Chronoshock

Diamond Member
Jul 6, 2004
4,860
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The sign-up is here.

I've played the beta the past 2 weekends (the beta servers are only open fri-sun currently) and I thought I'd post some impressions here. I'm also bored at work so this gives me something to do...

Cliffs/summary:
Only pvp, no mobs to fight
Gameplay is very similar to WoW battlegrounds
Unreal 3 engine, looks great
Huge skill variety, 400+ skills
Up to 24 skills can be used at a time (limited hotbar like GW)
8 classes


The way the game is set up is very similar to WoW's bgs, you queue up for one of three types of warzones: elimination, bloodbath, and vortex (team deathmatch, ffa, and CTF roughly speaking). Each match rewards you with money and items, with more money and better items rewarded to the winning team. Items are distributed by selecting up to 3 items from a list to roll on and you can roll multiple times on a single item if you really want it. In addition to loot, you also gain "essence" from each match, used to gain new abilities.

Skills are learned via trials, and each trial requires essence to complete. Completing trials gives you experience. There are only 10 levels in the game and progression is pretty rapid right now (I am level 8 after 2 weekends of heavy play). The only difference between levels is an increase in equip points.

Equip points are required to wear armor and equip abilities. Higher ranked armor and higher rank abilities consume more equip points, so effective builds must find a balance between the both (there isn't enough points to wear the best of everything).

Gear is fairly varied, with multiple tiers of rarity and a lot of randomized attributes so that should add good replayability. Each class has its own armor set, but you can wear any type of armor you want.

Classes are also very flexible, you pick a class initially to determine what skills you start with, but you can pick up any other classes skills by completing their trials. Your character's class is really only a label to describe where the majority of the skills you're using come from. This means you have a ton of customization.

Abilities are varied, and their usage centers are elemental charges. There are 4 elemental schools, and most abilities will either generate or consume charges. The more charges you have in a particular school, the better abilities in that school become (so shooting a fire dart with 10 fire charges will do 60 more damage than with 0 fire charges, and 120 more damage than if you had 10 water charges). You have two elemental bars, fire/water and earth/air which oppose each other. Typically characters will focus on just two non-conflicting schools.
Charge manipulation is an important aspect of pvp in Fury. As an example, if someone is healing themselves a lot (water element), you can use an ability that swaps their water charges for fire, destroying their ability to heal for a while.

Since the game is in beta, it still is a little buggy. The top three issues I've seen thus far are UI bugs, connectivity issues, and performance. This game is a RAM hog, and 1gb really isn't enough. I'm using only 1gb right now and there is a few seconds of swapping when I enter a warzone. The game supports a wide variety of graphics cards (there's a low-end render for cards that don't support pixel shader 3) but the unreal 3 engine looks best with a newer card.

Right now, due to limited number of people (100-200) they don't segment the war zones based on level, so starting up can be painful as you will get owned repeatedly by high levels, but at least leveling is fast and you can still fight other low level people.

 

matas

Golden Member
Aug 8, 2005
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I'm gonna try it out, even tho I would like pve and pvp mmorpg.
 

KMFJD

Lifer
Aug 11, 2005
31,038
47,821
136
Sounds cool, is the movement is the game based on wasd or point and click?
 

Chronoshock

Diamond Member
Jul 6, 2004
4,860
1
81
Same control scheme as WoW, wasd with the option of holding down left+right click to move as well. Camera is controlled via left click and right click separately (left moves camera but not character, right moves both). All hotkeys are remappable
 

effee

Golden Member
Sep 4, 2004
1,797
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I'd play counterstrike or GW if i wanted PVP only. PVE is fun sometimes..
 

Aikouka

Lifer
Nov 27, 2001
30,383
912
126
Maybe I'll give it a try... I have to wake up my poor video card... nothing has really made it try yet ;). Oh and you know that 1GB of ram isn't enough good enough for WoW, right? For 1 WoW client, 1.5GB+ is recommended and I currently use 4GB (3.5 in 32-bit OS) for 2 WoW clients.
 

Fingolfin269

Lifer
Feb 28, 2003
17,948
31
91
Still holding out for a Shadowbane type game that doesn't suck. Must include player ownership/building of cities or some other type of ownership that forces server politics.
 

Fingolfin269

Lifer
Feb 28, 2003
17,948
31
91
Still holding out for a Shadowbane type game that doesn't suck. Must include player ownership/building of cities or some other type of ownership that forces server politics.
 

Chronoshock

Diamond Member
Jul 6, 2004
4,860
1
81
Originally posted by: Aikouka
Maybe I'll give it a try... I have to wake up my poor video card... nothing has really made it try yet ;). Oh and you know that 1GB of ram isn't enough good enough for WoW, right? For 1 WoW client, 1.5GB+ is recommended and I currently use 4GB (3.5 in 32-bit OS) for 2 WoW clients.

