Fury gets fixed up

via Eurogamer


Auran Games has stuck a much-needed plaster over some of Fury's gaping wounds.

Dubbed Age of the Chosen, its biggest features cater towards easing new players in and slowing things down a bit, moving towards a kebab-shop brawl rather than Bruce Lee fist explosion.

Carnage helps here, a new battle type that pits four of you against four. But instead of killing each other, the goal is to massacre as many computer-brained enemies as possible, with the winner flaunting the highest body count. On top of this is a head-to-head Elimination mode to introduce you to Fury proper, asking you to juggle offensive and defensive abilities for the perfect murderous mix.

These new battle modes and Bloodbath Training Grounds will make up a revitalised tutorial, which not only gives you more information on how to cut your opponent into pieces, but also asks that you complete five matches before you can join everybody else. It's repeatable, too, just in case you feel like everything is moving a bit quickly, and there is a wide variety of bot classes to fight to hone your tactics.

Underlying mechanics have been changed, too, increasing the global cool down of your abilities to 1.3 seconds and pumping your health from 25000 to 3000. It should all make for a little more breathing space, although a new Combat Fatigue debuff will cut healing power over time - making it more effective the longer you slog it out.

Joining it is a fresh Sprint ability to close down your opponents quicker; Liberate to break crowd control or debilitating effects like root, stun and mesmerise; Elemental Purge to strip yourself of charges and counteract manipulation attacks; and Elemental Immunity to make you invulnerable to said manipulating fiends.

Elsewhere you should now be able to get all of your abilities from a couple of computer-characters rather than a handful, abilities equipped should now say as much in the ability list, entire combat logs can be saved for revision, and ladders of all matches will be displayed at the end of every match.

Auran has also improved the user interface to make it all more intuitive and less like wrestling a gerbil, as well as got to grips with an enormous pile of bugs and tweaks to overall performance.

It's a healthy dose of changes, but then Fury needed exactly that, being far too hectic, clumsy and unoptimised for out liking. Still, an MMORPG can change considerably over its lifetime, so it is worth keeping an eye on if the original player versus player premise tickled your fancy.