TERA Patch 109 went live today with the long dormant Baldera zone finally released (I erroneously identified that it would be released in patch 108). And boy did the game lose a lot of players on the NA servers because updates like this in the past, would at least have way more players around trying out something like a new zone (especially one that was long requested, but abandoned in place having been there uncompleted for over 8 years) once the server was live out of maintenance.
First thing I did was buy the legendary tier of the new gear (several weeks have passed since it came out and I knew from past experience that the bottom would fall out once the hardcores had run through the content, and would be dumping excess drops onto the auction house at low prices). I spent less than 30K gold for everything which would at least allow my character to clear whatever combat quests were involved.
There were only a few players doing the starter quest that takes you to Baldera (like 3 players besides myself). Once I completed the short series of quests (fortunately there was only a single kill 20 mobs) that brought me into Balderon, there were less than 10 players in the area. I then ported to Highwatch where there was probably less than 30 players (normally in the past, the areas around the warehouse NPC would be clogged easily with over a hundred characters or so).
The story quest itself sort of resumes where Fate of Arun left off (you meet Dakuryon and Rhodos again). The zone itself is still tied to the Baraka (race) and surrounds the Argon invasion (or at least their reemergence). So I’m not sure if this team managed to find some of the old story quests that were supposed to be part of this zone (which was pre-Fate of Arun, and thus would have had a different story to it), and managed to cobble together this story. It wasn’t that long though (I managed to complete it in 30 minutes).
In a nutshell, it felt underwhelming (one of the lowest grade efforts that I’ve seen in years), which is really sad. The game is really in a bad state right now, and Bluehole isn’t even trying anymore (they seem to be fine with pouring most of their eggs into the PUBG basket). I know the first warning flag will be whenever Gameforge decides to finally bite the bullet, and merge the two NA servers together (I heard that the PvP server Kaia, has been fairly dead population wise just a few months before En Masse closed; I can only imagine how it has been the past few months). After that will be an inevitable death spiral without anything new on the design horizon (just reintroducing new gear and different enchanting materials isn’t going to cut it). Basically, this is the first time where I am actually concerned for the future of this game (especially now that Krafton is now a publicly listed company in South Korea, and will be under the gun to perform).
