Today, Auran staff delivered a sad news to the players who have enjoyed Fury, website and game servers are closing down in 48 hours :

Fury League has been announced by Auran Games and the total prize money is $25,000. All details you ever need can be found at the Fury League website.

Check out the Fury League website.

Nobody likes being called a loser. It brings to mind images of rejection, and for some, it might even spur them to doing things they never thought they could do. The question is, can calling someone a loser through an email spur someone to return to an MMORPG that they left?

It seems that someone on the Fury marketing team wants to defy conventional wisdom by sending emails that attempt to coerce people who've stopped playing the game to return by calling them losers.

Here's one email that Warcry's Razorwire website picked up:

Subject: LOSER! LOSER! LLLOOOOSSSSEEEERRRRR!

From: apache@furydev.unleashthefury.com

Time: 12:08 AM

Chances are... you are a

LOSER!

Or will you prove us wrong?

In the 3 months since release, tens of thousands of people have played Fury and every single one of them has lost at least one game! That's right - not one unbeaten player exists in our database. And the stats show that once you have won 3 games, you are extremely likely to play dozens, if not hundreds more games.

So, we'd love you to come back and check out all the changes and improvements and discover that winning feeling.

For a start it is easier to stay alive now, and there are new game types specifically designed for new players. We have also added AI Bots (and they love losing), new gametypes, new maps, fixed the GUI lag and hundreds of bugs plus loads of other stuff. You can find out more about all the changes at http://www.unleashthefury.com/ageofthechosen

We have also introduced the Chosen which allows you to play FREE FOREVER. Why not show your friends you are not a loser as well by bringing them along, they can play for FREE! Just get them to follow the instructions found here http://www.unleashthefury.com/free2play

Cya in game (unless, of course, you want to remain a loser).

The Fury Team

Granted, it's an intriguing attempt to get people to return to playing Fury, but conventional wisdom would dictate that these sorts of campaigns don't always do well in the long-run. Will it bring players back to the free-to-play game? We'll have to see.

With Fury's first major content patch, Age of the Chosen, approaching on December 14th, Auran and Gamecock Media Group have announced that with the update comes a new free to play option for Fury.

Under the new account option, players will be able to download a free version of the game and participate in it as normal, for the most part. The only restrictions on free to play accounts -- or Chosen as Auran calls them -- is that they will not be able to trade with other players, and will earn Essence and Gold at a slower rate.

There will also be additional account types, and of course players can purchase gold or upgrade to "Hero" status through the Fury Store -- enabling them to earn Essence and Gold more quickly.

This isn't the only thing being added with Age of the Chosen, though. You can find out all the details on features coming in a mere three days over on the Age of the Chosen Features section of the Fury website.

Fury had a rough start, and as such Auran -- the game's developer -- is having to look into cutting back the size of its staff. There were rumors circulating around the net yesterday that this spelled doom for Auran as a whole, but Tony Hilliam -- CEO at Auran Games -- laid that to rest with a statement.

Auran is still around, as will be Fury, but unfortunately the company has had to make the difficult choice to go through a wave of layoffs. The size of the company has increased from 30 to 70 over the past few years as they ramped up production of Fury and their XBLA game Battlestar Galactica. Now Auran will be focusing more on outsourcing development of the game's content to China, where they've previously had success doing so over the past two years.

That said, Fury's first major content update: Age of the Chosen is still on target for a December 14th release. Regarding the update, Hilliam said: "Fury: AotC addresses many of the issues identified by players and reviewers in the original release. We’ve greatly enhanced the new player experience and made huge improvements to a number of systems. There will be another major FURY announcement next week about further changes that will be very exciting to all players (unless of course one of the staff under strict NDA decide to leak those details as well)."

To read more, head over to the Tony Hilliam statement on the Fury forums.

The PvP orientated MMO Fury has today announced that December 14th 2007 will be the date for the first free content update for the game.

The content will see the addition of new types of game play, better NPC tracking and the addition of a new 1v1 elimination match system. As well as that, four new abilities have been added to the game and some bugs have been fixed and tidied.

