Fury preview

Fight the right fight
As with any MMO, Fury revolves around character progression, and it can be argued that along with the enjoyment of playing the game itself, the ability for a player to watch their in-game personality grow stronger and gain access to more powerful skills and spells is a big drawcard. Fury employs ranks – of which there are ten – instead of traditional levels, to reflect the relative strength of a character.

‘Fury is a competitive game, so we’ve kept the total number of ranks quite low,’ explains Carpenter. ‘In fact, increasing your avatar’s rank doesn’t confer any direct increase in power or health. Instead, each rank provides you with more equip points that you can use to customise your incarnations. Thus higher ranks allow your incarnations to be more diverse or more specialised on whatever path you prefer.’

That's a critical hit if we ever saw one...

Once a player achieves a higher rank they are free to compete with other players of the same rank and make use of the new abilities the rank entails. Alternatively, players can lower their rank to one they have previously gained. The advantage of this is a simpler experience; a player may feel that they are most comfortable at a certain difficulty level, or perhaps would like to spend more time at a lower rank before advancing. This somewhat replicates the ‘alt’ or alternative character phenomenon of games such as World of Warcraft, where the player can create a new character to repeat lower-level content, or experience the game from the perspective of another class.

‘In Fury … you can set any of your incarnations to be any rank you have achieved, so if you want to play at a lower rank you can. This gives players the ability to attain the same end result as they would with alts without forcing players to grind through the same repetitive content again and again. Additionally, players gain the benefit of being recognised for who they really are, not which alt they happen to be playing the most,’ says Carpenter.



The heart of Fury’s gameplay consists of teams of players fighting competitively in specially-designed arenas. This service is moderated by non-player characters called ‘Astralists’. Carpenter describers them as a gateway to Fury’s matchmaking system, designed to keep games fair by preventing better-equipped and higher ranked players from fighting opponents that would stand little chance against them.

‘This is great all around, as it ensures that pro clans fight other pro clans and pick-up groups fight other pick-up groups,’ he says.

Climbing the ladder
Essentially, players gain higher ranks by slaying opponents in battle. Carpenter however says that there’s more to it than just cutting down swathes of enemies.

‘The best way to advance is to play with your team and ensure that you and your team are all playing to win. “Play to win” is of course specific to each of the four game types as Bloodbath, Elimination, Vortex and Fortress all have vastly different goals, objectives and play styles.’

Not all players will want to hang around at the lower ranks – most will race to the maximum rank of 10. But what can they expect when they get there? What would normally signal the end of a game is just the beginning for an MMO, and is known as the ‘end-game’ in online parlance.

‘Very commonly a player hits the level cap and the game changes completely,’ says Carpeneter. ‘With Fury, the longer you play, the more you move into deeper levels of tactical and strategic gameplay. You aren’t forced to re-roll in order to find entertainment or to learn a completely different game.’

Indeed, if anything, spending time with the game will help accustom players to Fury’s crowning glory – the Incarnation system.

‘Each Incarnation is a collection of skills, abilities and equipment that you, the player, construct via a points system. Each incarnation can be as focused or as diverse as you desire,’ explains Carpenter.

You don’t even have to lose an incarnation that you like – it can be saved and recalled like your favourite weapon loadouts ala DiCE’s Battlefield.

‘Fury’s Incarnation system is unlike anything in an MMO to date. Unlike WoW’s talent points or EQ’s AA points, there’s no cost associated with changing an incarnation. This gives players unprecedented ability to build new incarnations, test them out, and then tweak them as much as they want.’