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PAX Preview: Fury
Fury is in essence a game similar to Guild Wars in that players are matched against players in instanced battle grounds – but there is also where the similarities end. “We were lucky that we could look at games like Guild Wars and World of Warcraft and learn from them,” said Adam. They also learned from their own in-house testers and removed the power bar (which a dev had called a fun bar, and would get himself killed to replenish it) – a major shift in their design that required a re-think and re-balance of their entire skill system. For PAX, players had four incarnations to choose from as a starting point. They were the Paladin, Offensive Mage, Healer and Warrior. In the demo, we simply picked one and fought! In the normal game, there are eight archetypes spread across four schools (with one melee and one caster in each school). A player can pick and choose the skills they wish to train and hence the trials to undertake. At character creation players get to choose one archetype, but more as a guideline. Players are free to follow as many archetypes as they wish, they just cannot take them all into combat at once. Players can mix and match these skills to build an infinite number of incarnations to use.
Fury pits players on a server against players from other servers. This is a community building exercise and it also gains a larger player base from which to match teams against. Adam estimates that waiting times will range from 30 seconds (prime time) to a general maximum four minutes (off-hours). The more players there are online, the more the Match-Making program has to draw from, the faster players will be matched into teams, and teams matched to other teams. One of the advantages Auran had from developing when they did was that they got to see the mistakes World of Warcraft and Guild Wars made in regards to queues. Ultimately, they believe wait times will be largely insignificant.
Four types of maps or battle grounds are planned for launch. They are:
“No trash talk,” said Adam. “That’s not what we are about.” The cross-server games provide prestige points and ladder standings, but there are also in-server challenge games available. These games will not count for prestige, experience or loot, but are a medium for trying out incarnations, practice and friendly rivalry (trash talk permitted). Carpenter also said they would evaluate whether or not the community wanted additional reward systems for this style of play during testing (gambling, perhaps?). Carpenter himself is something of an oddity in gaming. By trade, he is a chemical engineer and told us he is currently in the market for a systems designer who has a degree in engineering or economics. He got his start in gaming through a re-evaluation of the mathematics behind RPG game design and now has Fury to try them out on. Carpenter is keenly aware of balance and given his background and what he seeks in future designers, Fury should be fundamentally strong.
Unlike most early PvP games we’ve seen, it seemed melee was a more than viable option in Fury. As a warrior, I had no problem running around and killing enemies. Sure, I got destroyed my share of times as well, but as a die-hard melee gamer, I definitely felt things were fair. The true joy of Vortex games was the ability to run into the enemy base and actually steal some of their crystals. Victory was achieved by capturing four crystals and holding them in your base at the same time. The only way to truly prevent your enemy from winning was to wait for an opportune moment and steal a crystal. Even if you didn’t make it home, it made it harder for them to win. When carrying crystals, the screen turns wavy and all abilities are disabled. Basically, you run for it and hope your teammate stop and help. In games where our teammates did not talk, we always lost. When we became more social, victory was inevitable. Built-in VOIP communication will be a key for Fury.
At the end of each game, all sides get a chance to bid on reward gear. Priority is given to the winners and highest scorers, obviously. Simply double click to set your top three choices and wait for it to resolve. There is also a score board – not unlike Counterstrike – to look at.
Fury should support roughly 5000 players per server and with cross server combat, that community only gets closer. The matching system intentionally pairs people with complimentary characters against people of similar strength and allows people to enter as a group or be placed individually. For a tradeshow demo, Fury is perfect. It is fast, easy to learn and fun to play. The only concerns are whether these four games will stand the test of time once the game launches and what kind of pricing model they select.
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PAX Preview