Fury: General Patch Notes – Dec 14th 2007 (Age of the Chosen)

Brand New Carnage Gametype

Carnage is team based Player vs Player vs Bots. Each player team consists of four players working together to slaughter the bots. Each bot killed will drop a Blood Token, which can be returned to the team base. Victory goes to the team who collect the most Tokens.

Carnage will be released with three maps, designed specifically for Carnage.

New 1v1 Elimination

Prove that you are the best individual warrior! You'll need to master the four new 1v1 Elimination maps and carefully consider which combination of abilities will offer the right mix of survivability and damage potential.

Will it be you who dominates the new 1v1?

Improved Tutorial

We've streamlined the tutorial and we now give players more information that will prepare them for the battles that lie ahead. New players can choose between Bloodbath Training Grounds, 1v1 Elimination or the new Carnage warzones and must complete 5 matches before being allowed into the main Sanctarum.

Repeatable Practice Area

Players can now return to the tutorial area at any time and practice their skills against a wide range of bots such as Healers, Wardens and Destroyers.

NPC Amalgamations

In the Age of the Chosen it will be much easier to find the NPC you need to earn and learn your abilities.

The number of Trial Guide and Ability Mentor NPCs will be reduced significantly: you will now be able to learn all abilities for a single Archetype from just two NPCs.

Equipment System Changes

The power and rarity of all equipment obtained in the Age of the Chosen will be more closely associated with the tier of the item.

Rare items will be of a higher tier, and carry significant advantages over lower tier items. Overall the power of enchantments on items has been reduced.

Combat Mechanics

All combatants will be given a little more time to think between attacks, with the global cooldown increasing to 1.3 seconds. Base health will be increased (from 2500 to 3000) and the bonus health obtained from equipment will also be increased significantly.

Beware of the new Combat Fatigue debuff, however: the longer you are in combat and taking damage, the less effective healing will become.

Improved Interface

Numerous changes to the GUI will improve your experience in the world of Fury.

The Artificer and Auctioneer interfaces have been improved.

Abilities you currently have equipped will be marked in your ability list.

In warzones we will be adding the option to save the entire combat log chat window contents after a match.

The ladder value of all matches will be displayed at the end of each match.

Four New Abilities

Four new abilities have been discovered. Every character will gain access to these free-to-equip abilities!

Sprint: Temporarily increases the user's movement speed. This ability is self only.

Liberate: Using this ability will break any disruption effects placed on the user. This ability also renders the user immune to stun, root, pacify, terror, mesmerize, knockback and teleport effects. This ability is self only.

Elemental Purge: Strips the user of all their charges. A useful counter to charge manipulation. This ability is self only.

Elemental Immunity: Temporarily renders the user immune to charge manipulation effects. Charges can still be generated and consumed through normal ability use. This ability is self only.

Bugs & Polish

The pile of squashed bugs littering the corner of our office is huge! A vast number of bugs have been fixed, and the general polish improvements are numerous.

Auran is now offering a 10-day free trial to check out Fury. This is a great opportunity to see if Fury's fast-paced, Arena-based PvP gameplay fits your play style.

To get started, simply visit the website's trial page and fill it out, then you'll be able to play as much as you want for 10 days on the free trial account. Once the trial is over, you'll be able to continue playing if you so choose by purchasing a copy of Fury, either from retailers or through Auran's online store.

As part of this, inactive Fury Challenge and beta accounts have been re-enabled for 10 days. Head over to the Free Trial announcement to find out more.

Fury - the new PvP MMO developed by Australian game developer Auran - is now officially live. There's a "Day One Report" up on the official Fury website to mark the occassion.

To read more, head over to Fury is Live - Day One Report Card.

Apparently the dev team at Auran has decided to make some major changes to it's PvP-based MMO, due for release on October 16th 2007.

Most of the apparent changes will be available on release but the team have said that some will need to be held back so that proper testing can be undertaken.

Below are a list of the main changes:

Source - Fury Website

Patch Notes - 26 September 2007

Ability Changes

• Fixed a bug that caused the Equip Point costs of some abilities to be lower than intended.

