Some friends and I recently decided to do some battlegrounds together. Not being on the same servers, we had to create newbies and do the grind to 19. We’ll probably be stuck with WSG, and AV (much less Arena) is pretty much out of the question for us.
Anyway, this drove me to try out the Fury beta recently. Fury is getting a fair dose of hype as an upcoming fantasy MMO focusing exclusively on PvP. You’ve got standard PvP scenarios — free-for-all, team deathmatch, and CTF, with third-person WoW-style fantasy combat. There is not a persistent world, but there is persistent character advancement with skill trees you advance in to customize your character. Battleground-style PvP without the grind! Sounds great, right?
I was surprised that I got bored of it fairly quickly, and it wasn’t until I was writing this that I realized why: Fury isn’t an MMO at all.
The game is essentially contemporary fantasy PvP (e.g. WoW, DaOC, etc.) combined with Diablo-style character persistence (your stats, gear, rank, etc. accumulate over time). That’s it. You log into a lobby area, group up with some other players, and off you go to your own little PvP instance, an experience much like Battle.net or XBox Live. Fury’s lobby interface is “in-game” — you are in a 3-D room with other avatars, rather than using a 2-D Battle.net-style GUI. But it’s essentially the same thing.
It was interesting — since I was expecting an MMO, the absence of a persistent world made the experience feel very empty to me. In WoW, having that world outside the battlegrounds gives a sense of meaning to PvP that wouldn’t otherwise exist. You’re honing skills that can be used in non-battleground PvP, earning gear you can use outside the battelgrounds, and building relationships with people you might interact with outside the battlegrounds. The metagames are wider in scope, and deeper in complexity, when a virtual world is present. In Fury, I might beat a crew senseless in a battle, but I feel like a tree falling in the forest that nobody’s around to hear.
I’m not trying to say that Fury’s approach is strictly inferior to WoW’s. It depends what you’re looking for, and I think Fury could be great for someone who’s really just interested in the tactical skill & thrill of PvP battles. But I like feeling like I’m a part of a virtual world, and the Fury arrangement doesn’t really do it for me.
Funny you should mention…
I was talking with Brian “Pyschochild” Green who I’d asked to preview Fury for my site (he couldn’t because their installer doesn’t work on Win2k!). We were wondering, what exactly do you do when you’re not playing PvP?
Obviously, he comes from a hardcore PvP background and what he knows is the most staunch PvPers do something else in downtime.
Sitting in a lobby? Not fun.
There’s a very loud minority calling out for this type of “MMO” and I don’t know if they realize that there is no such thing as this type of MMO.
I mean, it’s called Counterstrike with persistent characters.
Sounds like Dungeon Runners except that game is PVE focused not PVP. Dungeon Runners has a central town with portals to different dungeons and that’s it. Fun if you like old school Diablo-like hack n slash. But don’t go looking for depth and breadth…it’s not that kind of MMO.
I have to agree as well. The more instanced and fractioned you make the whole thing, the more you dilute the experience in my view.
It’s kind of funny that people are finding this kind of a game less enjoyable. One would think a game that strips away all of the “less fun” stuff, grinding, guild drama, travel time, lvling, etc. would be more fun. >.> Do you spend that much time waiting for an instance to open? I guess that would make it feel like you need something else to do…
[…I mean, it’s called Counterstrike with persistent characters.]
Yes. Or “PvP Diablo.” Really, if Fury were considered an MMO, then Diablo probably should be as well.
[…Sounds like Dungeon Runners except that game is PVE focused not PVP. Dungeon Runners has a central town with portals to different dungeons and that’s it. Fun if you like old school Diablo-like hack n slash…]
Yes. In fact, Dungeon Runners is essentially a 3-D Diablo with an in-game lobby interface!
[…It’s kind of funny that people are finding this kind of a game less enjoyable. One would think a game that strips away all of the “less fun†stuff, grinding, guild drama, travel time, lvling, etc. would be more fun…]
But you’re talking about taking away the -entire- PvE experience, the good along with the bad.
Yeah, I’m thinking from the developer’s PoV, they were probably only thinking of the bad in the pve experience, not realizing that perhaps all that hassle actually has a beneficial psycological effect; it’s a persistent WORLD, not just characters, that we’re after.
Exactly!