Fury preview

Aussie developer Auran promises the world with its feisty MMO Fury.

Unleash the Fury. Only words, yes, but they are more profound than one would first give them credit for.

If you’re wondering where we found this collection of letters arranged in striking prose, it was not in a chest at the bottom of the sea or one of those poorly designed ‘Memorable quote’ websites; you need only venture to unleashthefury.com – the online home of Australian developer Auran’s upcoming massively multiplayer title Fury.

Even without specifying who should unleash said fury, and at what, the words are clearly a challenge; a virtual gauntlet thrown onto the electric battlefields of cyberspace, where MMOs fight fiercely for subscribers. A fiery disc, marked with cryptic symbols and an emblazoned ‘F’ in its centre serves as a logo, its hypnotic spin as defiant as it is mysterious. Doubtless, grown men shiver under its shadow and woman fight nail, tooth and 3-inch heel to be in its presence. We’re not that fond of shadows (they can be chilly on winter days), but it looks imposing enough to warrant such reactions.



Spurned perhaps by the rapid growth of the MMO market and the seemingly unstoppable success of Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, the Brisbane-based Auran has taken up the daunting task of placing Australia on the MMO map. Founded in 1995 in the unquestionable sunny state of Queensland, Auran is one of the last great Oz developers.

Auran carved its name into the scene with its first release in 1997, the real-time strategy title Dark Reign. The game proved to be a critical success, scoring a 9.2/10 from GameSpot and 89 out of 100 from PC Zone in the UK. During its many years in the spotlight, DR was mentioned in sentences beside ‘Warcraft’, ‘Command & Conquer’ and strangely, the word ‘Orange’.

Oranges aside, Auran had shown the entire world – well, gamers anyway – that it could make a bloody good game. If this past masterpiece is anything to go by, then Auran is about due to unleash its fury onto the gaming world again.

A massively multiplayer online title that’s actually called ‘Fury’ is as good a start as any and should, at the very least, be associated fondly with a variety of citrus fruits in the years to come.

Roles to play
‘Fury … focuses purely on PvP action,’ states Adam Carpenter, Fury’s lead designer. PvP, or Player versus Player, is a type of gameplay that pits one human against another. The term is used almost exclusively in the MMO gaming space – which gave birth to the acronym – and involves role-playing or customisation elements that separate it from games such as Counter-Strike. PvP MMOs are also based in a persistent world where one’s achievement, earned abilities and equipment are stored indefinitely, allowing the player to pick up where they left off.

Another variety of MMO, called Player versus Environment is similar, and departs only in the fact that a PvE game has human players working together against a computer AI.

‘Most MMOs in the current market are PvE-PvP hybrids that provide PvP through designated areas or PvP systems that are tacked on and generally aren’t really well thought out. As Fury is focused purely on PvP, we’ve been able to avoid a number of the pitfalls and design issues that plague PvE-PvP hybrid games such as high-end PvE content providing items and abilities that prevent other players from competing effectively,’ explains Carpenter.

Auran wants to do more with Fury than just create a pure PvP MMO, it’s looking to forge a new genre of game – something that hasn’t been attempted by another developer in a very, very long time.

To give some perspective: Games such as id’s Wolfenstein 3D and Westwood Studios’ Dune II gave rise to the first-person shooter (FPS) and real-time strategy (RTS) genres respectively. Both games are over a decade old.

‘With Fury, we wanted to create something new and fresh. We didn’t want to make yet another WoW/EverQuest clone whose success would be primarily driven by the project budget,’ says Carpenter.

‘Fury accomplishes this by combining the customisation and character building of RPGs with the speed and action of FPS games. We’ve coined the term “Massive Multiplayer Online Third Person Slasher” or MMOTPS – we think it fits the new genre pretty well.’

The team was unanimous in its opinion of current MMOs and their varying implementations of PvP combat: They sucked. Carpenter admits that a few have come close, such as Shadowbane and Dark Age of Camelot, but none have hit on the best formula. With nothing but PvP on the table to balance, Carpenter believes Auran can avoid the troubles other games have faced, like PvE-specific abilities with no use in PvP or ‘ganking’ – wherein one player kills another unfairly while they attempt to complete PvE objectives.



Sure enough, coating this caramel core of Player versus Player action is a story to bind it as a cohesive, tasty whole. In Fury, the world of Altaia has been consumed by an all-powerful entity known as the ‘Fade’. Carpenter describes it as a ‘black hole-like force’ that happily devours whatever it comes into contact with. Much like a real-world black hole denies even light an escape from its pull, the mystical Altaia is deprived of magic by the never-satiated hunger of the Fade.

‘The Fade was brought on by the Altaian’s reckless use of magic. Their use was so detrimental to the world that the gods who provided magic abandoned the Altaians,’ says Carpenter. ‘The only way to resist the Fade is to gather Essence from the war zones [which serve as in-game combat arenas]. Each realm is fighting over the scarce resource, so it’s up to you to help your realm gain more Essence and therefore survive.’