Reading some of the previews or perhaps even getting your own hands-on time with TERA, its hard not to look forward to the game. Its crisp look with exciting action combat and new political system are all things worth looking forward to. However, the wait for some may be getting a bit too long. After all, the game has been live in Korea for some time now, so whats the holdup for the North American audiences?

We asked that very question to En Masse Entertainment at GDC this week and the team has been very busy over the past year getting the game ready for the audiences over here in the West. What sort of things have they been up to?

Taking suggestions and feedback from the TERA fans themselves, a whole new slew of elements have been added to the game before its launch in May. Rested xp has been added to allow players who may play a bit less than their friends to accrue more rested xp so they can earn xp twice as fast when they next log in.

A new broker system has been added to ease player transactions when trading goods and currency with other players. Daily quests have been added along with six different factions. Performing the dailies for your chosen faction will result in faction rewards.

The levelling curve has been fine tuned to make for a smoother levelling experience. Group experience has been modified to allow greater experience gains while grouped. Getting these groups is easier now too, as a new matchmaking system has been added, allowing players to quickly find groups for the instances they wish to run through. The instances have changed order a bit too from the Korean iTERAtion of the game. This has been done in order to assist in smoothing out the levelling curve and having it make a bit more sense for Western audiences.

For the end-gamer, a Nexus system has been added. These are public-type quests which will be activated in the persistent world every now and then. Should a player be of appropriate level when one of these Nexuses open and a slew of monsters from an alternate universe come pouring in, a quest will automatically appear on the players screen and they can opt to join forces with the other players in the area to push back these beasties. Three waves of monsters will assault the area and should they all be defeated, players will earn their own private rewards.

In an effort to combat currency selling for real world cash, chronoscrolls have been added. These are items that can be purchased on the marketplace for real money, and then sold in game for gold. These chromoscrolls will give their owner game time so they can continue playing the game without paying a subscription themselves, should they have enough gold to buy the scrolls from their fellow players.

PvP and PvE server sets will be available at TERAs launch. The PvP server set did pose some challenges to the developing team as the combat isnt a locked-target based system, which means extra considerations had to be made in order to avoid splash or inadvertent damage to allied players.

All in all, En Masse has been busy at work preparing TERA for its launch in the West later this year. All of these systems and additions may sound familiar and thats definitely something that needs to be considered when importing a game that may not have been specifically designed for a particular region. These additions and tweaks are likely to add enough familiarity that any MMO player in our part of the world will be able to easily pick up TERA and play and understand it. And that can only be a good thing.