Outmatched, outsized, and outclassed. This gigantic enemy is in for a world of hurt.

It's a giant spider scorpian ant... thing. Quick, kill it! Kill it now!

I wish I could summon the inscription of the One Ring in midair.

Our resident MMO expert Leif Johnson had plenty of chances to see and play TERA over the past year. But at GDC this week I finally had an opportunity to get some hands-on time with this action MMO myself and see what all the talk was about -- besides the attractive looking creatures that appear in every screenshot.The big feature that En Mass Entertainment wanted me to take away from the demo was their reveal of the Nexus Dynamic Event System, an aspect of their endgame content. The way it will work is that at some point during the endgame, a dimensional portal will open from the argon world (aka where the bad guys are located). When this happens, all the players who are within that particular zone, be it public group or soloing, will get a notification that an invasion is commencing. If they want to participate, they'll immediately be whisked away to join other players to fight back this enemy invasion. It kind of reminds me of when the Borg appear somewhere in Star Trek Online and players are notified via the a red alert message. However, this is much more difficult.These battles are like a horde mode on steroids and can take upwards of an hour to complete. After each wave of argon soldiers is defeated, a stronger, harder, faster one will come in to take its place. To encourage participating in these events and to make sure players will be able to fend off these enemy advances, players will earn some pretty epic loot for helping combat this threat. As for this particular demo, I was able to go hands-on with one of these instances called Temple of Temerity, where the overall objective was to make sure an ancient relic was still standing after 20 minutes of constant attacks from the enemy.My role for this instance was berserker (melee damage), and for this particular class my special attack skills are all charged-based, meaning the longer I hold down any of my attacks (left mouse button for standard attack, right mouse button for an AOE attack), the more powerful they're going to be. Block was tied to the Tab key and I could also chain together attacks by pressing spacebar if I timed my attacks right. The trick, however, was that I needed to make sure my character's targeting reticle was firmly on the enemy when I executed these attacks. This is an action-based game afterall and the combat definitely plays out like that -- you can't sit back and simply press numbers 1 through 7 and hope to win.As the enemies stormed through the hallways everyone on my team started to play their role perfectly, up to a point. Healers, tanks, DPS... we were doing a great job and even made it to the halfway point of the map. This was when we were able to heal our relic as well as gain access to a few environmental objects like having spikes pop out of the floor (which only damaged the enemies, not the team) as well as having some explosive barrels to deal AOE damage.But alas, no matter how many undead skeletons or giant troll-things we killed, the waves of enemies became far too great and our relic was destroyed with just about 30 seconds remaining on the clock. As much fun as it was to play, it does seem like this particular instance demands a sort of perfection from everyone in order to succeed. And seeing as how most of the people involved in the fight had never spent much time with the game before, we did pretty good. Just imagine how good we'd be if we spent a few dozen hours in the game.Now if combat isn't your thing, another piece of endgame content will be TERA's political system (which was not on display) that will allow guilds and players to run and govern over a piece of land in TERA. It's said that this system will directly affect the lives of players that go into and out of that specific controlled territory, but the team wouldn't provide more details than that. Still, that makes for an interesting dynamic, especially in an action MMO, and I'd like to see in action after the game goes live. And there isn't much time to wait as the game is still on course for a May 1st release here in the US.: I agree with your assessment that the characters in this game are incredibly attractive. It's almost distracting. Reminds me of this time I was on a covert assignment in Rivdendell to blend in with the elves... oh, memories. I'm sorry, what were we talking about?