ELYON (Japan) x TERA Collboration

Recently, Pmang has been tweeting about a ELYON x TERA collaboration event (that began on June 28th, Japan local time). Japan is the sole remaining region where ELYON still operates (which is still surprising since the KR region was shuttered and there was no push by Krafton to have another publisher take over). The initial announcement was earlier this month:

【ELYON×TERA コラボ事前登録キャンペーン実施のお知らせ】

ELYON×TERA コラボ開催を記念して、
空飛ぶコラボ限定乗り物(期間限定)や
コラボ限定家具などが
必ずもらえるキャンペーンを実施中です！

詳細は下記の特設サイトをご確認ください。https://t.co/an0YhxpO9o #ELYON_JP #TERA_JP pic.twitter.com/iustY6bdEO

— ELYON（エリオン）公式 (@ELYON_JP) June 9, 2023

Pmang was also the official publisher for TERA JP so I can see how they managed to lobby Bluehole to make this a reality an year after TERA shut down in Japan (that was April 2022) and nearly an year to the day that TERA PC closed world wide. Pmang IMHO did put some effort into caring for the TERA franchise and had a fairly dedicated player base (I still maintain that Krafton made a huge mistake closing the game on PC because they could’ve continued making a decent amount of revenue from this niche demographic).

Basically, this collaboration (which runs for around a month) makes parts of Arborea (the world of TERA) accessible in ELYON (like the original Island of Dawn is accessible by paying 50k gold) along with some iconic bosses like Shandra Manaya that are “flooding” into the world of ELYON through a portal (parts of ELYON is based on these dimensional portals so it makes sense story wise) that another iconic boss in TERA, Killian, had opened up. A key hero (Elleon) also makes a return in this collaboration event. Obviously, not everything is being made canon since Elleon sacrificed himself during the final part of the Exodor storyline (and is memorialized in Velika). Pmang staff demonstrate part of this in the following:

Also available are some of TERA’s iconic mounts including the pegasus and golden phoenix. According to the information, more bosses and other TERA related content will be introduced over time as event portals. The Manaya’s Core dungeon (and Shandra Manaya fight) is a key dungeon event that is being released first as part of this collaboration.

While the environments, NPC/boss models, and the boss fights are from TERA, the combat is still ELYON’s (thus not TERA’s action combat). Still, I do find this all fascinating because Bluehole still had to allocate resources to make this possible (and that itself is remarkable considering that TERA PC no longer operates, and ELYON only operates in Japan – and no one knows for how much longer). Actually, in this 4gamer article, one of the Bluehole developers who worked on this said they were extremely enthusiastic/nostalgic while working on this project (reminding them that yes, there was once a full TERA experience that ran on PC).