Fury: Full-Tilt PvP on Steroids

by Karen “Shayalyn” Hertzberg

As I was trudging out to the shuttle buses tonight after wrapping up my day at E3, I heard a couple of gamers chatting behind me. “You know what your problem is?” one said to the other. “You don’t have the balls to brutally destroy your enemies.” And I thought, you know, that would be a good opener to my article on Australian developer Auran’s newly-announced MMO, Fury.

I have no real segue for this, so…

Fury is a game for those who do have the cajones to brutally destroy their enemies—it’s 100 percent full-tilt PvP. You won’t be slaughtering NPCs in Fury; you’ll be taking on other players in fast-paced, instant-action combat. “[Fury] isn’t like other games where you’ll stand around 8 seconds waiting for a spell to cast,” Adam Carpenter, Fury’s lead designer, told us. “90 percent of our spells are instant cast.” Carpenter described the game as “on steroids.”

“They get mad when I say it’s on crack,” he laughed.

Although the game is designed to move fast, Carpenter insists that it’s not twitch-based. “We want our combat to require fast mental skills,” he said.

Instead of a traditional class-based system, Fury uses traditional RPG archetypes and something they call incarnations. An incarnation is a set of abilities and equipment that a player can save. While you can have only one character in Fury, that character can have as many incarnations as you like. Well, it’s not infinite, but you can have over 200 different incarnations, and that seems, uh…plenty. Players can change their incarnation whenever they’re in a non-combat area, so if you’ve played a melee class in one battle, there’s nothing preventing you from switching out and playing a healer the next.