In time machine like fashion, it’s almost like the clock rewound back to 2015 with regards to this rumor resurfacing again in 2019 with some old renders that has been previously published by Jang Seonghwan (a freelance Korean 3D character artist who also worked with Bluehole). He posted some of those images on his ArtStation page (those images are no longer there but remain available on an article written by Steparu as well as his Naver blog which I linked to his name; the images has since been removed).
As it turns out, the source of this TERA 2 rehash was MMOBytes which is known for clickbait YouTube videos of the “is it worth playing” variety (while barely touching into the later game aspects). But this also jogged my memory as to why I have never put much credence into this content producer; it was because of the opinion piece they did on Warlords Awakening (I myself had issues with the game since I covered it here from June 2018 but it was mainly due to how incompetently they handled early access). Everything I have to say is in that prior post (or all of those tagged postings). Various MMO sites for whatever reason, decided to pick up yet another clickbait video they (MMOBytes) did recently about this 4 years old news (debunked by Bluehole back then), causing it to gain traction again.
My own source (alias Giko) worked/lived in South Korea (well, is actually back there again) and was also an early private investor in one of the equity firms that held in interest in Bluehole (which is still a privately held corporation that is now known as Krafton). So he always had some insight that was rarely ever from Bluehole’s official channels (PR news on their site or info buried vaguely in their investor relation filings; business disclosures which were primarily focused at their private investors since they weren’t a publicly traded company).
This 3D artist periodically posted concept art that he was commissioned to work on (a small portion of his portfolio on his Naver blog linked above, dates back to 1999). This included concept renders for Bluehole including one that was obviously an Elin. The following naturally caused all sorts of rumors to flare up in South Korea (and other places where the game has its fans).
Bluehole came out and squashed those down hard to the point where they ended up stating there was no TERA 2 in the works and no plans to create a follow on (the objective was to focus energies on TERA itself). Project EXA and Project W were the two codename projects at Bluehole at the time AND were also near the end of the PC MMO funding in South Korea (most of the investment was being redirected into mobile gaming development by 2015). Project W was further along because of Kakao Games investment/partnership agreement with Bluehole (in exchange for the publishing rights for Korea, Europe, and North America).
Project EXA on the otherhand was something that Bluehole hadn’t really nailed down (except that it would be similar to Project W with the “social” game play). Some folks were thinking this was Devilian (which came via way of Bluehole’s acquisition of Ginno Games; what became Bluehole Ginno once the deal was approved and finalized). Devilian’s code name however was Immortal (which was also it’s original working name for the game since it originally was going to be called Immortal Online; the Bluehole acquisition resulted in an overhaul of large portions of the game including its graphics which pulled heavily from TERA’s assets, introduced a 4th shooter class based on the Elin race, and changed the ability for a character to transform to an animal mount, to the ultimate Devilian-form ability).
Project EXA could be defined similar to the above concept art; a concept. Bluehole at that time was lacking a library of games as well as intellectual property. This is why they were acquiring studios and bringing them under the Bluehole Alliance (what is now known as the KRAFTON GAME UNION). The Ginno Games acquisition was meant to bring more PC MMO titles with a global emphasis under the Bluehole name and brand starting off with Devilian. The original Diabloesque inspired game received the overhaul it did as a way to leverage the intellectual property in TERA (Bluehole’s hallmark MMO). The following may seem like a way off tangent but needs to be highlighted since it is related to the subject matter (I’ve covered this in various other postings on this blog beyond the ones I linked; I can’t find all of them because I didn’t tag a lot of older entries and the search function for Blogger sucks).
The problem as I ended up documenting in this blog, was Devilian’s failure (blame that can be attributed to both developer and publisher with the latter having most of the blame for failing to live up to their end of the bargain with the global marketing lie that was sold to Ginno Games by Trion Worlds). All of the bullshit Hartsman mentioned in that interview and this followup one, never came to fruition (the formalized acquisition of Ginno Games by Bluehole happened after Trion had finalized their publishing contract with Ginno Games; had this happened several months later, it is highly likely that Bluehole’s western publishing arm En Masse Entertainment, could have ended up with the inside track for NA/EU).
Digressing, Devilian’s poor handling by Trion (and also a much smaller SEA market for the Thai region publisher, True Digital Plus aka GoodGames), put the games future on a lifeline. From Bluehole Ginno’s perspective, they had no choice but to look at other options. Which is why they refocused efforts on Devilian Mobile (to the detriment of PC development which affected the Thai and NA/EU versions; the latter being its own fork since the Thai version was for the most part, same as the Korean version). GAMEVIL did end up signing a lucrative global publishing and marketing deal with Bluehole Ginno (resulting in a massive PR campaign leading up to the launches in various regions). Unfortunately, the game failed to have a consistent revenue stream post launch and was shutdown an year later.
Once it became clear that Devilian Mobile was not going to be the big money generator for both Bluehole Ginno and GAMEVIL (months prior to the service termination notice), Bluehole Ginno’s CTO Chang-Han Kim was tasked with coming up with a new game since the Devilian IP was sinking (and attempts by Bluehole Ginno CEO Won-Hee Park to license aspects of the Devilian IP, namely it’s human-devil transformation aspects were also failing to get any interest). Project EXA was in need of actual game concepts though; something neither Bluehole Studio (the design studio division that handled TERA and Project W) or Bluehole Ginno had except for some concept artwork that had been neither confirmed or denied as being associated with this Project EXA.
