Pardon the pun (it was included in the press release, I swear!), but is everyone ready to be... TERA-fied this Halloween? Right now the people over at TERA are celebrating Halloween by releasing a brand new trailer that re-imagines a classic tale from the Brother's Grimm, all set within the world of TERA! Be sure to take a watch, and have a safe Halloween!

En Masse Entertainment recently released the sixth episode of the official TERA Podcast. Producer Chris "Chager" Hager, Associate Producer Stefan Ramirez and Senior Community Manager Evan "Scapes" Berman talk about the private alpha test, the game's production process and new game features. They also discuss planning TERA's future with Bluehole Studio during their visit to En Masse Entertainment.

Want to listen to the 16-minute podcast? Then click here to download the mp3!

In his latest producer's letter, Chris Hager discusses TERA's upcoming alpha test and more. Here are his main points:

• Members of the Bluehole Studio overseas team recently visited En Masse Entertainment to iron out the details for the alpha/beta/launch schedule.
• Alpha is one of their main focuses at the moment. "We will be extending our internal testing to select partners and external users over the upcoming weeks," he said.
• En Masse is in the early stages of redesigning the official TERA website. They're also looking into new forums.
• The platform team's  account management system is taking shape.

TERA is scheduled to launch in North America in spring 2012.

En Masse Entertainment just published the transcript for this month's Production Chat on Twitter, giving players the chance to ask questions regarding the recently announced Spring 2012 launch window. For example, the team confirmed that "guild housing is back into the discussion for possibly making launch now." They also hinted that they're looking at raid content before launch.

You can read the entire Q&A after the jump. These chats are held on Twitter on the third Friday of every month at 3 p.m. PDT.

Are you curious how En Masse Entertainment will be dealing with gold sellers and spammers in TERA? According to a new press release, those issues will be managed by Crisp Thinking's automated community management platform:

"The Crisp Platform tackles threats including gold farming, spam bots, griefing, power leveling and phishing attacks by detecting irregular in-game behavior; patterns within online chat and social graph activity in real time. It detects bad behavior and monitors trading activity in real time; automatically deals with low-level behavior in accordance with rules set by moderators; and prioritizes and escalates more severe problems to moderation teams."

Sounds helpful, but does it work? En Masse COO Patrick Wyatt says it's actually the best system available. "In testing we’ve been extremely impressed with its performance," he said. "The Crisp Platform automates many of the functions of human moderators, which allows our live team to spend their time moderating serious issues and helping players."

Cody Bye, ZAM's director of content, is a guest host on the latest episode of This Week In MMO on GameBreaker.TV! In TWIMMO episode 56, Cody joins Gary Gannon and Hillary "Pokket" Nicole to discuss Diablo III's real money auction house, the new Firefall trailer, Dragon Nest's open beta launch and TERA being pushed back to spring 2012. Find out what they had to say by watching the video below!

En Masse Entertainment just announced that TERA is scheduled to launch in North America in spring 2012. According to a new letter by Producer Chris Hager, an alpha test will be held later this year followed by a beta testing phase early next year.

“Adding time to our schedule will help us ensure we exceed people's expectations for TERA,” said Chris Lee, publishing VP of En Masse Entertainment. “The game’s action combat and depth has generated a lot of interest, and we are committed to making sure every aspect of the game lives up to our standard of quality.”

En Masse Entertainment sent us a video that takes players on a walkthrough of TERA's Dark Cathedral dungeon! The video follows a group into the dungeon, from its entrance at the Cathedral Redoubt in the Shattered City all the way down through to the shadowy chambers of the Grand Chapel. On their journey to the core of the Dark Cathedral, they fight all kinds of hostile characters, including Devans and Lokians, and of course a big-ass monster.

Watch the video below and explore the Dark Cathedral!

Over the past several months, we've been working on revamping our forum interface to make posting on ZAM a more streamlined and enjoyable experience. We are proud to announce that our upgraded forums are now live! We've stripped away the clutter and added a variety of new features, from updated contact information options to the ability to embed YouTube videos in your posts.

The main focus of this revamp is to make our forums easy to use. Posting buttons are more prominent, you can quickly reply to a thread directly from the thread view page, and you can now search within a thread. We've also expanded the options for our non-premium members. They can now select from a variety of pre-made avatars, use emoticons, enjoy mouse-over previews and post images and polls after reaching a specific post count.

We have forums for multiple games and topics, and we've made it easier to move from forum to forum. In the top right corner of the main forum page, you can quickly jump to any category. Whether you want to talk about games like Rift and World of Warcraft or more general topics like computer hardware or TV and movies, we've got you covered. We even have a new Star Wars: The Old Republic forum, so be one of the first users to share your thoughts on this highly anticipated MMO!

For more details on all of these changes, check out our design update notes after the jump. We hope you enjoy our forum upgrade! If you have any feedback or comments, please feel free to post them in this thread or send a private message to Kaolian, our senior forum administrator, or Darqflame, our customer relations manager.

En Masse Entertainment just released a video recap of the TERA demo they showed to members of the press at E3 2011. In the video, Producer Chris Hager and Associate Producer Stefan Ramirez walk players through the game's political system and a group battle with the mighty dragon Sabranak, one of TERA's big-ass monsters. Watch the video below!

We got the chance to check out the demo in person at E3, so be sure to read our impressions of the political system. We presented TERA with our Best of Show Award, so it's a safe bet that we liked what we saw.