Important: Because of the equip point cost changes many character incarnations became invalid. To avoid players entering matches with invalid incarnations we have removed these abilities from incarnation hotbars. If an ability has been removed from your bar you will still be able to select it from your ability list at a new tier and re-add it to your bar (equip points permitting). The abilities affected are:

• • Beast of Prey
  • Blood Crypt
  • Blood Taint
  • Boon of the Earthmaster
  • Countdown
  • Firestorm
  • Frost Skin
  • Saving Grace
  • Shield of Valor
  • Supernova
  • Virtue
  • Vitality
  • Ward of the Dark
  • Ward of the Heartless
  • Ward of the Merciless
  • Ward of the Vengeful
  • Ward of the Wicked
• Enduring buffs are no longer affected by stored charges.
• Enduring buffs of the same name no longer stack. The first copy of an Enduring buff prevents new copies of that buff being placed on a character. If someone places on unwanted buff on you that blocks using a higher tier or different buff, simply double click the buff icon in the lower left corner of your screen to remove it.
• Defensive stances have had their cast times reduced to near-instant.
• Defensive stances can now be used while under the effects of a hold (eg Silence).
• Advanced defensive stances now cause any carried vortex crystals to be dropped.
• Increased damage of all hostile life transferral abilities, and reduced the percentage of health returned to 50%.
• Fixed a bug where defensive stances were not set to be "Any style".
• Fixed a bug where Contaminate was not correctly listed as a Poison effect.
• Countdown's Area of Effect portion has had its damage and range reduced.
• Fixed a bug where Countdown's icon did not appear on the GUI debuff stack.
• Maim has had its trigger count lowered.
• Fixed a bug where Ward of the Merciless was dealing too much damage.
• Essence requirements added to defensive stance trials.

Equip Points

• Equip points for the first three ranks have been changed.
  • Reborn: 100 (was 80)
  • Initiate: 135 (was 95)
  • Disciple: 170 (was 152)

Equipment and Item Broker

• Fixed a bug where certain Death faction items could be purchased with a lower faction level than intended.
• Fixed a bug with the "Vampiric" item modifiers.
• Fixed a bug that could cause Item Broker NPCs to stop working.
• Fixed a bug that prevented removing items from the Item Broker sell list.

Ladder

• Fixed a bug that caused the Avatar Name to not update on the ladders if that name had been changed by a CSR.
• Ladder ties are now resolved using each player's skill rating as a tie breaker.
• 'Best 10' ladders (as used for Fury Challenge) no longer receive contributions from a loss.
• Made several bug fixes to correct errors in the recording of ladder and player statistics.
• Clans will now only receive ladder score contributions if they meet the requirements for a Clan match (more than half the team are clan members: 3 for ELM and 5 for VTX)
• The All Warzones ladder now consists of the sum of the best 10 results from each game type (Vortex, Bloodbath and Elimination for Individuals; Vortex and Elimination for Clans).

Matchmaking

• Increased default (starting) skill rank value for all players.
• Implemented optimisations for match making.
• Fixed a bug that could cause a character to become temporarily stuck in a matchmaking queue.
• Fixed a bug that caused the matchmaker GUI to reset if a player changed zones while queued.

Death Handicap

• Implemented a system to support new players through the learning process:

• • New players (defined as characters with a maximum avatar rank of Reborn, Initiate or Disciple) will now receive a buff to Physical Offense / Defense and Spiritual Offense / Defense in Vortex and Bloodbath.
  • All players in a match will start with a base Handicap Score for determining the strength of the buff. A higher Handicap Score results in larger increases to offensive and defensive stats.
  • The buff applied is largest for Reborns and reduces for both Initiates and Disciples.
  • The Handicap Score is defined by maximum and minimum values.
  • Each Death recorded for a player will increase their Handicap Score.
  • Each Kill recorded for a player will decrease their Handicap Score. Kill assists reduce the Handicap Score by a lesser amount than Kills.

