Fury Beta preview

Once settled on character design you’ll spawn at the Citadel of Rebirth, the first area where you’ll bump shoulders with your fellow fledgling Chosen and take part in the tutorial. Here you’ll forget the ogre-like character graphics as you wander around an environment where motes of dust get caught in light spilling from impressive cathedral windows and bloom effects leak from every edge of armour and stone. Fury renders using the Unreal 3 engine and does so sparing no expense with fancy effects.

Actually, the bloom effects cause color bleeding so extreme you’ll be unable to appreciate the detailed texture design; thankfully video options allow you to turn off post-fx inclusive of the bloom. There’s also an option to switch the 3D renderer completely in favour of one that runs on older graphics hardware. While downgrading makes Fury run smooth like oil, it also makes it ugly like sin.

The same scene, but the second screenshot is using the older renderer. Fast yet disturbingly plain.

The tutorial takes you through the various components of Fury by means of guide NPCs who teach you the various different aspects of the game, everything from class progression to combat. When your avatar is left standing as you read the tutorial notes, he or she will constantly flex their muscles and engage in complex tension relieving routines, a constant reminder that you’re here for one reason and one reason only, to fight.

It’s a little thing, but it keeps you well and truly in the aggressive frame of mind.

The mechanics of character progression and ability branching show the lockdowns of traditional MMO games to be surprisingly absent. There are character archetypes - one melee and one caster class sitting under each of the four umbrella ability ‘schools’ (which are based on the four elements of life, growth, death and decay) but while you might choose to start off as a Champion, Defiler or Overlord – you’re never stuck with that template. At the end of any PVP session you’re awarded different amounts of essence, divided into types that align with the aforementioned elements.

Stunning environmental effects abound with the Unreal 3 based engine of Fury.

Testing out your fire-starter abilities in the NPC filled tutorial arena.

Everything revolves around the acquisition of Essence.

It’s essence that allows you to unlock the memories of your past (being immortal, there’s plenty of it) and through each memory learn long lost skills. To boil away all the fluff; you fight the good fight to gain essence, trade essence in to learn new abilities via ‘trials of advancement’ and for each newly learned ability take your character a step closer to a new rank. Ranks are Fury’s answer to levels, ditching the numeric system in favour of suave titles like ‘initiate’ and ‘adept’, giving advancement a more organic feel.

The kicker with all the above, is that the abilities need not be tied in with the class you chose initially. You can – through perseverance and Essence gathering, gain skills and spells from any school you please. Each rank you gain doesn’t make you innately more powerful, but rather allows you to work with more diverse combinations of abilities, spells and gear by way of equip points. Through the in-game mechanism of incarnations, you can save different combinations of abilities like alternative characters, and load them up at will. Each saved set of powers and gear is another incarnation for you to fire up when the need arises.

The only disappointment that cropped up during the tutorial was the locked nature of the UI. When your character sheet or equipment window is up, its placement on the screen is fixed and immovable. When focus is on a dialog window or screen your character stops moving and cannot be controlled. This feels rigid, and could do with being conducive to people who like reading over stats or equipment details as they make the dash from one NPC to the next. Lead designer of Fury Joseph Hewitt commented to MMORPG.com that Auran have no plans to offer a customisable UI to players.

“Besides being a lot of work and prone to exploitation” explains Joseph, “I also realised that there wasn’t a lot left to customise once you take into consideration the simplicity of the game play and what we’d already built into the interface”