Lords of the Dead, one of the pre-beta testing guilds for Fury, offers up an in-depth look at their experiences thus far in these early stages of the game.

LotD is one of the closed testing guilds for Fury, and I must say that it is positioning itself to be an action packed PVP game. Fury won't have any PVE, and players will be competitive from the time they log into the game. Anyway, click on the link below to read the rest of the article.

Game Development Cycle

Just so everyone is clear, Fury is currently inbetween an alpha client state and a beta client state. That is why the live testing weekends and fileplanet contests label the events "Pre-Beta" Weekends. June 1st was the first large event that Fury had outside of a previous tests conducted by a small group of closed testers. People who get in for these events should expect to see rapid change from week to week, but also they should temper their expecations by not expecting the game to be in retail state just yet.

Character Creation

The character creation is pretty much standard as we've come to expect. While I'm sure the options will probably expand throughout the pre-beta and beta, I was pleasantly surprised at the wide variety of avatar selection choices this early in the closed test. I ended up creating a bald guy with pale skin, and a dark colored outfit that befits my status as a Lord of the Dead. After that, I started the game and went into the tutorial.

Game Tutorial

The game tutorial was one of the better ones I've seen. There is someone narrating the storyline about the game, and telling you what your purpose in life is while running you through a series of exercises intended to orient you to the game environment. The first thing you figure it is that combat isn't like your standard Massive Multiplay Online Roleplaying Game (MMORPG)combat, but neither is it like a First Person Shooter (FPS) type game. Its sort of a mixture of both, and seems to take the best parts of combat from each type of game. I'll talk more on that later.

The rest of the tutorial is designed to give you an overview of the game controls, help you select a starting class, and eventually let you graduate into the real gaming world.

Read more here.