Warzones

• Made small adjustments to Bloodbath scoring.
• Reduced team size in Vortex to 8. (Note: this change was applied as a server hotfix on 21 September 2007)
• Reduced the number of players in Bloodbath matches to 16. (Note: this change was applied as a server hotfix on 21 September 2007)
• Reduced the time limit for Bloodbath to 7 minutes. (Note: this change was applied as a server hotfix on 21 September 2007)

Tutorial

• Re-enabled Archetype training in the tutorial area. This was previously disabled to prevent a possible "stuck in tutorial" bug that is now fixed.
• Made optimisations to Tutorial maps.

/death command

• Stolen Vortex crystals dropped after a character uses /death will now return to the base they were stolen from if not picked up.
• Characters that die due to using /death in Vortex will have to wait the maximum time before respawning.
• The /death command is approved for use to remedy becoming stuck in terrain.

VOIP

• Please experiment with in-game VOIP support. Lots more changes included in this patch ... cross your fingers, it appears to be working!

Miscellaneous

• Fixed a bug that would cause the uninstall.dat file to become corrupted during patching. Note: this fix will not restore previously corrupted uninstall.dat files. To fix your uninstall.dat, simply delete your Fury folder and install a fresh copy of Fury.
• Fixed various rare crash bugs.
• Made fixes for various bugs that could cause players to become stuck at the loading screen.
• Fixed a bug that could cause a character to continuously load into a warzone (instead of the correct map).
• Added pre-loading for various map elements (such as Vortex Crystal carrier graphics) to improve in-combat performance.

For those of you sad that the WSVG has been cancelled, frown no more. Auran sent out a press release today announcing that the Fury Challenge has now accumulated more than $2 million dollars worth of prizes. The event has also been extended to run until October 7th, 2007. You can see all of the prizes by clicking here.

You can read more about the Fury Challenge by heading over to its website.

The Fury beta is still underway, but with the NDA lifted they've been publishing the patch notes on http://www.unleashthefury.com. There was another patch today, and we have the notes for you, listed below.

Patch Notes - 14 September

Ability Changes

• Quickening is now correctly interrupted when damage is taken during the cast time.
• Reduced the immunity to hostile attacks on advanced defensive stances from 5 seconds to 3 seconds. You can no longer execute abilities while immune.
• Fire damage abilities have been increased in power.
• Water damage abilities have been reduced in power.
• Adjusted all Healing abilities to use new power curves.
• Reduced the positional damage bonuses applied to abilities.
• Reduced the trigger count of Toxic Touch to 2.
• Reduced the trigger count of Venom Splash to 5. Increased cooldown to 10 seconds. Venom Splash will now always hit.
• Reduced the minimum number of buffs removed by Elemental Burn to 1. Elemental Burn no longer always hits.
• Reduced the amount of damage dealt by Electrify when the secondary effect is triggered.
• Damage absorption buffs now correctly have a group modifier applied.
• Fixed a bug with the debuff lengths for the abilities Ward of the Vengeful, Ward of the Dark and Ward of the Heartless.
• Frostseal is now a charge consumption ability. The amount of damage absorbed has been increased.
• Long duration buffs are now classed as Enduring effects. You may only have up to 4 Enduring effects on you at any given time.

Match Rankings

• Made adjustments to the calculations for end of match rankings. Certain abilities will no longer have as large an impact on the rankings as previous.

Client Performance

• Added 800*600 resolution to the supported resolutions list. Note: You may experience some UI oddities when using this resolution.
• Made some changes to map preloading to improve client performance.

Tutorial

• Fixed a bug that caused character avatars to remain in the Tutorial map after a player completed the tutorial.

Name Reservation

• Implemented name reservation. Previously used names or reserved to the account they were created on. The name will be released if the owner of the account creates a character with a different name.

Grouping

• Fixed a bug that could cause a player to become hostile to all players during Vortex matches.

Mail

• Fixed a bug that could cause mail to expire prematurely.

UI Optimisation

• Made some changes to UI code to improve performance, particularly in Sanctuary zones.

VOIP

• Made a variety of updates to VOIP as part of work-in-progress.