I played WoW for a year and a half, and believe me Fury eats through a lot more ram. At the start of matches I'll be swapping for up to 40 seconds :( The textures in this game are pretty big so I imagine vram is important too
 

KeithTalent

Elite Member | Administrator | No Lifer
Administrator
Nov 30, 2005
50,231
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Hey I'll try anything once!

I prefer PvE but a free weekend of this should be enough to determine if I like it. Just signed up.

Thanks OP!

KT
 

Chronoshock

Diamond Member
Jul 6, 2004
4,860
1
81
Just remember that the initial matches will be difficult and possibly frustrating since you'll be facing people with a lot better gear/abilities than you. This obviously won't be the case in retail, but since its beta the whole population is mixed together. You start off with ~75 equip points (whereas the experienced players will have 1000) so you will feel constrained in your build choices early on. Just use the first few ranks (which will pass quickly) as an experience to learn the controls and maybe help out your teammates a bit.

Edit:
Oh yeah, this weekend or next weekend will feature a new client build that has a number of bug fixes and performance/visual optimizations as well as new maps and UI elements. So hopefully you'll have less problems than people have had in previous test weekends
 

Ika

Lifer
Mar 22, 2006
14,264
3
81
Sounds cool. I'll give it a try once I get my computer up.

Is there some sort of rankings system or "match record", if you will?
 

Chronoshock

Diamond Member
Jul 6, 2004
4,860
1
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Originally posted by: Aflac
Sounds cool. I'll give it a try once I get my computer up.

Is there some sort of rankings system or "match record", if you will?

Not in the current build, but the one coming up in August will have rankings, ladders, etc. and retail will probably have even more options.
At the end of each match you'll see a summary of battle statistics, who was the best player for each class, as well as other awards that give you additional essence.
 

imported_sushicide

Senior member
Jun 20, 2005
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By the way, once you start a character you're stuck with it, can't delete or make new ones (maybe they'll change that this upcoming weekend)
 

Chronoshock

Diamond Member
Jul 6, 2004
4,860
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Originally posted by: sushicide
By the way, once you start a character you're stuck with it, can't delete or make new ones (maybe they'll change that this upcoming weekend)

Yeah its not that big a deal since there's no fixed choices in this game. If you choose to be an Invoker, you can always witch to being a Healer for example. All you have to do is pick up the skills of that class. If you don't like how your character looks, you can go to the Grand Illusionist and alter any aspect of your appearance. The only reason to remake a character would be to change your name or your gender.

Oh yeah, you can also set up multiple configurations (called Incarnations) so that you can have a setup where you wear healer gear and have one set of abilities on your spellbar, and then another setup where you have on melee gear and some melee set of abilities on your spellbar, etc. Imagine the WoW wardrobes mod except combine that with swapping class skills as well.
 

Chronoshock

Diamond Member
Jul 6, 2004
4,860
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The preview weekend is starting today at 3 PM EDT, if you're still interested I imagine you could still sign up. I'll see those of you who signed up in the game. If you have any questions feel free to message me, my sn is Shock. The syntax for tells is /tell Shock, hi
 

KeithTalent

Elite Member | Administrator | No Lifer
Administrator
Nov 30, 2005
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I can't get the game to install. When I click the icon on my desktop it just hangs forever and I eventually have to restart my PC.

I believe I saw this listed as a known problem on the beta forums. Oh well, I guess I won't be able to try it this weekend after all.

KT
 

Chronoshock

Diamond Member
Jul 6, 2004
4,860
1
81
Originally posted by: KeithTalent
I can't get the game to install. When I click the icon on my desktop it just hangs forever and I eventually have to restart my PC.

I believe I saw this listed as a known problem on the beta forums. Oh well, I guess I won't be able to try it this weekend after all.

KT

I believe the installer is just a self-extracting archive. Try opening it up with winrar or 7-zip and just running the setup manually. Another thing is that your download may not be complete. Check your file size, make sure its 2,428,042,831 bytes (according to the developer, I don't have the install file on me right now). If that's the case you may have to redownload. If you want I can try downloading the installer when I get home from work and compare md5 hashes
 

KeithTalent

Elite Member | Administrator | No Lifer
Administrator
Nov 30, 2005
50,231
118
116
Originally posted by: Chronoshock
Originally posted by: KeithTalent
I can't get the game to install. When I click the icon on my desktop it just hangs forever and I eventually have to restart my PC.

I believe I saw this listed as a known problem on the beta forums. Oh well, I guess I won't be able to try it this weekend after all.

