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November 16 2010

Bluehole Studio, the guys behind the eastern (and a large part of the western) development of TERA, have a very strong presence at this week’s G-Star convention in Korea.  CEO Kang-Suk Kim and developer Hyung-Kyu Park took part in a press conference for some Q&A.  From there, TERAFans translated the proceedings and have posted the session on their forums

There are definitely some very interesting bits of information, not the least of which being the pay model, which they’ve finally shed a little bit of light upon.  It’s hard to discuss this early on in development, and so I can appreciate why it’s taken this long to find out even this little bit of information.

“TERA’s payment model will be monthly subscription based.”

“We can’t say that TERA was made specifically for a subscription-based model, but we thought a lot about what the game was worth to players. We came to the conclusion that a monthly subscription would allow players to enjoy the game most easily. We are not interested in cash shops or partially making the game a pay model like some MMORPGs out there,” Kim said.

The two talked about the next stress test, which may be occurring as early as next week, and if all goes well, they open beta testing should follow.

When asked about their launch date, they pulled off a Blizzard and stated the game will launch when it’s ready.  To be quite honest, I was very happy to read that, as it means they are not going to rush the game out early dude to a marketing deadline.

I was also impressed with the discussion revolving around future updates.  They are already planning ahead, in terms of huge updates that will be game changing in some regards.

Hyung-Kyu Park: The theme of our first round of updates will be air. However we are planning to restrict any flying around to certain areas and servers.

Of course the normal field monsters will not be able to counter you while you are flying but if there are flying monsters flying around, the players should be able to fly as well. We don’t have any of these details finalized yet.

Definitely head over to Terafans and check out the entire Q&A.  It did nothing but make me want to play this game even more.

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