There was a patch this weekend to Fury which include revamps to the experience required to obtain certain ranks - making some easier and some harder - as well as a number of other additions, changes and fixes. You can check out the notes in full below.

Patch Notes - 8 September 2007

Stability

• Made several changes to improve server stability and protect against crashes.
• Fixed a crash when clicking the exit button on the launcher.
• Fixed an issue that could cause an “Out of Memory” error when launching the client.

Character Advancement

• The number of Combat Excellence Points (CEP) required to attain each rank has been rescaled as follows:

• Made changes to the type and amount of essence required to complete trials:
  • For each Discipline, the first three trials all require Fury Essence (they previously required aligned Essence)
  • Fury Essence is now the dominant Essence required to complete trials.
  • The aligned Essence requirements on a trial are now 1/5th the total Fury essence required.
• Fixed a bug with Ability selection when completing a Trial.

Balance Changes

• Defensive Stance no longer shares a cooldown with the advanced defensive stances.
• All advanced defensive stances now share a 30 second cooldown.
• All advanced defensive stances now grant an additional effect: User is immune to all hostile actions (except Deathblows) for the first 5 seconds the stance is active.
• Remedy, Aid, Treat, Revivify, Rend, Desolate, Ravage and Enervate now remove 3 effects instead of 5.
• Trickster's Step, Unstoppable Strike and Nature's Liberty have all had their cooldown increased.

Matchmaking

• Fixed a bug that could cause only one team to load into an Elimination match.
• Changing matchmaking queues now correctly reports which queue you left to join the new queue.

User Interface

• Made optimizations to the tooltips to improve performance.
• Fixed issues with the Abilities tab of the Journal panel displaying erroneous information about abilities.
• Fixed a bug with the "Unlock Memories" button that could cause it to display incorrectly.
• Screenshots taken via the in-game Bug Reporter now include the interface. Please use the in-game Bug Reporter to report any interface bugs.

Sound

• Made changes to the sound and music system to help prevent some crash issues.

VOIP

Note: VOIP code is still being worked on. Consider the below Work-in-Progress updates

• VOIP options changes should now be saved correctly.
• Default volume for outgoing voice chat has been increased.
• Added a volume slider to modify volume of received voice chat.
• VOIP should now be correctly disabled in Bloodbath matches.

Item Broker

• Item Broker now correctly reports that you sold an item when selling to the pawnshop.
• Fixed an issue that could occasionally cause players to be unable to sell to the pawnshop.
• You can no longer sell equipped items to the pawnshop.

Equipment

• The loot display at the end of the match can now be scrolled with the mouse wheel.
• Fixed a bug that allowed players to spend more gold than they had available at the Durability Repair NPC.

Targeting

• Fixed an issue that could cause your target to be changed automatically before that target died.

Miscellaneous

• Fixed the Instance dropdown menu to correctly show "Abandon Warzone" when in a combat zone.
• Fixed a bug that could prevent Clan creation.
• Characters now spawn facing in the correct direction at the start of matches.
• Fixed a bug that would sometimes cause a character to appear as a headless female with red skin.

Direct from the Fury news section, the Fury Pre-order and Fury Challenge account creation has been postponed for a few days while the team works through some stability issues discovered recently.

If you want to sign up for email notification when the Account Creation is available again, head over to the Fury Pre-order page.

The Fury Challenge website was updated this morning with the prizes that are up for grabs for those competing in the tournament. The list is fairly impressive, including 2 college scholarships, 24 GeForce 8600 video cards, a Dell XPS laptop, 2 Dell XPS desktops, tons of gaming hardware from Ideazon and Logitech, and a lot more.

Head over to the Fury Challenge Prizes page to find out more. Be sure to check out the How to enter, How it works and Rules sections as well.

At the first of three Fury parties in Australia, Auran announced the first ever Fury tournament - called the Fury Challenge - to be run in September.

The stakes in this tournament are very high, with over $1 million worth of prizes up for grabs.

Current sponsors for the challenge include Dell, nVidia, Logitech, IGN, Gamestop, and more, so expect the prizes to be fantastic.

