I’ve also been in the Fury beta and recently signed up for the Fury Challenge. I think the game has a lot going for it and hope it does well (especially as I’m an Aussie and like supporting the ‘home’ team). There have been a lot of complaints about performance issues and my understanding is that the release dates will be pushed back to allow this to be tackled.

I’ve really enjoyed the couple of bloodbath and elimination matches I’ve played… but I’ve crashed out too many times… and I understand that its in beta so I’ve given what feedback I can then uninstalled it from my PC… I’m hoping things get sorted by the time its released. The games relies a lot on having a large player base for player matching… so a poor showing at launch could hurt everyone’s experience of the game.

My issues have been around the performance and interaction of the client. On my PC it automatically determines that it can’t be run in Hi Spec mode and sets itself to the low spec renderer that I can’t change… while I understand this for a PvP game of this nature, why can’t I at least play with the settings till I get it how I like it, I find it annoying that it limits my options that way (similar to Tabula Rasa but at least I have a custom option that gives me some control). The low spec version looks awful and I don’t understand why even in low spec I get low frames per second while games such as Guild Wars I’m running maxed out with no issues (OK so GW has had longer to get the performance right, but it was pretty to look at at launch and still ran fine then too). The patch installation process is annoying as it doesn’t give you a progress bar for how long the patch will take to install once you’ve downloaded it. It takes ages to find join a match… time when you don’t have much to do unless you join the queue and then go shopping or create a new build… but then you get interrupted as the match starts and often don’t get to complete what you were doing. So I end up just running around or playing Bomberman or something on my DS till the match starts.

The tutorial is a bit limited and only gives you the bare minimum, it doesn’t really have a nice intereactive lead in to the game… I’d like to see starting players given the option of trying out the match types in a ‘bot mode’ where you face off against bots that allow you to learn the ropes without letting your team mates down (not an issue for bloodbath as it all vs all – but vortex and elimination are team based).

Anyway, that’s a bit of war and peace, so I’ll stop after this… I just wanted to say that I agree that the game is a blast once your playing a match and I prefer it over Guild
Wars PvP as its faster paced and gets the adrenaline pumping… but it seems to cater only to those with high end PC’s (another example of not learning from the example of WoW). I have high hopes that this will be fixed in time for release but I’ve been disappointed before.

Personally I have a lot of fun playing a healer / lifetap type, and my only quibble is they don’t have VoIP working over their system yet (last week anyway), and that gives a tremendous advantage to guilds and organized players versus random PUGs.

In my opinion support to grow new guilds and groups, and in-game support of what used to be guild-only options like voice chat, is the only way to get casuals ilke me to sign on for a pvp game. In the short run we might pick it up and enjoy it on a limited basis, but if we can’t get into a winning group once we learn our class, we aren’t likely to sign up for a long time.

I’d like to see Fury fix these issues and convert to a micropayment/subscription system… I would sign up to play it for 10 dollars a month right now, but I won’t pay 40-50 dollars to buy a retail version for this.