TERA’s Patrick Sun on working with Bluehole and more

[AL:TERA]TERA made news as the most played MMO on Steam earlier this summer, so naturally we were curious to see how things are going a few weeks later. En Masse Entertainment producer Patrick “Treeshark” Sun was gracious enough to field our questions, and he talks about everything from playerbase gains to working with Korea-based Bluehole Studio in the interview after the break.

MassivelyOP: TERA recently made news as the #1 most played MMO on Steam. Is En Masse still seeing playerbase gains this month?

Yes, this is an exciting time to both be working on and playing TERA. We’ve seen a huge influx of new players — so much so that we had to open the new Highwatch server to accommodate them. As far as I know that’s unprecedented with a three-year old MMORPG, they’re usually doing the opposite. I just checked and we are still the most played MMORPG on Steam and welcoming tons of new players every day!

Is the dev team happy with the state of endgame gear progression?

Yes, they’re currently happy AND they’re constantly looking at ways to make it better! We work with Bluehole to provide feedback on progression and what our players like and don’t like, and they incorporate this with feedback from other regions. One of the big advantages of being successful on Steam is that it gives us more weight as a region. They do a pretty good job at balancing the feedback they get both from the players and from the game data.

How closely does En Masse work with Bluehole Studio regarding TERA’s content? For example, BHS recently announced the Brawler for TERA Korea. Can you give us a ballpark figure for how long it takes something like a new class to undergo the “westernization” process?

En Masse Entertainment and Bluehole are in constant communication regarding content and the live service in general. They update us with the status of present and future content, and we provide our feedback based on not only how we think about it, but how we think our audience will perceive it. Bluehole, however, has the unenviable task of having to listen to all regions and finding a way to balance all the feedback they are getting.

As for the class, they share what they have near the beginning and we provide our input accordingly. Ultimately, Bluehole is still the developer and it will be up to them how to develop the class. For us, the westernization process mostly involved localization and naming. On top of that, we also have to prepare how we present and educate the players about this class. This process can take up to four or five months, but this also takes into account that we are also providing updates to TERA in the interim.

Thanks for your time!