Monday, May 4, 2015

44.7 :: Terror in Tera

** I realize my embedded images look like crap.  I'm trying to figure out why as they look fine in the edit screen, but somehow lose their "shape" when I publish.  I hope to have it corrected soon.**

I can't believe it's been over a month since I posted last.  Seems like it was just last week I put the last post up here and somehow 39 days went by without me noticing it.  Granted April is a busy month for me and work hasn't made it any less busier.

-slurp-

Gaming wise I've been playing a little bit of Diablo 3 and Tera Online.  My son and I started up a couple of Season 3 characters in D3 and made it to Diablo-3-Reaper-of-Souls-logo-iconlevel 70 in a 2 weekends of play.  Blizzard has really changed the game a lot since I leveled my first character and I must say the experience was a lot of fun.  Of course now that we're level 70, we are going through the painful grind of Paragon levels (800 in total if I want to max out everything), running Adventure mode on various torment difficulty settings and running through rifts.  It's not as much fun as we had while leveling to 70 but it's still a good time trying difficult difficulty ratings to see how well (or badly) we do.

Tera OnlineIn my free time (what little I have) I've also been delving into the world of Tera Online.  For a game that is free-to-play (f2p) it has really done well for itself.  The character creation is simple but offers a decent variety of choices.  There are 8 classes to choose from with an additional class if you have a character over level 40 on that server.  I've only been playing for a week or so and my highest level character is an Archer class at level 36.  I also decided to try my hand at a Warrior class which I'm pleased to say is quickly catching up to my Archer.

-slurp-

tera_logoTera features some stunning graphics and the combat animations are very well done.  The targeting and movement controls are a bit different to get used you, but once you have it down you wonder how you ever managed to play click to target games (i.e. World of Warcraft) before.  Wildstar and Neverwinter have similar no-click targeting combat but Tera seems to outshine them both.

I'm uncertain what the future holds for me in the Tera universe.  So far I like what I see and I look forward to logging in when I have some free time.  Whether that will continue in the weeks to come we'll have to wait and see.

-slurp-

As I mentioned earlier, April is usually a busy month for me.  Since my past post I celebrated a birthday, my oldest son's birthday as well as my sister's birthday.  April also concluded my large project at work; a project that I have been working on for the past 15 months.  As a result of that wrap-up, I spent a lot of time getting things finalized with my development team, individual development tasks properly sized and just plain old fun.

The 15 month project may have wrapped up but my next one has already begun.  This next project isn't nearly as aggressive as the last, but it will still be a challenge to wrap up by the end of 2015.  Overall work is OK.  I have a great team of developers who (for the most part) have their heads down and do their jobs and a great management team backing me up.  In a few short months I will be "celebrating" my 10 year anniversary with this company.  Hard to believe it has been 10 years.

-slurp-

"The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why." -- Mark Twain

May the 4th be with you!

Cheers,

Al