERA which opens the first new zone since the continent of Northern Arun was unlocked in 2014 with the Fate of Arun expansion.
I covered some of the (then missing) details when En Masse (EME) put out a short teaser video of the Exodor archipelago several weeks ago. The only thing I didn’t really cover is the server wide trading card system (which is nothing new since many other games have similar systems; with the one in TERA though, part of it is derived from Devilian’s Talisman card system which had several different tiers that augmented core stats, provided bonus attributes when you had a set equipped, and could be combined to grow its XP and upgraded to higher tiered versions).
I’m not exactly sure how it is implemented in K-TERA though since I haven’t been following the dev notes there (like if there is a growth component) but the video EME released shows them to be tierless (without a growth component) and are acquired by collecting 20 card fragments. Similar to Enhancement Points (EP), the bonuses are available to all characters on the same server.
It’s another reasonable progression system where you can progress your characters by just playing since you’ll slowly collect the fragments needed to assemble a card (and any excess fragments you don’t need for a card is tradable). What I’m not sure about is how much RNG has been used in the drop system.
With regards to the various smaller islands surrounding the 4 main zones, getting to them has its own transport system; a hovering platform which you can unlock and use when gaining reputation credits from killing monsters in Exodor. The central mass is the Verrak Fortress (named Berak Fortress Secret Zone in EU).
As noted in the Gameforge preview, the story quest involves Elleon and Jelena. Elleon has been in a weird spot since part of that story got lopped off when the team that took over TERA (a few years after the KR launch in 2011), changed the starter zone from the Island of Dawn to Stepstone Island. Also, the tutorial prologue (where you could trial a class at level 20) had been removed earlier; this tutorial involved Elleon as a lead-in to the actual Island of Dawn starter zone.
With the revamped Stepstone Island newbie tutorial having no real involvement of Elleon, he ends up making a sudden appearance later in Velika (and even then, his story seems to be disconnected). It didn’t help that parts of the level 54-58 questing was replaced with party dungeons that players would have to go through in order to see the story (they weren’t mandatory though so players could find other ways to level from 53 to 58 to get the next main story quest to popup in the tracker).
The current TERA dev team tried to piece together the story with the revamped/streamlined main story quest and solo quest dungeons where you now go through that part of the story and eventually see him get injured at the start of the solo instance of the Labyrinth of Terror as the search begins for Killian (and Jelena teleports him to Habere for medical help and recovery).
I guess you could say that he was supposed to originally be a very core part of the TERA story, but ended up turning into this occasionally appearing NPC. The current dev team decided to utilize him and Jelena (the female Castanic who had been prominently used in very early marketing) for the culmination of all of these disparate updates that have been piece-mealed release starting with the class awakenings (Apex). I’m not going to spoil the story though. Honestly, I really wished all of this had been rolled into one complete expansion with more main story quest content added for the level 65-70 journey (as opposed to having to run through this dailies grind). But I guess their resources and priorities (lack of) made this a necessity.
Both regions will be deploying the update on October 15th.
