Ten Ton Hammer: On
similar lines, are any changes being made to any of the archetypes and
the skills they can employ? Are you doing anything in this expansion to
combat the “flavor-of-the-month” builds that are
fairly common in Fury?



Cameron:
Flavor of the month builds (or classes) are fairly common in every
game. The question we have to ask ourselves is whether or not
it’s popular because it’s unbalanced or just part
of a healthy build/counter-build metagame.



Based on a lot of player feedback we decided that for Age of the Chosen
we wanted to focus on reviewing and improving Fury’s
equipment system. By focusing on this we’ve been able to
setup a solid base moving forward for both equipment and archetype
changes which will be our next major focus.



Ten Ton Hammer: Numerous
enhancements have been made to the GUI in Fury, even since the final
weeks of beta. What kind of problems and/or feedback have you received
from the players that is escalating these GUI changes?

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/14871"
title="Deep in combat"> src="/image/view/14871/preview"
width="200">

style="font-style: italic;">GUI lag will be
fixed with the Age of the Chosen update.

Adam: A lot
of the improvements made during late beta and in the Age of the Chosen
update have been on our wishlist for some time.  They were
either added because of player feedback or due to our own desires to
improve their usability.  It really comes down to a case of
scheduling resources and the need to prioritize what everyone can
do.  For example, the changes to the Artificer GUI were
designed during beta.  We just couldn’t get the
engineering time allocated to implement them.



One of the best changes that AotC brings is a fix for the infamous and
exceptionally frustrating ‘GUI lag’.  This
story is somewhat ironic in and of itself.  From talking with
our programmers, my basic understanding is that the Unreal engine uses
a set of logic to determine when to send information.  To be
efficient, it will generally try to send information as infrequently as
possible and still provide good gameplay.  In the case of GUI
updates to your charges, health and so on, there was a bug with the
change-detection code meaning that it would never trigger on updates to
your charges and health info.  It was only when your ping to
the servers was updated that your charges/health would
change.  Effectively, it was a bug charges/HPs were being
updated at all.  However, the fact that the GUI was updating
(due to ping updates) made it quite frustrating to track down as the
issues were very inconsistent and very difficult to reproduce in a
reliable fashion.  Thankfully, it has been fixed and will go
live with the Age of the Chosen update.



Ten Ton Hammer: Improving
the tutorial mode in Fury is a huge step in streamlining the process
for new players in the game. Do you expect that the new tutorial will
help bring other players into the game aside from those that have
already learned the nuances of the title?



Adam:
We’re definitely hoping it will.  We found that the
release version of the tutorial had too much RP and too little meat in
it.  As part of the revisions, we’ve stripped out
most of the RP explanations and presented solid concepts to
players.  A good example is that the tutorial now clearly
explains how charges are opposed.  In the older tutorial, it
was wrapped in RP so that a lot of players didn’t immediately
grasp the concept.  In addition to streamlining the tutorial,
we’ve made improvements to the initial tutorial zone so that
players spend more time there before heading out into the other
Sanctuary zones.  Of course, since you do spend more time in
the zone, all the early game essentials are available within a small
area.



Of course, we haven’t had time to make all the improvements
we wanted, so you can expect to see additional improvements in future
Fury updates.



Ten Ton Hammer: The
equipment system has been one of the most complained about aspects of
Fury from the outset. How have you enhanced this part of the gameplay?
Will we begin to see other forms of equipment retrieval as the game
grows and evolves?

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/13278"
title="Generating some energy"> src="/image/view/13278/preview"
width="200">

style="font-style: italic;">The equipment
system has received a large revamp.

Cameron: We
received a lot of feedback about the equipment system.  Mainly
that it involved too much grind and created a large disparity between
the haves and the have-nots. We’ve gone back and reviewed
both the power level of the items and each individual enchantment that
can appear on them and as a result item power and equip cost are now
much more closely aligned. These changes create a system that is easier
for new players to understand and provide advanced players with more
meaningful choices when deciding between items and abilities.



One of our goals for Fury next year is to introduce a crafting system
which will allow players to create their own items with custom
enchantment combinations. This system is currently in early development
but is something we’re really looking forward to releasing.
Fury also has a number of ladders that keep track of player rankings
and we’ll be allowing access to new equipment as part of the
ladder rewards system.



Ten Ton Hammer: Is there
anything else you’d like to tell the Ten Ton Hammer readers?
 



Adam: Watch
for a really cool announcement that we’ll be making early
next week.