Australian Gamer Feature :: A visit to Auran

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A visit to Auran

Yug and Matt take a visit to the offices of local Brisbane based game developer Auran, to generally harass them but also find out more about their upcoming MMO game: Fury

PAGE 1 (Welcome to Auran) : PAGE 2 (FURY)

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For those who haven't been keeping up, or who skipped the previous pages of this article, Fury is the latest and most promising offering from Auran, the Australian development company best known for the hugely successful Dark Reign.

Broadly characterised as a MMORPG, Fury can be better defined as a combat game in an RPG universe. It is not an RPG in terms of goblins and gnomes, elves, dragons and the like. It is an RPG in terms of playing and building a character.

The building of a character is not done through endless hours of grinding and questing, though. It is done through combat, and combat only. There are no dragons to slay, no bosses, and no collecting 128 Orc BellyButton Lint or 76 Lizard Tongues.

What Fury is most similar to is something like Battlegrounds, the PvP (Player vs Player) dedicated component of World of Warcraft. However, PvP in Fury is not the small afterthought that it is in WoW. It's the point. The emphasis is on fighting and killing your opponents.

And who are your opponents? Naturally they're other players. One thing Auran has done quite cleverly, though, is made it so that rather than servers being discrete parallel universes, the Fury servers are set up to talk to each other. The purpose of this is that each Fury server will contain relatively friendly players. The opponents will be drawn from OTHER servers.

The potential in this for 'home' and 'away' games, no reference to the dire soap opera intended, is obvious, but when asked about the possibility of 'spectator' players, Adam was not really able to give me that much information. It is something they've considered, and as a 'spectactor sport' Fury would excel, but it's not certain yet.

In fact, many of our questions had to be left unanswered. Fury does not yet have a publisher, and until all the ink is dry a lot of the more important questions are still to be determined.

Questions of this nature include things like when it's coming out, what sort of payment model will it use, how much will it cost, where are the servers going to be hosted. We asked each of these, and were beaten and thrown into the street.

Not really, but it was clear that Auran are focusing on the game at the moment, and the business side of things is yet to come.

I thought the simplest way to discuss the pros and cons of Fury now would be a quick FAQ, a collection of the information we recieved from Adam Carpenter, Fury's Lead Designer. This is not, in fact, questions that we asked Adam, nor were these answers given verbatim. This is information collected and connected and then distilled down to give as much information as possible, while sparing my RSI ridden fingers.

What races and classes are available in Fury?

None. There are no races, only humans. Humans can be either male or female, with distinctly different appearances to those. It's also interesting to note that there are no pre-definied classes. This means your character is never limited to a pre-set role. Characters have ALL their learned abilities available to them, from healing to melee damage to ranged spells, AOE and DOT spells. However many they can carry they can use. Fury allows you to build a number (up to 255) of what Auran term 'Incarnations'. These Incarnations aren't separate characters. They're more like something like World of Warcraft Add-on 'Itemrack', allowing preconfigured spell choices and armour choices that you have set up, and which fulfil a role YOU choose.

This Incarnation system is both innovative and interesting, in that it eliminates the 'I wish' factor present in other RPG games.

How do you level up?

This is still being finalized, but levelling up is done through combat (of course), with each fight earning a certain amount of experience. Rather than numerical levels, Fury uses ranks, not unlike World of Warcraft, etc, with titles like Adept and Initiate appearing before the names. These ranks will probably not be visible to your opponents. We're not sure about the details of the levelling, but we'll find out more ASAP.

What about loot, money, etc?

Loot and equipment comes from the player enemies you slay. It is not taken FROM them, it's created new, and goes into a 'chest' at the end of a battle. Cash is shared equally, and any items are bid for. This bid isn't based on points, etc, but your selection to bid puts you in the running for a die roll. As you are allowed only 3 bids per battle, there can be strategy in your bidding choices. You can, for example, elect not to bid on the uberfat l00t that is there, and instead bid on a lower, but more likely item.

How is equipment value determined?

Unlike the 'pre-crafted' weapons and equipment of World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs, equipment, including weapons and armour, are essentially random. Value is determined by those final stats. This will have the effect of providing a wider range of equipment, but probably at the cost of 'personality' in known and loved equipment.

Is there a colour system for equipment?

Yes. The colour system is not yet finalized, but it is not the same as the World of Warcraft system, and allows a much larger range of colours. Colour is determined dynamically, by the stats and effectiveness of the item, not by an arbitrary colour assignment.

Can you see the actual armour and equipment?

Yes, you can. In fact, you can wear whatever armour you like. There's no need to match your armour to your incarnations role. The armour itself will have benefits to the role, specifically percentage bonuses in the relevant schools, but not actual requirements. So just because someone looks like a knight, doesn't mean he's not actually a healer. And just because someone's dressed in robes doesn't mean he's not a melee fighter.

How does the game look?

Very impressive, actually. The detail on the characters is surprisingly high, down to fine textures on scales of armour. There is a kind of 'light bloom' effect on everything, that I'm not a big fan of. It tends to wash things out a bit. I like that sort of thing when you're in direct sunlight, but it looks out of place in a dungeon. That's personal taste though.