To find out more about the Fury Challenge, head over to the challenge website where you can find all the details about this upcoming tournament.

In a press release today, Auran - the developers of Fury - announced the business model the game will use once it's released in October.

The base model will be free to play with regular free content updates, though there will also be an optional subscription model for additional benefits. That being said, all players regardless of account type have access to the most powerful items and abilities - nothing will be locked out if you choose to not subscribe to a payment plan.

During the first month of play, all players will start out as "Immortals" regardless of account type, which gives a taste of what the subscription plan offers. Once the free month is up, Immortal status is part of the subscription plan for the game, which is currently set at $9.99 a month. Immortal status grants you access to all of the following:

• Quick travel in the Sanctuaries and Schools
• VoIP talk privileges
• One additional Item Roll Slot
• Extended “rested gold bonus”
• Selling privileges on the Auction House
• Priority log-in queuing
• Entry into weekly and seasonal Ladders
• Personal player battle statistics
• In-game Customer Service access
• Elite access to the test server to preview new content

To read more, you can head over to the Fury Business Model press release. They've also put a FAQ up which should answer most every question regarding the business model for the game. You can read this FAQ by clicking here.

Auran - the Australia based game developer currently working on Fury - has partnered with Codemasters to bring the title to Europe when it releases this fall. The game is entirely focused on competitive PvP and progressing through "levels" is done by competing in arena matches to unlock new skills, obtain items, etc. Fury will also follow in the footsteps of games like Guild Wars and be free-to-play, something that will surely draw a lot of attention to the competitive gaming market.

Fury begins its closed beta in just days, so here's your chance to sign up and be a part of the next revolutionary MMOG. Auran has completely removed the need to PvE if you wish to participate in PvP. In fact, they've removed it from the game entirely! Fury is a completely PvP-driven game where players can either compete in Bloodbath, free-for-all style matches, or team up with other players to compete in objective-based matches.

To read more, head over to the press release.

While you're here, take a look at some of the screenshots, concept art, and wallpapers we have of the game. You can check them out in our Fury Image Gallery.

IGN has an exclusive preview up of "The Courtyard", a newly implemented PvP map for Fury. Featuring some very nice graphics and an interesting design, Fury looks to be taking it's PvP arenas seriously. Below is a snippet of their article and some screenshots:

Since our initial look at the game, a few critical pieces of information have since been locked into place - in particular, the finer points of the storyline and reasoning for Fury's unique game structure, with its Sanctuaries and Warzones and heavily gothic, Asian tones.

This is Courtyard - the newest map unveiled by Auran.

So why all the mayhem and magical warfare? As the story goes, the inhabitants of Fury's universe were at the height of their successes. They were loved by the gods and in turn, they worshiped these beings diligently. As a reward, the gods gave these humanoids the gift of magic. Typically, this gift was abused and the gods, being temperamental sorts, decided the best course of action was to ditch these magic-imbued beings and leave them to their own destructive devices. Unfortunately, the more the beings used magic, the more energy was being sucked from the universe, causing what was referred to as 'The Fade'. Hence, much of the universe has faded away, and there are only small areas left, which are hotly contested.

The tale of the newest map - one of the contested areas - Courtyard, provides a tantalising taste of the complexity of the history. You can read the full tale early next week in our exclusive background excerpt, courtesy of Michael Hampden from Auran.

Courtyard is an 'Elimination' map, meaning that it's been designed to cater to Elimination mode first and foremost. However, as with most other maps, other game modes are also very much playable on it. As it fits into the four dominating schools, Courtyard is very much a 'Life School' map. The giveaways are the Asian architecture and the emphasis on water and snow - key elements in the School.

Combat is a blend of rapid-fire magic and physical combat.

As your character is deposited into the map, each character on your team begins inside a holding room. After a short countdown, you're able to leave the straw-mat, thin-walled confines. The level itself is set high on a mountain; snow swirls through the air and ice is packed onto the tiled rooftops of the pagodas that line the enclosed map.

