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Nothing Compares to a Sword in the Face

Ten Ton Hammer’s Hands-On Preview of Fury

By Cody “Micajah” Bye

My heart’s beating fast. Too fast. I lean forward in my desk chair, peering at the computer screen, waiting for steely death to descend upon me. My defenses are prepared; my shields have been cast and I’ve grabbed a bunch of power-ups. I’m ready for whatever is coming to me.

I don’t have to wait long, as another Champion strides around the corner, their wicked sword raised parallel to their chest. I throw a bolt of frost at him, trying to increase my chances of surviving this encounter. My enemy resists the attack and strides forward, whirling the sword at my face. Panicked, I mash my hotkeys furiously, hoping that speed will win this encounter. But it doesn’t, and soon I’m waiting for my body to respawn.

According to Auran, you should "Waste enemies, not time."

This is but a glimpse of the gameplay of Fury, a brutal peek inside a world that’s been fractured by cataclysmic events and each member of the population has fallen into a pseudo-amnesiac state and continually battle each other for dominance of their war-torn civilization. As players, you control a single member of this world, one whose ultimate goal is up to you to decide.

Fury, at its core, is all about action. Everything in the game is built around the concept of quick, frenetic gameplay. One of the mantras of the game (revealed in a recent gameplay trailer) is essentially “Waste Enemies, Not Time.” Truly, that motto explains the basic functions of the game. In most instances, you can play a round of Fury in just seven minutes (if you don’t count queues or loading times) and you never need to do a “corpse run” or “wait for a rez”. Gamers are constantly being plopped near their enemies, so with a quick dash across the level, you’ll be battling it out again in no time.

Taking some steps away from the highly popular MMORPG genre, Fury is a self-described massively multiplayer online third-person slasher (MMOTPS). While many of the elements of a classic MMO are still viable in Fury – persistent characters, customizable appearances, lots of loot – the main gameplay of Fury differs quite drastically from what I would describe as traditionally MMORPG.

Character creation in Fury is a purely aesthetic situation. The only portion of the Fury character creation process that is permanent after your selection is the choice of gender, everything else can be modified once you are in-game and have the means to change your appearance. With only one race to choose from, the character creation process appeals more to the vain side of human beings than anything else.

Character creation in Fury is purely for aesthetic reasons; you can change everything but your gender when you're in-game.

Although you still choose a “class” at the beginning of the game to define yourself, your character in Fury is essentially classless; you can choose any selection of abilities at any time during your experience within the game. All the beginning “class” does for your character is open up certain abilities to you initially that other players might not have access to. Once your character has enough money, however, you can buy any number of abilities from various merchants.

While character creation, a persistent character, and loot options may still be included in Fury, the rest of the gameplay is vastly different from what is found in typical MMOGs of modern times. Gone are the cast-and-wait sort of scenarios that you might get in World of Warcraft, vanished are the spawn-camping situations of EQLive, and eradicated are the days of farming for gold.

Fury takes all those ideas, stuffs them into a time-compressed package, and zips them into your various battleground arenas. The geniuses’ at Auran, when they were developing Fury, determined that speed and pacing are often the focal points when determining how much fun an individual player has when interacting with a game. In our previous interview with Auran’s CEO, Tony Hilliam, he noted that the game previously included an extended “cool-down” timer for most of the abilities:

“Getting the pace “right” has been the key to why Fury is so much fun. During development, we were playing the game and it was “nearly right” but it was still missing that elusive “addictive fun” element. We felt there were two problems: (i) there was a lot of stop/start when you stopped running to cast a spell or wield your sword, and (ii) when you ran out of mana, you ran out of things to do (as one designer put it ‘I’m out of fun’).”