Why a new game under the Bluehole Ginno subsidiary? This was originally the subsidiary studio meant to target games made for a global audience (which began with Devilian). What happened here is a long blog post on its own (which I did back in 2017). Long story short, Kim met with Brendan Greene and the idea was eventually pitched for this battle royale style game (a genre that Korean game design studios have virtually little experience in creating). An early idea was to leverage some of the concept art that was created by Jang Seonghwan and to have this game code named as Project EXA. However, because not even Bluehole Ginno at the time thought the game would end up being successful (to the degree it ended up being), they decided to scale back including utilizing marketplace assets from Epic (the game engine used was Unreal Engine 4 out of necessity since new games could only license the latest release) and used concept character designs from Bluehole Ginno’s concept artist, Taehyun Kim since one of the things they did not want to do was to leverage IP from TERA (or the actual renders made by Jang Seonghwan) in the event that the game failed. Bluehole Ginno’s CEO tried to even sell the idea of Devilian’s human-devil transformation mode in this new game but that idea was ultimately rejected.
So all of that concept art was put into the drawer of ideas and concepts that has never even made it past the prototype stage. In that regards, this Project EXA ended up becoming what eventually was released as PUBG (Project EXA was not necessarily PUBG’s code name; it was just a project code name for a game that had no real conceptual designs at that point except for the fact that it would share the same “social” (systems that went beyond the usual MMO ones) game play that was originally planned for Project W; and it is debatable from the Thai CBT if that social game play even remains.
Basically, there was and has been no TERA 2 in the works because the company had two focal points (on top of handling aging TERA) in recent years; delivering Project W to Kakao Games and getting PUBG to Steam Early Access (which ended up being this unexpected success for them that ended up becoming their primary focus, and caused them to announce the working name for Project W (in order to leverage the popularity and name recognition of a company that had previously been a small time player) as well as a closed beta test schedule. PUBG drove some changes at Bluehole including an initial proposal to merge the main company with Bluehole Ginno (that was cancelled in favor of renaming Bluehole Ginno to PUBG Corp), expanding the offices for PUBG Corp, and rewarding the team with bonuses. The ultimate culmination of all this was Bluehole performing a corporate re-branding by changing the parent name to Krafton (which I jokingly and often times seriously refer to as KRAPTON). This doesn’t even cover some of the ridiculous decisions they came to like their lawsuit against Epic (which they subsequently dropped a few weeks later when Giko tipped off his contacts regarding the nuclear option that I had wrote about) or their equally ludicrous suit against a Chinese government committee regarding their inability to trademark the Chinese translated version of “Chicken Dinner”…. Oh and yes, PUBG Corp created a subsidiary studio called Striking Distance (so a subsidiary of Krafton creating a subsidiary of its own <- this here is Bluehole/Krafton lunacy in its “finest”…)
With regards to TERA (PC), the company did show some signs of introducing new content at their 2017 Winter showcase which ended up being parceled out in smaller updates throughout 2018 and this year, culminating in the Exodor patch (the first new region since Fate of Arun). Krafton’s commitment to TERA has been maintaining the PC and console version (both of which are having significant retention issues and not helped by design decisions) while promoting various mobile versions including TERA M, TERA Classic, TERA Origin, and TERA Frontiers. Two of the mobile studios that Bluehole had previously licensed the franchise to were eventually acquired; SQUALL in 2015 which created TERA M and the Japanese adapted version called TERA Origin) and Red Sahara Studio in 2018 which is designing TERA Frontiers. TERA in general is a niche market (wacky high fantasy) where its current downtrending numbers do not help with even justifying a TERA 2. As a player, I would love to see a TERA 2. But the realistic side of me doesn’t see the case for one.
Generally speaking, new PC MMO’s are no longer high on the development list because the revenues aren’t there compared to mobile. Ascent: Infinite Realm (A:IR) was funded towards the tail end of the Korean PC MMO investment and is now stuck in development hell again after less than stellar feedback for the Thai beta test earlier this year (they want to address that before launching the 2nd Korean beta; the first CBT at the end of 2017 also had less than positive feedback). And their newest PC game MISTOVER is a single player turn based rogue-like RPG. The company also released a social “avatar” based mobile game called Mini Life. Project BB which they previewed at G-STAR 2018 was mentioned to have been the furthest along out of five near term projects they were working on but hasn’t released yet.
All of this is the scattershot approach of the KRAFTON GAME UNION where the subsidiaries are trying to make the next success. All of them have distinct personalities (as opposed to trying to over leverage assets from other IP’s like what they did with Devilian in terms of using a lot of graphical assets and some designs where it made sense). None of these recent initiatives have bore any fruit like what happened with PUBG. The lackluster reception of A:IR during the beta tests doesn’t offer any positive reinforcement to even consider a re-thinking of a TERA 2 (which isn’t helped by the current state of TERA across most all regions).
If there is anything, it is evaluating the possibility of leveraging the production for the artwork and effects being done for TERA Frontiers (an Unreal Engine 4 mobile reproduction of PC TERA) to create a completely re-mastered version of PC TERA. All of the assets need to be recreated so all of that production work will be a sunk cost for the company. It’s not that simple though because the majority of the remaining work is in the actual coding of the game systems and control systems for the PC client (work that amounts to coding a new game; a time and resource sink which they aren’t willing to commit to). But that is just deep rumor with no actual movement by Krafton’s Bluehole subsidiary since something like this isn’t high on the priority list (it would be a different story if the live game was pulling in big revenue numbers). Basically, there is no TERA 2 (and if there were, Krafton would have been talking it up back in the 2017 timeframe to capitalize on all of the PR buzz from PUBG). That’s about the latest that I know of at this time from the grapevine.
