August 29, 2011
The PAX 2011 En Masse Entertainment Open House Event!
Just an update! The team at EME uploaded a video of our day at the office! I'm the one who's ALWAYS ready to kick some ass :D (in my curse shirt xD)!
Thanks again to all the staff at En Masse! What an awesome experience!
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Hey, TERA Fans :D As you all know, the team at En Masse Entertainment was kind enough to invite the community into their new office in Seattle this Saturday and I was one of the attendees! In this post I'll detail the events of the visit from my perspective :)
On Saturday afternoon, the group met up with Scapes at the convention center and we all made the trek over in a fairly orderly fashion! When we got to the office we rode the elevator up in groups, met the team, and took a tour of the office.

Their office is entirely open with almost no one having an actual enclosed office or cubicle. Beautiful views of the water can be seen from nearly every corner of the space as you'll see in the above pictures! There are huge, brilliant pictures of TERA characters and landscapes all around. Needless to say, the office just bleeds inspiration and looks like a lovely place to work.
After the tour, COO Patrick Wyatt sat us down to reveal their secret weapon in the fight against illegal RMT: the chronoscroll system. Alongside the event the team published a detailed description of this feature over on the official site, but here are the basics:
- Chronoscrolls are items which will be purchasable on the official site at TERA's launch.
- The cost of chronoscrolls will be equal to the cost of a monthly subscription.
- Chronoscrolls will be able to be sold in the in-game auction house or in player shops for in-game money. En Masse will have no say in how much in-game money the chronoscrolls cost: the players of the server will be in total control of placing value on the scrolls.
- Therefore, with this system, in-game money will be able to buy subscription time and subscription time will be able to earn players in-game money.
The goal for the feature is to kill the incentive for illegal RMT by legalizing a Gametime to in-game money type of RMT. I think it's an interesting idea that could definitely be successful. How about you, TERA Fans?
After the chat with Partick, we learned that our demo would be the same instance used during this year's Gamescom: Necromancer's Cell. We were placed into teams for the run and Organic and I spent the time waiting to play by chatting up the writers and other team members (the fruit of which can be found in his notes here!)
While I was waiting to play, Brian Knox alerted me to something I did not expect-- the Elin in the current build of the game were wearing release-candidate state, updated armors! I let him know that with this knowledge I was obliged to hijack a computer station and take pictures and to my further astonishment, he agreed to let me post them here for you guys! (Thanks a TON EME! <3)
So without further ado, have a look at the updated Elin armor:

I personally found the changes remarkably subtle and in some cases I had trouble locating what was changed. I learned that nearly all of the Elin armors were updated in some way; all short skirts gained shorts underneath, some panties were changed to shorts, some skirts were made slightly longer, and most stomachs were covered. I feel that they are tasteful and preserve the spirit of the original armors. I'm so excited I was able to take pictures and share them with you all, so please, let me know what you think!
The build of TERA we played also had a couple of additional features:
- Localized voice acting: All of the voices were provided by Seattle based actors. High Elves had slight British accents.
- Updated UI Icons: A few of the UI icons were changed around. See a picture over here.
- The build included the Korean Dark Awakening patch.
- New PvP ranking sheet, see picture here.
- Updated controller support.
After I had snapped all the pictures I could of the new Elin, Brian was awesome enough to hook up a controller for me to test the game with as it's a feature the team is really proud of; and understandably so! The controller was nearly plug-n-play: when it was plugged into the PC, TERA immediately recognized it. I was able to change bindings through an in-game menu and even hold down the attack button to spam the basic attack just like you're able to with the left mouse button.
The clunkiest aspect of controller use at this time is picking up quests, since you have to get the cursor to the "accept quest" rectangle using the joystick. However, the team has plans to refine this and I have no doubt they will! They seem extremely dedicated to controller support and as a huge keyboard and mouse fan I have to say, leaning back with a controller and some TERA was pretty sweet!
The Necromancer's Cell instance was a lot of fun! I played a sorcerer and felt that my group did extremely well as we had no deaths what-so-ever and cleared the place in 19 minutes! The two bosses we fought were pretty fun and not too challenging from a ranged perspective.

The final boss included static adds which pulsed AoE lightning that hit you hard if you got into their melee range, so it was essential that ranged classes cleared them out when they started to take up too much space. Overall the demo dungeon was a great experience.
The promised swag bags did not disappoint! They included TERA posters signed by the team, a TERA messenger bag, a TERA rock, and most importantly, the world's first chronoscrolls. That's right! We were granted physical chronoscrolls which we will be able to use as one month of free gametime at release. Completely awesome, check it out below!

On the whole, the EME open house event was awesome. I'm so glad I was able to attend and I really appreciate the team for opening up their doors to me and other community members!
Filed by TERA Fans News at 6:55 am under Uncategorized Tagged Attendees, Auction House, Beautiful Views, Curse, Detailed Description, Elevator, Game Auction, Game Money, Goa, Inspiration, landscapes, Lovely Place, Open House Event, Orderly Fashion, Pax, Perspective, Saturday Afternoon, Scapes, Secret Weapon, Trek
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