K-TERA’s product director (who goes by the nickname of Jerry) made a posting offering up what they are planning for TERA in 2019.
http://www.inven.co.kr/board/tera/2152/27887
The keyword he mentions is “diversification” relating to the “reorganization of existing content” in order to provide more places in the game world for players to enjoy. Highlighting the level 70 expansion that was just released in Korea, one of the highlights of that was a renewed focus on the open game world with the introduction of new field bosses and re-factoring of several existing (but highly underutilized) zones with higher level monsters.
Dungeons won’t be prioritized any less but also won’t be the primary means of delivering “new content” (it’s also clear the practice of cycling dungeons in and out will continue). Additionally, they are looking at a system that will allow players to learn boss patterns and mechanics (which besides the most geared and most hardcore of players, is leaving most others out from experiencing that content or having to deal with toxicity from not being familiar enough while running dungeons for the first time with others who are already experienced with them).
As for cycling dungeons, I really feel this isn’t the best method. Instead, dungeons should be designed with a player selectable difficulty system where not only monster health points and damage scales, but also the mechanics change. This is a noticeable struggle that many Korean design studios have where all of the leveling and story dungeons don’t have the ability to scale in terms of both max level and difficulty (even LOST ARK suffers from this where only a select few dungeons are scaled for the Chaos Dungeons at level 50).
Webzen’s MU Legend (a game that I’ve mentioned countless times as one that I am not fond of) actually has one feature that I do feel was properly designed; general dungeons (interdimensional rifts) that scale from Normal to Mythic difficulty while monsters also scale based on the level of the character. While they aren’t end game dungeons (which are indeed limited in terms of available number and also gated by combat power), it provides a means of existing dungeons to at least scale where players can enter them at their own desired playing level (while not obsoleting that already designed content).
Bluehole’s method of cycling dungeons in/out and gating entry to them via ever increasing item level is pure laziness (plus also likely related to the entire dungeon system not having a solid foundation to allow scaling that difficulty along with setting the appropriate loot tables (everything probably needs to be tweaked separately). Imagine if a player could select a difficulty level (with the appropriate rewards), players could do their own practice runs learning the dungeons by actually running less difficult versions of them (while not reaping the rewards as well). Sure, higher difficulty ones could have added mechanics thrown in but the key is the ability to learn the base ones (and that familiarity will help when running the more difficult ones with others).
True, there is some merit that players will tend to take the path of least resistance if there are too many dungeons to select from where they’ll find the most efficient ones to one to get the loot (thus the rationale that Bluehole uses to offer only a small set of dungeons which they cycle from). A better thought out system would however allow a larger number of players to experience such content that was designed to begin with.
Moving on, the 2nd point in this posting is pure vagueness (new ways of enjoyment) where he even mentions it’s something that is difficult to explain until they have some of those designs prepared (i.e. prototype). The 3rd point is obvious; improving the existing content/systems like PVP and guilds for example. It goes without saying that way too many designs and systems were removed from TERA (Vanarch system, Alliances, Crusades, Sky Castles, Nexus, etc). Then you have this current gear enchanting system which is IMHO, ridiculous at the higher end (and that item level again is the gate keeper to accessing a lot of the end game dungeons).
The 4th point is something I am extremely skeptical about since it goes into increasing the optimization of the game client (TERA is built on a much older build of UE3 that was more or less suitable for first person shooters and not for massive persistent worlds; newer builds akin to what would be considered “3.5” builds would work better since Epic added enhancements to better support MMO’s, but would still involve time/resource investments by Bluehole to tweak/write custom extensions; which would be better spent on just rebuilding the entire game in UE4 or in other words, sort of like creating an entirely new game again since assets, rigging, and animations would all need to be redone in order to get the most detail out of them along with the recoding). Stability of the game service should be a given but I also realize that the backend for this maybe at a level below nightmare level given that publishers like EME can’t even keep the dressing room properly updated since its content seems to get scrambled/deleted with each update (and no one there seems to have the time to dedicate to updating it).
The few comments by Korean players are pretty much also skeptical/sarcastic in nature because this is typical; lot of promises that aren’t delivered or underdelivered from what players were expecting. Like I thought (based on last years winter update) that an entirely new zone with a new story line was part of plans (since it also had artwork of what the zone would be like). I figured part of that would follow this new level 70 expansion. But after seeing this producers newsletter, it seems like the 6 part quests for level 66-70 are it (with no hint of actual new zones to expand the existing game world). That is my bad for expecting a Fate of Arun type of addition when I should know better given what I know about Bluehole in general. As I always tell others, lower your expectations, and then triple down on them.
