Having not been following TERA closely over most of 2021, I didn’t even realize that HappyTuk (the Taiwanese publisher) had shutdown the game back in November. The only reason I learned about that was because I received a comment on one of my TERA Rising Private Server (localhost emulator) videos on YouTube asking if there was any updates (to emulation developments for TERA).
I also haven’t been keeping up on emulation/private server developments since 2019 so I ended up doing a quick look, and learned I had missed a whole lot of stuff. Basically in late December of 2020, the actual server files for TERA Taiwan, had been leaked online. The relevant version was patch 92.03 and the files were verified to be the actual official server binaries from Bluehole.
A leak of this magnitude is pretty bad for the company because there is now a more recent base level for emulation/private server advocates to work off of. Plus compared to prior reverse engineering efforts (really outdated and lots of missing functionality and content), it is completely working except for a few publisher facing API’s (so website, account functionality, and launcher were hacked up to provide a quick frontend, while the in-game store functionality and parcel delivery is still an ongoing effort some are trying to create). But everything else (questing, dungeon instances, open world content) is working based on what was available in patch 92.03.
Having only learned about this one year after the fact, a lot of the leg work to make it easier to get up and running has been done over the course of 2021 (including a mostly turnkey VMWare server environment that can be downloaded, and tweaked). Since Bluehole has been squashing (DMCA) repositories as they pop up, I managed to get all of the server and client files so that I can eventually try to get a local version running. It does predate the 64-bit client which came in patch 97 as well as a flurry of changes with the gearing system that came in 2021, but this is much better than the TERA Rising local setup.
I spent several hours reading various threads on a popular site (that has folks who try to work or emulators for various online games) just to catch up (and was sort of glad I didn’t learn about it until now since more info and tools have been cobbled together including how to reduce the memory footprint since the world server itself requires a minimum of 64GB of RAM; that’s because it tries to spin up multiple channel instances which is overkill for running a local copy to just play around with). That default configuration means it takes close to 20 minutes just to bring the entire world server up. One thing is clear, the backend for a lot of these MMO’s are a flimsy stack of cards just observing how TERA’s processes run.
But to the actual point I wanted to get at. Learning that the Taiwan version shutdown several months ago (with no publisher to pick it up), does provide better visibility into the upcoming closure of the Japanese version. This IS looking more like a conscious decision by Krafton to shutter the game if publishers (when renegotiating their contract and/or when they are not meeting their objectives) cannot agree to the terms and conditions being set by Krafton/Bluehole. They also don’t seem to be interested in going the route of a publisher like VALOFE. MMO’s just aren’t a focus of the company now, and most of the design teams that worked on TERA prior to 2018, are really no longer part of the equation either (the franchise has been fairly rudderless over the past few years). The 64-bit client rewrite was out of necessity given Microsoft officially no longer supporting Windows 8 and earlier. That also seemed to energize the small group that continued to work on the game (including the graphics team that expressed their eagerness to graphically upgrade TERA). But as shown by the minimal content updates throughout 2021, TERA is not a focus for Krafton/Bluehole (and internal development may actually be winding down).
And part of this maybe driven by the fact that the TERA server files were leaked by an employee of a relatively long time regional partner (HappyTuk took over in 2015 when the original publisher for Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan OMG Digital Entertainment, could not come to an agreement with Bluehole Studio). It makes more sense now why Bluehole completely changes all of the opcodes for every update ever since the 64-bit client (making it more challenging to try to utilize a newer game client with different server builds). But just having a fairly recent server build of the game leaked like this, allows for the eventual reverse engineering to rewrite some of that from scratch (and capturing packets for later releases, in order to just recreate that portion of the content). I believe these efforts will really get going should the NA/EU region be shuttered in the future (that probability seems higher now since they are closing what was a highly profitable region with Japan).
It’s also not like there’s been significant content updates since patch v.92.03; the biggest ones being the Baldera update and Mahtnan gear changes; most changes have been smaller including streamlining to questing and general progression, some balancing changes to class skills, plus the usual cycling of dungeons. The latest content update (combination of patches 113-114) are effectively rehashes (yet more new gear is just part of the problem of driving players away); even the ability to go back to the old Island of Dawn (another one of my suggestions I lobbied for back when Bluehole was soliciting feedback) isn’t a case of high level effort; those assets already existed and has been a long running request to have the zone reverted back to its original pretty state. But it’s not enough to get the player base back given the inane design choices over the last 2-3 years.
I’m now sure Krafton is no longer putting much resources into TERA (or Elyon) by choice since their money is coming from the PUBG IP (and they are focusing effort on newer initiatives now that Krafton is a publicly traded company in South Korea). Basically, no one should be surprised if within 2-5 years, TERA PC is no longer in operation in any region.
