GDC 07: Fury First Look

Australian developer Auran is busy showing off Fury, its upcoming massively multiplayer role-playing game that focuses solely on player-versus-player combat. It's the first time that we've had the chance to see the game, which is set to launch later this year.

Auran showed only a brief glimpse of the game, which looks as though it's set in some kind of hybrid fantasy universe that's influenced by many styles, including Asian themes. The surprising thing about Fury is that it will feature absolutely no player-versus-environment combat, which means that you won't be running around a virtual world looking to kill monsters or animals. Fury is all about PVP combat, so it's being designed so you can participate in player battles that range from small to absolutely large.

CEO Tony Hilliam told us that one of the goals of the game is to allow realm-versus-realm combat. A realm is typically a server that has thousands of players on it, and the more popular the game, the more realms that it has to accommodate its player base. However, if you're on one realm, you can usually only interact with players that are on the same realm. In this case, everyone on your realm would be on your team, and you'd battle the players on another realm. How Auran plans to implement realm-versus-realm combat has yet to be seen, but it's certainly ambitious.

The combat in Fury is skill-based, much like in World of Warcraft or Guild Wars. Your character has a collection of skills and abilities that you map to your keyboard. Some of these are offensive, some defensive, and some have other effects. The idea is that you can unlock new abilities in each fight, though the trick is that you can purchase only a set amount of abilities, so you must pick and choose from your larger collection of abilities. Moreover, there are going to be 10 ranks in the game, and the higher your rank, the more points that you can have to purchase skills, plus higher-level skills will be available to you.

Since the game features just PVP combat, Auran has to make it fun because players would otherwise leave after a few losses. So in Fury, everyone earns fury points (which is the basic currency of the game) and can even get loot, even if they're on the losing side. Sure, the losers may not get as much as the winners, but the idea is that there's some kind of reward in it for you, and that you'll have fun along the way. We saw some combat take place in a level aptly called "The Coliseum," which is exactly what it is. Like a deathmatch game in a first-person shooter, the level is designed solely for PVP combat, and there are all sorts of power-ups scattered around.

This was just a brief introduction to Fury, so Auran didn't show much beyond that. The company began work on the game a couple of years ago, so Fury is well along in development and on track for launch in the fourth quarter of the year.