Questions by Cody
“Micajah” Bye, Managing Editor
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Answers by Adam
Carpenter, Creative Director of Fury, and Cameron
McNeil, System Designer of Fury
Since its release in October, Fury
has been under a seemingly constant barrage of scrutiny from the
industry press (except for our own Jeff Woleslagle’s positive
first impression review of the game). Whether it’s horribly
scored reviews or rumors about potential staff layoffs, the press seems
like they’re hell bent on crucifying the entire Auran
development team. Still, the Auran staff has forged on and are
preparing to release their first major update to the game, titled the
Age of the Chosen.
With major enhancements to the armor, GUI, and
general gameplay in Fury,
the developers are hoping that Age of the Chosen will allow gamers to
truly enjoy the Fury experience. To learn more about the upcoming
expansion, the Ten Ton Hammer staff shot the Auran developers a list of
questions, which Adam Carpenter and Cameron McNeil deftly answered.
Check out their answers and hear about the huge number of improvements
Auran is bringing to the game!
Ten Ton Hammer: There are
a whole bundle of changes going into Fury: Age of the Chosen. How many
of these changes and additions were in response to player feedback?
What sorts of additions were originally scheduled for this update?
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style="font-style: italic;">The developers at
Auran don't plan on letting Fury die away.
Adam Carpenter:
With only a few exceptions, all changes in the Age of the Chosen are
based on player feedback and data gathered during beta and shortly
after release. Some of the changes like the equipment updates
were directly requested by players. Others like the
introduction of Carnage and changes to combat are based on data mining
and trends analysis.
As far as what was originally scheduled, most of the Chosen features
were already on the list. As I’ve said in the past,
we have far reaching plans with Fury.
Ten Ton Hammer: The Age
of Chosen free expansion is coming very quickly after the initial
release of Fury. Why didn’t these changes make it into the
original game?
Adam:
We’ve targeted the October release and a December update for
a long time. In order to meet the October date, we really
needed to stop all new development about 6 weeks before
release. During the last 6 weeks, the focus for most of the
team was on bug fixes and stabilization. However, not all of
the team were involved in bug fixing. A number moved off and
began to work on the Age of the Chosen update. As we got
closer and closer to release, more developers moved off of the bug
fixing branch and onto the development of the AotC update or the
content update that we’re developing for early next year.
Ten Ton Hammer: What can
you tell us about the Carnage game type? Will players be fighting each
other while combating the Bots in the game? Can players steal
blood tokens from other players, or the base of the other players?
Adam: The
Carnage game type pits two player teams against each other and against
a team of bots. The goal in Carnage is to kill the bots,
collect their blood tokens and then return them to your base to score
points. The emphasis in Carnage is on killing as many bots as
possible, as quickly as possible.
Now, players aren’t limited to only killing bots.
You’re free to kill the opposing team members any time you
want. In fact, the best time to kill them is when they are
carrying a lot of Blood Tokens as when a player is killed, all Blood
Tokens they were carrying disappear.
This creates a risk versus reward element as the longer you spend
gathering Tokens before turning them in, the greater chance that
someone on the enemy team will kill you. Of course, if each
time you collect two or three Blood Tokens you return them to your
base, it’s very inefficient as your Blood Tokens returned per
unit time drops off quite a bit.
Ten Ton Hammer: Tell us
about the 1v1 matches. How are these going to play out? Won’t
the melee oriented characters like the Destroyer and Guardian have an
unfair advantage over the weaker, ranged classes?
Adam: Are
casters really the weaker roles and in Fury? Also, what
really defines a caster? A few weeks ago, after we made
changes to the movement damage bonus, a few players were stating that
casters were now overpowered.
That aside, and to give you a more direct answer, the beauty of
Fury’s character development system is that you
aren’t locked into a rigid role. You can be any
kind of melee, caster or hybrid that you can imagine and change your
Incarnation anytime between battles.
If melee incarnations are the current flavor of the month, bring in
abilities that will shutdown melees. Likewise, if healers or
high defense incarnations are popular, switch your incarnation up to
bring buff strips and any of the abilities that shut down healing, eg.
Frozen Agony. It’s all up to players to build the
best 1v1 incarnation they can think of.
Ten Ton Hammer:
Since Fury is a wholly combat-based game, any changes that are made to
the combat system effect every single player. Why did you decide to
implement a longer cool-down period? How will this change the general
gameplay environment of Fury?
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style="font-style: italic;">Life expectancy of
beginning players was far to short, and Auran made some changes to
alleviate that situation.
Cameron McNeil:
One of the problems we were seeing is that the life expectancy of
players on the very low end and players on the very high end was far
too short. New players lacked the knowledge and experience to
compete effectively against others who already understood the game. At
the very high end, highly skilled groups were able to coordinate
attacks and strategies well enough that an enemy’s life
expectancy was far too short. Even in the mid range we were
encountering problems where some elimination fights would never end.
This created a pretty fundamental and difficult problem. Many
fights were too short with a player’s life expectancy
measured in just a few seconds. Other fights were far too
long. These are conflicting issues, and while it would be
simple to address either of them individually, together they present
quite a problem.
Increasing both the global cooldown and health will allow more time for
players to analyze their situation and react accordingly or learn from
their mistakes. At the same time we realize that creating this extra
buffer may result in longer drawn out matches which is something we
want to avoid. To solve this issue we decided to introduce a new Combat
Fatigue debuff. This debuff slowly builds as the player takes damage
and reduces the overall effectiveness healing has on them. Combat
Fatigue is removed on death or if the player can manage to avoid combat
for a short amount of time.
Ten Ton Hammer: Several
new, free-to-equip abilities have been added to the general ability
pool of the game. Why were these four particular abilities deemed
necessary enough to find their way to a coveted
“free-to-equip” position? What sort of alterations
will these abilities make to the combat in Fury?
Cameron:
Fury has a number of abilities based around controlling your opponent
and while these have counters we felt that in a lot of cases this
wasn’t obvious enough to new (and sometimes old) players. The
goal of the new abilities is to help players better cope with
traditional forms of crowd control like holds and stuns as well as
Fury’s unique charge and charge manipulation mechanics.
Sprint
- Temporarily increases the user's movement speed. This ability is self
only.
Liberate
- Using this ability will break any disruption effects placed on the
user. This ability also renders the user immune to stun, root, pacify,
terror, mesmerize, knockback and teleport effects. This ability is self
only.
Elemental Purge
- Strips the user of all their charges. A useful counter to charge
manipulation. This ability is self only.
Elemental
Immunity - Temporarily renders the user immune to charge
manipulation effects. Charges can still be generated and consumed
through normal ability use. This ability is self only.
To read the latest guides, news, and features you can visit our Fury Game Page.
