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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?

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?

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.

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