En Masse is very proud to bring TERA’s vast MMORPG game world and true action combat gameplay to the Xbox One starting today. TERA’s emphasis on action within the MMO genre has always made it a good candidate for play on an Xbox One controller. In fact, TERA’s signature combat, with its emphasis on combo-building and active dodging, originally drew inspiration from console action games.
How It Began
During early development, a few folks at En Masse rigged up gamepad support on an Xbox 360 controller by manually assigning inputs. Even with this rudimentary setup, TERA still played quite well, and as a result Bluehole added official controller support to the PC version. As gamers ourselves, we, at En Masse, recognized it would be a popular game on Xbox One and urged the developer to make it happen.
Challenge Accepted
TERA is developed in South Korea, and when the project was greenlit and development began, there were not many developers there with experience developing for Xbox One. Eager to add new skills and experiences to their arsenal, Bluehole wasn’t going to back down from the challenge of bringing TERA to the platform. At the time, Bluehole had never developed a console game before, so getting set up to develop an Xbox One game represented a challenge. Finding the right people to develop a massive game with complex systems and network support was another challenge and made progress slow at the start of development.
Totally Worth It
Just before PAX West in 2017, we had the game up and running at a good framerate with control assignments and behaviors developed specifically for Xbox One. Picking up the gamepad and controlling one of TERA’s 10 character classes immediately felt visceral and satisfying. Excitement about the build was so high internally that the team at En Masse immediately put together a sneak peek play session with members of the TERA community. The positive response of these players made it quickly apparent that all the time and effort poured into the project by the development team was well worth it.
Looking Forward
We’re excited for all Xbox One players out there to finally play and discover everything TERA has to offer! The development team took great care to fully adopt the complete MMORPG package of TERA for Xbox One. They even packed in some new features, including a lock-on system to help keep track of all the onscreen action, a fully re-designed and streamlined user interface, social features like integrated party voice chat and streaming support, and more! Everything from TERA’s vast game world, dozens of dungeons, hundreds of creatures, and unique combat encounters are reborn in a new and different way on Xbox One!
TERA is free to play on Xbox One right now.