TERA : Exploring the Exiled Realm - 6

Fey Forest might seem like a far cry from the Isle of Dawn. It’s less open, with thicker tree lines and even less friendly locals (if that could be possible), with tight paths and large groups of monsters. Occasionally, as you travel on your way, you’ll find a house or a couple of people doing something for the war effort, but it isn’t difficult to see that the forest is owned entirely by the faeries, gnomes and other natives. Fey Forest might seem completely different from the Isle of Dawn, that’s true,  but underneath the surface there is trouble brewing, trouble that has its roots on Dawn and in the return of the malevolent demon god Lok.

Completing Quests

When I came back to TERA this week, I was in quite a funny position. I seemed to have loads of quests that I’d yet to complete and all of them involved killing some obnoxious amount of enemies, which at first I thought was going to be easy. The Fey Forest doesn’t offer monsters much more powerful than we’d been previously used to, but they hunt in bigger packs and are much more likely to attack you without provocation. It’s very easy to get caught off guard by a couple of sabre-tooth and what seem like hundreds of faeries, and when you find yourself in that situation there’s a good chance that the battle  isn’t going to be as clean cut as perhaps you’d have liked. So after over 30 minutes worth of hunting, I found myself bloody, beaten and lacking in MP. It was time to continue with the story.

Such a Tool

But that wasn’t before meeting one of the workers. He’d managed to forget his tools when travelling to the other side of the forest and, more embarrassingly, he’d lost all the parts to repair the broken bridge he did have. I was sent to check on his status, although not without being assured that the man I was going to meet was a complete idiot. After arriving at the bridge, he had me find all the parts (stolen by the gnome-like Red Hats) and then I had to take them to his boss for repair so that he didn’t get into trouble. The boss reminded me that the guy was an idiot, but I couldn’t help but thing that considering I’d delivered his tools and fixed his mistake, I was the bigger idiot.

Fey Forest - More Quests?

The Fey Forest is home to endless quests and, while it isn’t quite as dense as I found Middle Earth to be in our Lord of the Rings Online review, it wasn’t a million miles behind. It seemed that completing a quest would not only bring you to a new area (if you were strictly following the quest path, that is) but would also probably unlock 2 or 3 new quests as well. As a result, my quest log went from practically empty to too many to fit on the same screen at once. They weren’t all story-related, so some can be avoided, but all are given to you with the aim of making the Fey Forest a safer place for the general human populace. It is with this goal in mind that you come across a friendly fairy and her request to hunt down, weaken and rescue the unicorn Seravy after it had become brainwashed.,

Seravy

Seravy was the purest unicorn in the forest, until monsters appeared and took it under their control. It was this act, the act of spoiling such a beautiful creature, which has plunged all of the creatures of the forest into disarray. While it wouldn’t fix all of the problems, it would be a great first step to weaken the unicorn and then use a brew made up in a previous  quest to free Seravy of its mystical binds. I grabbed my bow and made my way to where Seravy had last been seen.

Civil Unrest

But Seravy wasn’t the only creature in the forest out of sorts. While the faeries have never been especially happy with the idea of loggers chopping down trees, recently they’ve entered into something of a civil war. The faeries I’d been fighting had taken it upon themselves to rid the forest of meddlesome human interferences, but their friends were about to attack the fairy’s lake in a bid to destroy those not loyal to their cause. It would be up to me to save them as well (which is a recurring theme throughout the game, odd for an MMO).

Walking the Unicorn

It didn’t take much to prevent the attack on the fairy’s lake, you just had to thin out the ranks, but Seravy was going to take a little longer to sort out. Not because it was difficult to fight, it was weaker than the Feral Unicorns surrounding it, but because you needed to use a vague item hidden deep in your backpack and because, when you finally did have control over it, it walked incredibly, indescribably slow. Watch the video for my reaction, because quite honestly there’s no better way of showing you what I mean than by showing you as my life actually slips away in front of my eyes.

Conclusion

In my time playing TERA this week, I’d reached out to the faeries and realized that there was much deeper problems in the Fey Forest than perhaps we were initially led to believe. The refugees we’d seen scattered around the place are the victims of something much darker than annoyed faeries, and it was nice to think that over the next few weeks we’d be getting slightly closer to discovering what exactly is going on. The Fey Forest region is proving to be very interesting and is made all the more enjoyable by the occasional PvP battle or through the multitude of quests available. If only they’d speed up that damn unicorn, I wouldn’t have a single thing to complain about.

M. Growcott