UPDATED: PAX West 2017: Sneak Peek With En Masse Entertainment

Shane, Taylor and I had the opportunity to meet with En Masse Entertainment and demo three of their titles.

We first got to test out TERA.  TERA isn’t a new game, however, En Masse has been working to move  TERA to console platforms. This brought a new set of challenges since combat, options and menu tress had to be reconfigured and mapped to a controller. We got to demo the XBOX ONE version; Taylor had never played  TERA before, but Shane and I both play online and are familiar with game play and story. Characters were pre-selected and geared for us, and we just happened to pick characters that fit our personalities.  Taylor was the DPS, a striker Porpori, Shane was a high elf sorcerer, and I played a human female lancer.

We were placed into a specific instance that the developers had created for us to enjoy. We were outside in a snowy area with a few BAM (Big Ass Monsters) to fight through. We were shown how the combo system worked, chaining different abilities together. Shane was familiar as he played the PC version with a Dualshock gamepad before.

We were given a few opportunities to get used to our characters moves, as we were led to fight a very strong beast at the end. The three of us were enjoying quite a difficult battle, but I got overzealous and died. Shane and Taylor pulled the boss too far from his patrol zone, and he reset! We were told he wasn’t supposed to be in that are to begin with, so his AI got confused. The demo for PAX was very specific so that players could get used to the new controls. After I spawned back in, we got the boss back down to 30% health and kept hammering it until it died!

The demo we played was very fun, and was a blast to get to check out early. There were some slowdown’s and draw distance issues, but these were all known to the team and they explained to us that they are going to be fixed. No specific details were given to specs. There aren’t any plans for PS4 Pro or XBOX ONE X support, but the game will benefit from faster hardware.

The change from playing on PC to playing with a controller wasn’t that hard at all (although I do have a hard time using controllers), and the game felt exactly like what I get when playing  TERA on my computer at home. The different ability bars were very fun, and pretty intuitive. Holding down the LB button would let you access the second set of spells. The menu’s were completely redone to support controllers better. Shane quickly found the emote wheel and started dancing the moment he got a chance.

The console crossover will go into the BETA phase in the next few months for both PS4 and XBOX ONE, with a full release sometime next year.  Servers for the respective platforms will still be separate, so no cross platform game play will be available.

Next we split up to test out the new side scrolling beat-em-up Closers, on PC. Shane and I got to wander through New Seoul and test out the game mechanics. Set in New Seoul after a futuristic war, Closers follows teens with amazing psychic abilities as they try to protect their home. While we didn’t get to experience much of the story due to demo limitations. The game is a 2.5Dbeat em up, with anime style characters. We started in a hub world, and our party would then set out on missions. Shane played a ranged character, and I played an up close brawler. We had to keep our combo count going, so there was an incentive us to play aggressive. Each character had a special “Closer” ability that would cancel the attacks of any enemy. Even big boss moves. If the animation started, we could run up and stop the attack all together and beat them down wit hour specials. Closers is going into alpha testing in September, and should be released before the end of the year.

Our final demo, Kritika, is a third person action RPG which is also already available to play on PC. We got a taste of the new instance that was just released as part of the Shattered Table update. This game felt a little more button mashy, trying to do as much damage while waiting for cool downs on abilities, but was still fun to play even with just two people in the instance. We each got to check out their latest character class, Psion, which is set to be released sometime in October. She was a cute, punk girl with a short skirt that reacted very well to the physics of her jumps. Shane was very intrigued (of course).

That was our visit to the En Masse media suite. We were very grateful to be able to check out some of their new content. TERA for consoles is definitely going to be a day one pick up.