Fury Game any good?

[Mr. Lennon]

I just saw it listed as a free mmo on fileplanet. Has anyone ever given this game a shot?

 

[quikah]

Weird that this hasn't generated any other posts.

I finally got this downloaded and played it for a bit. Not bad. A bit twitchy and confusing at first. Think it may be a bit limited in playability, only arena style DM and CTF. No PvE. I can't imagine how they thought people would pay monthly for this. but it is a decent game for free, or $20 even.

 

[Chronoshock]

I posted about this in beta: http://forums.anandtech.com/me...ht_key=y&keyword1=Fury. The game took a downward spiral of retailing for 90 bucks, then 50, then 30, then 20, then free. I've followed the community for a while so let me try to give the synopsis:

The reason its done so terribly:
1) Bad beta experiences - Performance was absolutely atrocious in beta (huge memory leaks, only 8800s could run the high-spec engine and everyone else had to use the crappy looking low spec engine), the UI was clunky, server lag was bad at times, and skills were rebalanced way out of whack each patch so it was really hard to get a consistent view of the dev's directions
2) Poor marketing - They advertised in a number of places, but they didn't convey what they were too well and of course poor beta experiences made for bad word of mouth feedback
3) Ability/gear imbalances - It seemed like people would rotate to flavor of the month builds, and later gear procs were completely imbalanced (like say each piece of gear has a 10% chance of stunning for x seconds and you have that on all 13 pieces of gear)
4) Insanely steep difficulty curve - This affected people both in beta (leading to public perception), reviewers (many many bad reviews turned away the general public), and new retail players (beta vets would own them so fast they would give up within a day). I personally think this was one of the biggest issues.
5) Grind - Despite one of their slogans being "waste enemies not time," there was/is a heavy grind to unlock all abilities and get good equipment. This can be avoided by spending real money to unlock all the abilities automatically or spending money on in game gold (Auran actually sells gold themself)

To elaborate on the difficulty curve, Fury has approximately 400 abilities with 10 ranks each. Each spell costs "equip points" with increasing EP for increasing rank. Additionally, gear costs EP with better gear costing more EP. This means that builds must consist of balancing good gear with good skills, since you don't have enough EP to get good everything. This means there's a lot of strategy in how you spend your EP. The problem with this system is that with the sheer number of combinations, no one really knew how to make heads or tales of it unless you copied someone else's build or just tried out random things and were patient enough to "grind" the abilities and sets of gear required for each proposed build.
In spite of this wall of complexity, the devs throw you into the game with a minimal tutorial (more or less just teaching you the key bindings), and very little EPs. This means that early on, you can afford a full set of newbie gear and about 4-8 abilities. Given veteran players will use a set of 20 abilities, 4-8 doesn't cut it and you end up button mashing. Button mashing was the biggest complaint of new players since thats all the game seemed to be. Sadly, you need to earn ranks (more grinding albeit not much) to get enough EP for there to be strategic choices.
It takes a lot of gaming for the whole idea behind Fury to "click" and that doesn't happen for the majority of people. It took me probably 20-30 hours of play before I really understood what I was supposed to do.

Finally, the straw that broke Auran's back was that they really didn't listen to the community well. There were many devs that talked to the community, but their decisions would not reflect people's requests regarding features or balance. Granted, you can't always listen to what people whine about, but in some cases 95% of the people would agree that something wasn't working and the devs would go and make it worse. As a result, they alienated all of the veteran players and the major clans, decimating the remaining players. The only people remaining are probably 40-50 of the old vets and then a bunch of the new players that joined afteri t went free.

 

[Drift3r]

Fury is another Horizons, Dark and Light, Archlord, etc other wise known as a failed MMO attempt.