KT

I believe the installer is just a self-extracting archive. Try opening it up with winrar or 7-zip and just running the setup manually. Another thing is that your download may not be complete. Check your file size, make sure its 2,428,042,831 bytes (according to the developer, I don't have the install file on me right now). If that's the case you may have to redownload. If you want I can try downloading the installer when I get home from work and compare md5 hashes

Let me check that out when I get home from work.

Thanks for thelp; I'll let you know how it goes.

Cheers,
KT
 

ElFenix

Elite Member
Super Moderator
Mar 20, 2000
102,380
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Originally posted by: Chronoshock
Yeah its not that big a deal since there's no fixed choices in this game. If you choose to be an Invoker, you can always witch to being a Healer for example. All you have to do is pick up the skills of that class. If you don't like how your character looks, you can go to the Grand Illusionist and alter any aspect of your appearance. The only reason to remake a character would be to change your name or your gender.

sweet. i've hated the whole 'stuck with your starting class' thing ever since EQ came out. don't know why more games didn't pick up on UO's system where you can switch whenever you want (and UO you could roll a whole new character very quickly). always a pain in the ass when the game dev nerfs your character and you get behind because all the ubergamers have switched to the fotm class type.

how is the leveling system done? i also hate how games use levels as huge jumps (where the level is the biggest thing you get from the new level) rather than smaller ones. the only reason dungeons and dragons used big discrete levels is that it was too difficult to calculate fine increases in a character's abilities. with computers able to calculate these things on the fly in real time you can do much more fine increments. again, i'll point to UO, where there were no levels, only skills and stats. skills you had 700 points and they incremented in 1/10 of a point based on using the skill, with a cap of 100. stats i think was 240 split between strength, intelligence, and stamina (forget what the cap was on one stat).

there is no reason we need big clunky levels and trainers to give us new skills.
 

Chronoshock

Diamond Member
Jul 6, 2004
4,860
1
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Originally posted by: ElFenix
Originally posted by: Chronoshock
Yeah its not that big a deal since there's no fixed choices in this game. If you choose to be an Invoker, you can always witch to being a Healer for example. All you have to do is pick up the skills of that class. If you don't like how your character looks, you can go to the Grand Illusionist and alter any aspect of your appearance. The only reason to remake a character would be to change your name or your gender.

sweet. i've hated the whole 'stuck with your starting class' thing ever since EQ came out. don't know why more games didn't pick up on UO's system where you can switch whenever you want (and UO you could roll a whole new character very quickly). always a pain in the ass when the game dev nerfs your character and you get behind because all the ubergamers have switched to the fotm class type.

how is the leveling system done? i also hate how games use levels as huge jumps (where the level is the biggest thing you get from the new level) rather than smaller ones. the only reason dungeons and dragons used big discrete levels is that it was too difficult to calculate fine increases in a character's abilities. with computers able to calculate these things on the fly in real time you can do much more fine increments. again, i'll point to UO, where there were no levels, only skills and stats. skills you had 700 points and they incremented in 1/10 of a point based on using the skill, with a cap of 100. stats i think was 240 split between strength, intelligence, and stamina (forget what the cap was on one stat).

there is no reason we need big clunky levels and trainers to give us new skills.

There are 10 "ranks" in the game, and as I said you advance pretty quickly. Ranks 8-10 have the same power, and I am rank 8 right now after playing two weekends. The only difference between ranks is the number of equip points you get. Equip points dictate what rank armor and skills you can use. Each skill and piece of equipment costs points, the better it is the more it costs. You can use higher ranked gear or spells than your current rank, it'll just eat up more of your budget (a level 1 has 75 EP, a lvl 10 spell requires 75 EP). The progression system feels very natural, the limited number of EP helps you get eased into the game. Starting with too much EP would be overwhelming given the amount of choices you could make. Games in retail will be segregated by rank. You can set yourself at a lower rank once you reach a higher one. This way you can play with your newb friends if you want (your EP is of course lowered to that of the lower rank). Ranking up is achieved by playing games, earning essence (each game gives you 700-1000 essence depending on how hard you try), and you complete trials using essence to earn experience. Every 100 essence translates into 1 experience and you need 1000 experience to reach rank 8. 100 games goes by very quickly for a pvp only game. Each match lasts <15 mins.
 

Jinru

Senior member
Feb 6, 2006
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I've played 3 bloodbath wars now and I'm loving it =]. I came in top 3rd on all three!

the ingame names Kuze.
 

Kur

Senior member
Feb 19, 2005
677
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I like the idea, but it does have a somewhat steep learning curve imo, WoW I could just pickup and play this I have to do a huge tutorial! I don't wanna compare em but ya. It was fun, the battles are fast pased and I think are somewhat better then WoW's PVP system.