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Some questions on world design / lay-out.
To all betaists, here are a few questions I have in regards to Tera's world design and lay-out as it is such a biggie for me;
Is the world funneled and closed-in or wide and open?
Are mountains and other geography scalable or do they function mainly as walls / divisions?
How big do you reckon the total gameworld is? And how big are zones?
Is progress through the world while leveling a linear "path" or do you have multiple options for zones at each level range?
Is it one consistent game world or "phased" (multiple instances of public zones per server)?
Are towns and hubs faction restricted or are they shared?
How would you rate it immersion-wise? Do you love just traveling through the world or do you experience it as a chore?
Are there things to do out in the world beside fighting npc's? (Like harvesting / gathering / world pvp / fishing, etc).
Is there a day and night cycle?
Can you swim?
Unrelated bonus question:
Did they already announce a payment model apart from buying the box?
Thanks for your time and effort 
Comments
Depends on location, some palces are funneled others are as wide as anything i've seen, some parts of the desert/beach or arctic regions is just a giant open flat area.
The gameworld is 94 miles squared, believe it or not, it's bigger than Vanilla WoW, although some is undeveloped still. 4 new zones coming in February though and more later this year.
Your horse is a god, you can get over any mountain, I managed to get into undeveloped parts of the game and even fall off the map.
Some public zones have multiple channels, none of the main cities do though, this is just to relieve the crowded areas, however you communicate freely through to all channels when typing in area, looking for group or trade chat.
There are no factions restrictions in TERA, all races are allies.
I rate it a 10/10, I spent hours climbing mountains and explored the entire smaller continent, I was impressed when I saw what looked like a plant in the desert, I attacked it and the flower(actually a tail) retracted and out popped a 20 foot monster. Nevermind the giant windfish the size of a small town I saw flying in the sky.
No day and night cycle, but many zones are darker/lighter and the sun changes colours, the sky can be green, red, brown, blue, etc. There also zones where it's dust storms, raining or snowing.
Well the gathering is pretty basic, the ores/elements and plants have difficulty levels and harvesting them gets you buffs and whatnot, I haven't looked into this much.
You can only swim on top of the water, not underneath. Hopefully they develop this more in the future.
$49.99 got the reguler box and $14.99 per month or reduced prices depending on how many months you buy at once that goes to as low as $8.95 per mnth if you buy 12 months.
Edit: Some pictures I took, not good quality though so i'm sorry about that.
Please note these images are just from the much smaller continent of TERA and I didn't even get a shot of every zone...it's really epic in terms of variety.
I played and but sadly I can't help with much. I'll read up on it and get back to you though, as I'm pretty excited for this game. One thing I can say though is there are no factions. So the towns wouldn't be restricted. I do know that there is harvesting/gathering and it appears you don't need to train for each one, as I was able to gather some sort of plant, mine from sort of rock and use my hands in a wavy pattern to extract some sort of essence ....lol.
I don't think there are day and night cycles from what I've seen. I love the world and have had a really good time traveling from area to area as the world is extremely beautiful. Even my wife... who doesn't even look at video games walked by and commently on how "pretty" the world was. You can swim. I do think the world is phased - as it shows how many people are in the phase you are in. But if seems very large, as there were several hundred in my area with just a shit ton of people around - normal for a beta event.
I've heard on the pvp servers that there is full open pvp, but I need to read more about this political system. I'll see what else I can find.
Until level 16 it was basically one main quest chain with several side quests.
Servers were instanced: On Saturday on server 2 there were 5 channels, on sunday server 1 had 15 channels.
The immersion-thing was actually better than expected. The ambient music was fine, and when I didn´t look for the next mob to slaughter and looked up to sky and scenery, it both looked good. Sun shines, sometimes blocked by moving clouds, green forests and plains, butterflies here and there.
Level 16 was my max though.
It's some kind of hybrid, feels like Vanguard open space at times with a twist ( Zone channels
) while early levels and noob island AION-like.
I don't remember if you had loading screens in AION between the big zones, it you didn't then the feel is about same, if not then Vanguard/Aion mix.
I care about your gaming 'problems' and teenage anxieties, just not today.
Zone channels disappear on the other continent. I think it was after level 40? Someone else will have to confirm this.
Yeah on Ktera Channels disappear at lv40 (thats when pk rules start). This will probably be lowered for NA & EU becasue our pk rule set will start earlier.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
After heading to the city I traveled out to the countryside and it was very open and made me wish I had a horse. They did a great job peeling back distant entities where you can see forever but not lag. The main city has a huge cog wheel of sorts and from a great distance you could still see it spinning.
I was impressed
Just not worth my time anymore.
Thanks everyone. Very helpfull info so far. Cheers!
My brand new bloggity blog.