THIS POST IS ONLY FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE CONSIDERING PLAYING THE GAME BUT ARE CONCERNED ABOUT ISSUES OTHER PEOPLE HAVE BROUGHT TO THE FOREFRONT. If you do not plan on playing the game and have already made up your mind, THERE IS NO REASON TO READ ANY FURTHER.

I have been playing MMOs, (particularly Korean MMOs) since I was 11 years old (I’m 30 next month). They are my favorite genre of games. My first ever MMO that I invested major time in was Ragnarok Online, a tab target MMO. I then went to various other tab targets including WoW, L2 and FF11.

Then I played my first action MMO, Vindictus. The combat of the game was great, but it wasn’t an MMO really. It was a lobby based multiplayer action game. It didn’t have PvP (at first) or any guild wars or anything that I was used to in the tab target MMOs, but the combat was just so good that I didn’t care. That said I wished, what if a game could combine these two?

Thats when TERA came about. At first I thought, this is it, this is the one. But then I got to late game and saw that large scale PvP was impossible. Characters would literally turn into silhouettes because the game could not render them. You’d literally be fighting shadows and taking damage. Tera was the first Action MMO, so I knew that it could only go up from there. Took some years but then BDO came.

BDO is a mechanically rich game. I played it for years, at least 10’s of thousands of hours. Its the closest to being what I always wanted but ultimately it wasn’t.

While the combat was great and fun, the desync was absolutely atrocious. The more players on the screen the worse it got. It got nearly impossible to see what was going on, who was doing what, and there was no strategy other than attack or retreat.

Also there were no real reasons to play with other players outside of PvP, or to PvP in general, which again, the Tab Target MMOs always had. This same issue reoccurred in New World.

So this brings us to TL. After so many years on BDO, I was so sure I’d never play a Tab Target MMO ever again, but then I started to learn about TL more and more. I started to realize that this game had everything I wanted EXCEPT for the combat.

There is a large incentive for non stop PvP not JUST when there is a guild war every couple days. There is a large incentive for group play not JUST when you’re at early game or your guild has an event.

There is a large amount of progression, not JUST in exp but even your skill points, making the gap between a long term player and a new player as large as a canyon.

The game has little to no desync or lag, no matter how many players are on screen.

So this game has all this good stuff, what about the bad? When I saw the initial knee jerk reactions of the streamers, I did the same thing I always do. I asked myself, “how do I feel about this?”.

Lets start with autoplay. Knee jerk reaction, autoplay is horrible, shouldn’t be in any game right? Well every MMO I have ever played has some form of auto play. Auto lifeskilling, auto fishing, they are essentially the same thing as autoplay. Only difference being autoplay in this game actually REQUIRES your character to be present in the world, not afk in some random town standing infront of an NPC. Its no where near as efficient as actually playing the game, it diminishes the value of bots and pilots which are present in nearly EVERY MMO, and it is completely free for everyone to use, so what is the actual problem with it?

The pay2win elements. I’ll be the first to say I want absolutely no pay2win in my games. I’d rather it be completely gone. HOWEVER, the current pay2win system of this game I’d have to rate at about a 5/10. Its really not that effective when you learn more about the game, MOST things purchasable are hardly going to give people major advantages unless they also put the work in to match. This of course is subject to change.

In conclusion, if you can give up your bias for tab target, give this game a try. It may be the MMO you have been waiting for, you just didn’t know it.