Internode has had the opportunity to take an In-Depth look at the qualities and traits of Fury - Auran's new PvP centric MMO. Their article (snippets below) give you a good idea of the feel and flow of the game, and also what you can expect as a player in a game that doesn't cater to the cookiecutter MMO design template that many developers follow these days.

Most importantly, the refreshing idea of a game balanced around PvP rather than PvE makes for a delightful and new gameplay experience.

Internode writes:

The players will be able to trade, gossip, organise groups and just hang out at sanctuaries. Although, when I asked whether Auran would crack down on guilds devoted to dancing naked they said that they hadn't given it much thought. This is also where you will be allocated specific tasks called trials. Players will then have to use perform these trials in PvP games in order to unlock abilities and help to progress in rank. There will be four multiplayer types in the first release of the game. The multiplayer matches are: Fortress, Vortex, Elimination and Bloodbath. Bloodbath is your standard all-in kill-one-kill-all free for all deathmatch type game. Vortex is a 32 player (16 x 16) capture the flag type game.

Fortress is an interesting massive team based battle where players attempt to capture and hold specific supply points in order to win the map. An adaption of the advance and secure type of gameplay which is common in FPS multiplayer now. I got to see the Elimination mode being played. It was an extremely fast team based game where one team basically has to kill (or eliminate) the other. As with all team games the team which plays best as a team has the greatest chance of survival. This will be highlighted in Fury as not all characters can tank and deal massive amounts of damage. Healers and other types are required to cast buffs for the group to enhance their ability to fight and survive.

Rather than advance their character by levels Fury implements a rank system. All up there will be 10 ranks for players to advance. Players will also be able to create an unlimited number of different incarnations for their characters. This means that one incarnation of your character could be a healer and the other could be a tank. Essentially you can virtually go in to battle as a different type of character every time you play. Further to this it will be possible for characters to fight outside their rank. As in, a higher level ranked character will not necessarily own a lower rank just because of their higher level. Players will be able to compete against players of higher rank and still have a chance of winning based on how they play.

Auran have gone to great lengths to customize and optimize the multiplayer matchmaking in the game. Players will actually be ranked and matched based on past performances of how they have competed. This will provide a totally dynamic matchmaking system. All of these factors help to define Fury as a relatively unique form of an online competitive action sport rather than your stereotypical "game". There will be no story based single player for this game. It will predominantly consist of team based multiplayer combat. What other games in the marketplace provide a direct point of comparison to Fury? Guild Wars, while allowing for multiplayer team based combat, also was a story based single player level grind as well. World Of Warcraft also incorporates both types of gameplay.

Upon dropping into the world, the first impression is: Holy Pixelshaded Lightmapped Christ this is shiny. No expense has been spared in building Fury's artwork, and they really show off the Unreal 3 engine's capabilities. In fact, it's so pretty it's distracting - I ran around for a good minute watching my ass glisten and glint with shadery shinosity, and, in the heat of battle, there's so many pretty effects flying around it can get a little difficult to tell what's happening. At least, for a newbie with tired feet.

The controls took some getting used to. In order to keep one hand free to shoot fire at your opponent, movement, targeting and camera are primarily controlled with the mouse. WASD also works, and I found myself falling back into that mode on occasion, but the speed of the game strongly encourages you to keep your fingers mashing the number bar. It's pretty standard MMO third-person control fare beyond that; click on a target, smack a number button to use an ability, rightclick to control camera, both-click-and-hold to move forward.

The devs started us up in a sort of 4-on-4 capture-the-flag variant called Vortex - meant for 16 on 16, to be honest. In this game-type, two groups compete to collect these alien crystal egg things that get dropped by a flying thing, murdering each other in an attempt to collect 'em all - or steal them from the other side. Grabbing one causes big green crystal hemorrhoids to erupt from your ass - oh, and you can't attack while hugging that egg, of course. That's up to your teammates. Green Crystal Preparation H doesn't help - you'll have to drop it at a collection point at your base if you want the neon burning to stop. Get enough eggs dropped off and ding, gratz, game, set, match. My team, with a Gamespot pubbie and a dev filling in the other two slots, won the day with our superior F13 strategy and tactics: "stick together, assholes".

Read more here!