MAIN -- SONY -- MICROSOFT -- NINTENDO -- PC -- E3 BUZZ
An MMORPG... In All Its Fury...
Product: Fury
Company: Auran
Date: 07/16/2007
Avaliable On:

One of the overriding similarities I saw at E3 this year were games designed with the belief that MMORPGs were simply too slow. Fury is one such game that is attempting to take MMORPGs and turn them on their ear, by throwing out the "grind" and focusing on the good stuff.

I got a little bit of hands-on gameplay with Fury at Gamecock's EIEIO event (during E3), and it features a more fluid fighting experience that has a much more "FPS" feel to it. They are trying to provide an FPS-style rush, but with mental-twitch, not physical twitch. This means that, although the pace is faster than your average RPG, you will want, yea, even need to carefully select your attacks and spells if you want to succeed.

One way in which Fury cuts out the fat is by not having any "rat-killing" missions. When you start playing Fury, you will instantly be thrust into PVP combat. This may sound intimidating, but the game is structured so that everyone in your "Realm" has your best interest in their best interest. The game is set up such that everyone within the same Realm is rewarded as a team for team successes. All actual battles occur as Realm against Realm in "war zones", pushing a "Us versus Them" mentality. This is intended to help build a camaradie between players in the same Realm.

The experience, if you will, in Fury, is earned in the form of four types of "essence": Water, Fire, Nature and Air. Spells are also of these four essences. Instead of a "Mana" bar, which can become empty, Fury uses a very interesting dual-axis system. In this way, you don't "run out" of mana, you merely change the balance of the types that you have the most of. Managing these essences will be a key strategy in Fury, and there are spells (both offensive and defensive) which will manipulate and convert these essences directly, which can greatly affect the balance of power in battles.

Another novel concept used in Fury is the lack of "classes"; You can select whatever abilities you want, as you develop your character and gain experience, you increase the abilities available to you -- you're limited, however, based on the skill allotments allowed for your current Rank. This number of allowed allotments is, in fact, the only difference between the 10 Ranks.

HP is Solely Armor-based and there are no armor restrictions in Fury. There are modifiers caused by armor, so a spell-caster wearing plate-mail may find it a bit restrictive of movement and not very conducive to casting spells... but you could wear it if you chose to. This is an interesting approach, as it both removes restrictions that players may have thought to be tyrannical, while, at the same time, illustrating why these rules make sense, at least as guidelines on creating effective characters. The main thing this allows, however, is truly unique characters that work inspite of being contradictory. Imagine a powerful wizard who has never gotten over his fear of his own frailty and compensates by plodding around in full plate armor, widely known as the slowest yet most powerful and most protected wizard in the Realm. This lack of restrictions allows players to try unique things and to create characters which are, quite frankly, original.

Auran Games is based in Brisbane, Australia, but their servers are located in San Francisco, California. The closed beta began a couple of weeks ago, and as of the time of my appointment, there were several beta keys still available via FilePlanet or at the official Fury website's Beta Sign-up page. Fury is expected to officially be launched on July 27th.

Geck0 aka Robert Perkins

GameVortex PSIllustrated