General Discussion

Recently, News Manager Keith Cross had the opportunity to sit down and talk to Tony Hilliam, the CEO of Auran and Lead Designer on their game, Fury. As you may or may not recall, after Fury's launch, Auran announced that they would be pulling back significantly on staff and resources for the PvP game. Today, Keith talks to Tony about the progress that has been made since then.

While at the 2008 Game Developer’s Conference I had the opportunity to talk to Auran CEO and Fury Lead Designer, Tony Hilliam. During the interview we discussed what happened at Fury’s launch, their subsequent business model change and the Age of the Chosen expansion in the months after launch, as well as the future course for the game.

When Fury launched back in October it was billed as the MMO for PvP fanatics. The PvP fans came out to play, but to Australian developer Auran’s disappointment, not enough of them stuck around. Early users ran into a number of problems which helped drive players away from the game. Many players complained they had a hard time getting the game to run with the high level of graphical quality of which the game was capable, even on high-end machines. Because the game was PvP focused, any choppiness could be a death sentence, thus some players who could run the game on its higher settings would be forced to opt for lower quality visuals as well. Tony informed me of one particular bug that caused a lot of headaches in the first few weeks after launch. Apparently there was a sound bug that could cut the game’s frame rate in half. After a few weeks they solved the problem, but the damage had already been done. In the business of MMOs, the first few weeks are critical, and can direct opinions about the game for years to come.

Read the whole article here.

Honestly i think this was 100% right. Everything they said was true. Ppl do exagerate over it and I really think Auran's gonna get back on track. I hope more ppl come back to it b/c they have made a ton of improvement from there 1st launch. It's truely not that hard to understand if you sit there a while and u can get hooked easily.

Give it a try again most likely you'll end up likeing!!!

Is it good to judge a game based on launch?

Hell yes!!

If the player response wasn't as bad as it was, they wouldn't have understood what the bloody hell is wrong with Fugly... I mean, Fury.

Besides, it should have the stuff it promises, you know, the features and a functional engine, right from the start. I don't give two poops if other games are released unfinished, just as I don't believe that just because everyone does something it makes it right to do so. Games are products. I don't buy a movie dvd expecting them to 'patch' it later because there is a scene where the microphone blatantly appears. I don't buy a magazine expecting an errata next month because they were hardpressed to deliver an article.

Either you deliver or you leave UPS for crying out loud.

They failed on many fronts, I hope they can learn something from this... Judging by their terrible marketing campaign, there is still a lot they need to learn before they can avoid being called dungface on forums.
Spamming your customers with e-mails calling them losers and challenging them to prove you wrong is about as pathetic as having breathing as your best quality "Omg you can breath?!?"...

Yeah.

I'm glad to hear that they're still alive and kicking and growing. EVE got off to a rough start and look at it now.

The problem with going "well games grow and fixes make them better" is that the game isn't the only thing that grows. Economies grow and become harder to break into, more players are off in higher zones so there are less people to join with at earlier levels, and communities have already been formed. These things are easy to break into at the beginning because everyone's on the same page, but once time has passed, it becomes harder to make your place in a community that's oftentimes made up of day-one people. Joining in late gives you the feeling of being left behind even though you've only just begun.

While I disagree with the early beta stage some developers launch with, I do agree fully with the last paragraph. MMO's can change radically over their lifetime and, if the concept is interesting, deserve a second look after a couple of months to a year.

LOL, I didn't know Fury servers were still up.  I assumed it had fallen under its own horrible design long ago.  And if that didn't kill it, I'd of bet it would've collapsed under the weight of its horrible dev team, some of whom would come to these boards and berate the posters.

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Best of luck to them. Beside the graphic/lag issues, I must say that Fury is a pretty interessing and innovative game. If they can fix this and get a good player base back, then I'm sure Fury will be back straight on line and they will have then the possibilities to make it grow even stronger.

I may stop by on Hadralas in the next weeks... :)

Honestly it was a terrible game. At launch many of the Pay2Play features including voice chat did not work. I would have been happy if they extended the free beta while still working on getting the base game to work. But they didn't... they chose to exit beta and start taking people's money so they could play a broken game. This is very bad form in my opinion.

I posted and reported several bugs while in beta in hopes that they would not release but they did anyways...

-Nate

They couldn't even keep a measly 2000 concurrent players, that's friggen sad. Speaks volumes about this piece of trash, though. Something tells me they're never going to tell you who ends up funding them, because noone ever will. No company of any repute would give capital to a devloper who blew all the money they started with. And looking at the dismal failure of Fury, and the subsequent bankruptcy and employee firings, all of that initial money they started with from other investors was blown.

Maybe I'll send them an e-mail:

Are you a developer of Fury, the biggest wash-out PvP mmo ever made? Are you one of the people who created a game so bad it makes Shadowbane look like a raging success? DON'T BE A LOSER!!! Shut down and save what dignity you have left.

I very much like the idea of all-PvP games but I never tried this game because I am not interested in arena-styled encounters.  I want a full-time, non-instanced, resource-driven, faction-based, territorial conquest WAR!