Furious Million Dollar Tournament

Auran, the Brisbane based developer of Fury, has announced that they are holding a global Fury tournament with a million dollars of prizes up for grabs. That’s a million dollars Australian by the way which works out to around 844,000 US dollars. Although the way the exchange rate has been lately, by the time the tournament is complete it will probably be a lot closer to a million US.

The tourny is scheduled for the 15th, 22nd, and 29th of September. This is prior to the official release of the game, which is due in October. Auran is hoping to get over 600,000 participants, including both teams and individual players.

For those of you who are interested, you can get more information and details on how to download the free pre-launch client from unleashthefury.com.

One other bit of goodness from this announcement is the news that Auran will be providing an Australian based server. That should help keep the ping times down. Especially welcome for a fast paced action game like this. It’s a pity that Blizzard still hasn’t given Aussie players some locally based servers.

Update: The Gamecock Media Group has announced the official release date for Fury as the 9th of October. You can now preorder Fury from Gamestop.

Popularity: 15%

Fury Business Model

I found the announcement of the business model for Fury today by Auran rather surprising, and rather welcome. Auran are not taking the traditional path of making all their players pay a monthly subscription. Instead the basic game will be free to play with the option to pay a subscription to remain as an immortal.

The hook is that all players, when they first activate their accounts start as immortals for the first month. Then in order to remain as an immortal, they must subscribe for US$9.95 a month.

Immortals will get the following benefits:

• 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

This looks like a tremendously casual friendly system. Aside from the rested gold bonus, the priority log ins, and the quick travel, casual players will be less interested in the other features like the seasonal ladders and the battle statistics. VoIP can always be substituted with Vent. The features that casuals would desire can be lived without if necessary.

Auran have also promised that all players, regardless of their subscription status, will have access to all items and abilities, including the most powerful. It doesn’t say, but I’ll assume that means access to all the areas in the game as well.

You’ll still have to purchase the game, but that’s only fair. It’s then up to the player if they want to live without all the niceties that a subscription will offer. At the least it gives a way to enjoy the game for more than the standard 30 days that most give without having to commit right away. The promise is also that there will be regular free content updates.

Fury is currently in beta, and I believe is due for release sometime in quarter four this year.

Popularity: 16%

Fury Beta Opens

It appears that it is the season of the beta. First the Warhammer Online beta opens up, and then the Gods and Heroes and Fury betas open on the same day.

Fury is being created by Auran, based in Brisbane Australia. Auran created the original Dark Reign, a RTS that I and my friends thoroughly enjoyed. Now they are putting their efforts into Fury, which they are billing as a MMOTPS or Massively Multiplayer Online Third Person Slasher. Fury will be a fully PvP game which promises that you won’t have to fight a single NPC if you don’t want to. The developers are even tackling the thorny issue of making sure that the fights are fair, which traditionally been ignored in other PvP games.

If the picture below is any indication of the gameplay, then Fury could well be the PvP MMO to watch out for.

Fury has been slated for a Q4 2007 release. You can sign up for the beta here.

Popularity: 16%