The armour is a real highlight. It has a dull-metal sheen to it, with lots of fancy lighting effects and very high resolution textures. Another area that is particularly impressive is the game maps. While one combat map is fairly well know thanks to various videos and demos, many of the others that are not in as advanced a state of readiness are more impressive. In particular, we were shown 'The School of Decay'. A non-combat area intended to train people in the damage over time abilities. The School of Decay was visually extremely impressive, from the low mists to the very angry statues. It is dark and dank and rather creepy.

What engine does it use?

The Unreal 3 engine. This allows the game to be both technically and graphically advanced, and provides ready-made level editing and game modelling software ready to go. That means Auran can focus on making it good, rather than making it go.

When is it coming out?

That was one of the many questions that we were not really able to get any definitive answer on. Not this year is a definite, but approximately mid next year would seem like a likely sort of time. We'll have some more info on this and some of the other 'business' questions relating to Fury soon.

What are the 'schools' mentioned before?

The schools are basically the path or type of an ability being used. Healing spells belong to the School of Life, etc. To learn new abilities of a type you take challenges at the school that is relevant to it.

Challenges? I thought there were no quests?

Yes and no. There aren't quests of the type of killing monsters and collecting quest items type that is repeated through World of Warcraft, or the long story quests common in RPGs. There are, however, certain combat quests. These quests, appointed by the NPCs at the various schools, require you to use the combat skills you have in a certain way, a certain number of times, to do a set amount of damage or affect a set number of targets. Once these quests are complete the NPC will then award you a new ability (or abilities).

How many of these abilities are there?

The list is not yet finalized, but Auran are expecting approximately 400 different abilities to be available. It's worth noting that the system they've developed means that every character can learn ALL of these abilities.

How many abilities can someone have available at a time?

The number is limited only by your imagination. And... also by the limit. Each character has a certain number of 'equipment points'. Those are used to allot the abilities you are going to take with you on your voyage into pain. Larger spells and abilities will cost greater amounts of points, so you can balance the flexibility of smaller ranges of attacks against the power of a few larger ones. There is a complication, though. The points you have are also used to equip yourself, ie, armour and weapons. So you might well find yourself gadding about half naked so that you can spend that little bit more on spells and abilities. These points are allocated basically by level. A higher level character has a lot more points to play around with than a lower level, giving a lot more options.

The promo material shows Fury's slogan as 'No Ganking, No Grinding, No Waiting, No Whimps'. What does this mean and how is it achieved?

The No Whimps bit is clearly just marketing, but the rest is pretty valid.

No Ganking refers to the player balancing that occurs when matchups are being organized. The software determines your 'true skill' and puts you against players that match you. This true skill score means that players that are 'good' but not well equipped can be balanced against players who are maybe less skilled, but better equipped. Higher level, but less skilled, etc. Basically you'll never find yourself against someone vastly stronger than you, and utterly... well... ganked.

No Grinding is a clear reference to the 'EndGame' of World of Warcraft, which basically involves repeatedly killing the same old creatures for hours and hours to get the best stuff. Frankly it's boring, and it's something long criticised about WoW.

No Waiting refers to the server model Auran have developed. Fury servers are constantly searching the other servers for waiting teams, and with teams of four or so being standard, it's much faster to get games organized and happening than the 30 or so needed for something like WoW Battlegrounds. 1 and a half to 3 hour waits should NOT be occurring, and a few minutes should be the most.

Were there any really standout good or bad things about what you saw of Fury?

The only real potential negatives are things we haven't been able to get answered yet, such as recurring monthly fees. Another problem is that like Blizzard, Auran (or whoever publishes Fury) will almost certainly base their servers in the US due to cost. In a game as fast paced as Fury the lack of "local" servers could be quite annoying, though given the "server vs server" nature that would have been inevitable.

There was one thing that really stood out, though, which hasn't been mentioned yet. The animation. While the graphics themselves taken as an overall "look" are very impressive, the animation stands out. Two things in particular showed just how good the animation is. One was the "finishing moves". These finishing moves are big pre-canned animation moves, like the fatalities of ye olde Mortal Kombat, though far less gory. They are brutal and impressive, and show incredible animation and flow.

The other thing was spiders. Yes, really. The School of Decay we saw was empty of people, but not devoid of life. Crawling along the ground were large, fat spiders. A closer look at the spiders showed how remarkably well they were constructed. Not only were they detailed, but they were animated surprisingly realistically, moving their legs in opposing pairs like real spiders, rather than simpler animations a lesser designer might have chosen. This is not that big a deal. They're just spiders. But it shows an attention to detail that speaks very well of the project.

In conclusion:

Auran has been quiet in recent years, and though they've kept busy they haven't been in the mainstream, high profile they enjoyed just after the success of Dark Reign. Well, it looks like Auran are wanting the spotlight back. If it works out for them, Fury could be just what people want, an antidote to the dry grinding of World of Warcraft, and the long waits for PvP battles.

Stay tuned for another visit to Auran soon, when we'll get to talk more with Auran about what we can expect from Fury, including some of the "business" side of things, like servers, costs, and release dates. But most importantly, stay tuned for our hands on preview when we can tell you if it plays as good as it looks.

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