Hands-On Preview of Fury

Earlier this week, we released some first impressions of Fury based on our experience in Beta Weekend 2.0. Now, we have a full length hands-on preview of the game from this same weekend. Once again, Alan Hoover does the honors.

If you read my last preview article you just might be as excited as I am about the future features coming soon to Fury. Alas, there are already a ton of features within the game that I had the pleasure of playing with this weekend in the Fury Beta Preview 2.0. I would like to share that experience with you now.

It’s Saturday afternoon, I fire up the Fury Launcher, enter my username and password and click play. At this time I am flowing with excitement, much like a school kid waiting for the bell to ring, since Fury beta testing is currently set to weekends only. I load the game and my avatar is there waiting for me just as I left it, he’s such an obedient character. I decide to hop into bloodbath and earn some essence.

Essence is the “Experience Points” in Fury, as you gain essence you spend it on your skills which move you up in ranks. There are currently 10 ranks in Fury, from Reborn at level 1 to a level 10 Eternal. There is no player-versus-environment so all of your essence comes from using skills during heated player-versus-player battles. Also, there are over 400 skills! This creates a nice template scenario as you have tons of skills to choose for an incarnation. What’s an incarnation, you ask? Incarnations are the combination of skills and equipment that you select for your character. You can save your incarnations and use a drop down menu to recall different ones for whatever role you will be performing in battle.

Before I click on the guy who will lead me into the Bloodbath warzone, I make sure my skills and armor are in order and I have skills equipped for the type of Essence I want to gain. I have to select which of the four schools I wish to gain my Essence in. Life, Death, Growth, and Decay, are the four I have to choose from. Each of these schools represents a major element, for instance the Life school has a major element of Water. Death would be Fire, Growth is Nature, and Death is Air. There are also minor elements to each of the schools. Life and Death share the minor elements of Nature and Air, as Growth and Decay share the minor elements of Water and Fire. This kind of shows you the opposites of how schools are set up. Here’s the official break down from the Fury website.

I personally like nature and melee (physical) as opposed to casters (spiritual), so I was currently playing a Warden. I slotted up my Nature skills and tossed in a couple Water skills to gain some Life essence as well. Keep in mind that if I was to get a nature skill from Death or Life it would build essence for those schools. So I equipped Growth skills, and then it was time to click on the appropriate warzone. I queued up for Bloodbath, It only took about 2 minutes to have a match start as there were a lot of people playing the preview weekend. Once you load you get about 30 seconds to ready yourself as everyone is held in place before the match starts. I believe this makes sure everyone had loaded and has their mouse and keyboard adjusted to that perfect playing position.

3…2…1…Charge! Everyone at this point is looking for their first victim. It can start out as you versus one other opponent and quickly turn into a battle royal; the fighting is intense and nonstop fun. You die and you are back into the action in a matter of seconds. If you don’t die, you kill someone and move on to someone else, it really is stimulating. So I work my way around fighting on rooftops, rushing through buildings and beating on whoever I could. Hardly killing anyone at all because the matchmaking system isn’t in yet! But I don’t care, I am having fun just beating on people, I can’t wait to see these fights with even match making. I decided that I was going to just work up essence and not even worry about a kill, so I perched on a rooftop and blasted people with my lowest skill as they ran by. I did this a couple rounds and realized I had enough Essence to finish some trials.

Trials are what you use to get your skills. You spend your hard earned Essence (mine wasn’t so hard earned as cheaply stolen) to complete these trials to unlock new skills, as you unlock skills you raise in rank. Without even noticing, I progressed to Disciple, level 3 out of the 10 level s available. This meant I had more equip points so I could add higher armor and more skills. I decided I would do just that, but it would have to wait till the next day as I had to log out for the night.

Sunday arrives, all day I am thinking of Fury and playing my new Disciple character. Luckily for me Fury can be played casually and I wasn’t falling too far behind the curve that I couldn’t catch up. So, finally I get home with about four hours to go on the preview weekend. That’s when I came to the realization I was facing a serious time restraint, because as some of you know, the Bossman , A.K.A. Tony Hilliam, Auran CEO, said they were going to reward players who achieve the rank of Adept or higher by giving them access to a new VIP account. Well this could be a problem as I was freshly Disciple and had a long journey to Adept (level 4) and getting my reward.

I decided I was going to try my hardest to get to Adept or go out with a fight, literally. I logged in and equipped my new skills and armor that I previously had been hoarding from Bloodbath battles. Win or lose you get items from Bloodbath, which is nice for helping you stockpile. Off I went once again to the Bloodbath warzone.

This time things were going more in my favor, it was amazing how much difference one rank made in my survivability. I died about half as much and didn’t even think to try and shoot from the rooftops, as I was having a grand time fighting it out on the ground. My current incarnation was working well for me and I continued to fight using it for at least what felt like two hours. The game had pulled me in and I was up way to late as it was, but there was only one and a half hours left till the end of the preview weekend.

Knowing I needed to sleep and not wanting too, I checked my progress to Adept and my rewarded glory. There it was staring at me, as I needed to sleep; the big 50% progress to next rank was looking back at me, taunting me. I was distraught, do I stay up and play or do I chalk it up to an almost and go to my bed in shame. That was when I remembered that I had slotted a couple Life skills and were using them pretty regularly. I quickly rushed to the life school area and began training up skills I thought I might use later in the game. I completed 10 trials with my unused life essence and on that tenth one I heard the sound of glory. I had reached Adept, and made it to my reward of a VIP all week account to see the new build and all the hard work Auran had put in behind closed doors for the last couple months. Then I thought, maybe I should hit up some vortex? I have more equipment points, more skills can be added to my hotbar, I would definitely be a force to reckon with! Nope, I’ll save that excitement for next weekend. Goodnight.

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