November 8th, 2007

Unleash the Fury freely, for 10 days

Auran developers supposedly gave in to the massive fan pressure and released a 10-day free trial to their Fury online player versus player title. Whenever a new MMORPG launches publishers ride the tide of the great hype and for marketing reasons forget to allow players sneak peeks at the very content they’re praising. I can’t tell you why that is, but it’s been the unwritten rule of every major release from the past five years. Free trials eventually become available once a sizeable period of time has passed since release, but Fury seems to be of a different breed. The trial applies to newly created accounts as well as old ones, so if you played Fury in the past, including beta, this is the proper way to see what has changed in the mean time.

Considering the huge success of the open beta Fury challenge, this new offer is bound to draw some attention. Players all over the world tried out the game and engaged in team contests for undisputed domination and over one million dollars in prizes, and that was before the game was officially released. “We've had a lot of requests for a free trial, and previously we've said we were planning to have a free trial available for Fury,” they said on the official website.

Let’s take a look at the major changes since beta. We have performance tweaks for lower end computers, new game maps and the Bloodbath training ground complete with bots and human opponents. The ranking system is now determined by your battle skill and not by the number of trials completed or time played. To avoid imbalance in the arranged matching system, pre-made teams will now enter a different battle group, while new players even receive a bonus in offense and defense to properly compete against veterans. Some changes have been made to create a faster database response, directly reflected in faster loading times, mail and vendor response during prime time.

Fury has three game types offering individual and team competition, with team sizes varying from 4 to 16. Vortex is a capture the flag variant. Each team has to capture Vortex Crystals and return them to their base while preventing them from being captured, in as tactical team based endeavor. Elimination is a 4v4 death match arena where rounds are scored in a best out of five series. Bloodbath is the free for all battle and you can collect blood tokens from the fallen to increase score.