Posted by: schild @ 20:01:37 on 12/7/07
This was a one on one interview with Adam Carpenter. Everything after the bump are his personal thoughts on the development of Fury and how it evolved.
Prepare yourself, it's a long one.
Prepare yourself, it's a long one.
f13.net: I'm here with Adam Carpenter, in the parking garage of the Internet (level 3B, for those wondering). So, who are you?
Adam: I'm the Lead Designer on Fury and the Creative Director at Auran Games.
f13.net: So we met a while ago and Fury was, at that time, in alpha and you were already giving demos. Unlike the current state, which we'll get to, what was the climate like back then? Specifically, speaking to the budget and game development.
Adam: This was during E3 2006 and the climate around the office was fairly positive. For E3, we had focused on creating a vertical gameplay slice that exhibited the core combat system/gameplay as well as the advancement and character development systems. If I remember correctly, at that point we were focused on a release in January, 2007.
What we still had yet to do was crystallize what the game really was. We knew it was arena combat, we knew it was PVP, we just didn’t know everything it needed to be.
f13.net: OK, let's go a little further back. What were things like before E3, 2006? As far as I know, Auran and Fury weren't even on the map in terms of MMORPGs and the American Gaming Hivemind.
Adam: Definitely not. I originally moved to Australia (from the US) in 2003 to work on a game that was originally titled Hwarang and eventually was called Guardian’s Online that was being developed for the Korean publisher Hanbitsoft. The original intention with GO was that it was going to be the end all, be all PVP, siege warfare game with thousands of quests and so on.
Unfortunately, the price tag for the game was significantly lower than what it should have been and the commitment to the project was rather lacking. To give you an idea, the game had to be point and click, Lineage II style which meant that most of the design team, let alone the other dev team members didn’t want to play.
GO was in development from January 2004 until March 2005, and I think it was officially canceled in May of 2005. When it was canceled, most of the team took a week long forced leave and myself and one of the other designers were given a week long task to create an overview for a PVP arena combat game that the other 40ish developers could start work on the next week.
At the end of the week we had a fairly solid, though very high level overview for the game that would eventually become Fury. Of course, with this being only an overview, and with us needing to select engine tech still, we were a long way off from beginning proper development. However, with the goal to finish and release as quickly as possible, development was started pretty much instantly.
f13.net: Why did you all decide to use an untested engine (Unreal Engine 3) if you were on the fast track with the new game? That seems counter-intuitive to me.
Adam: Primarily because we needed a solid engine and the Unreal engine had proven itself so well in the past. While I wasn’t directly part of the evaluation, a good amount of thought and consideration was given to the use of Unreal 2.5 versus using Unreal 3. In the end, I think the major reason we chose to use Unreal 3 over Unreal 2.5 was the tools support and Epic’s planned timeline for delivering/completing new features.
f13.net: But as we now know, Epic didn't quite deliver on everything it promised. I don't particularly want to dig up that corpse, but I imagine you were left to create a lot of your own tools and such. So let's jump back forward, and talk about post E3 2006. Obviously, you didn't make the planned January, 2007 launch. To be fair, no one thought you would, but how does a date like that even get picked out?
Adam: Well January, 2007 wasn’t the first release date. It had already been pushed back at least once. See the original mandate was to make a game in one year. However, we had also been working on an MMOG and people still wanted to create an MMOG. Given the requirements of such a game, the timeline kept extending. Unfortunately, it wasn’t being extended in any sort of meaningful fashion as we never had enough time to do it “right.” We all too frequently redid work many times.
f13.net: What was the early feedback like from the "press" and the players themselves?
Adam: The feedback was great. Everyone loved the concept and the people who were able to play the early demos loved the gameplay.
f13.net: Alright, so early feedback was good. But then beta came along. This is, the first time as far as I can tell, that you all were no longer in a controlled environment. Talk about that if you could.
Adam: The first external testing started in either January or February 2007. This was the very first alpha playable with all of the character advancement systems in place and players playing from around the world. At this stage, the levels in the game were very unattractive, and we hadn’t begun the first balance passes. Likewise, the only renderer available to players was the high-spec renderer.
Most of the players in at this point were our uber hardcore followers. All were players with very high end systems and very much devoted and committed to PVP. However, in early alpha, they were all having fun when they could get games.
From there, we had a targeted April as being the formal start of beta. Unfortunately, we were still a long way away from beta and we ended up calling the April/May build “pre-beta”. Basically "pre-beta" just meant glorified alpha.
f13.net: What did you learn from the hardcore players?
Adam: That Fury was fun, that the original advancement system sucked, that we needed to get more players in to really test a lot of things properly. Most importantly, in alpha we learned that the game was damn confusing for a lot of people.
f13.net: Once the "pre-beta" hit, how did that feedback change?
Adam: The feedback didn’t change all that much. See in alpha and pre-beta one of our problems is that we had horrendous player churn. If we were making a classic PVE game, we wouldn’t have been showing it off to anyone as it wasn’t at a state we wanted it at. However, since Fury is PVP, we needed to have players in there playing and testing in order to get any kind of feedback and data.
Unfortunately, I think that the volume of players required has hurt us all along. In order to get players, we made alpha/beta keys available pretty freely. Players aren’t used to this, as anything free on the internet must suck. Hence a lot of people coming in were already negatively pre-disposed and when they saw the state of the game, they left with an absolutely horrid opinion.
f13.net: How does a company even cope with this sort of problem?
Adam: We try our best to analyze why players are leaving, and try to make the changes we can to address those problems. In many cases, the problems players were having were issues that we had already foreseen. In these cases, we tried to get the development schedule accelerated to bring them forward. However, that is vastly as case of easier said than done.
We also worked even harder to try and get more keys out and more players into the game. Just think about that for a minute. We know players are having issues with the game, we know it’s not at a state that we really want to show it off, yet we’re trying to get even more players in as we need to do scale testing and the like. It’s a total Catch-22.
f13.net: Internally, what happened at the studio in response to this churn rate and finding out the public's opinion of the game?
Adam: Internally, we kind of had three camps of people. Those who wanted to do more marketing in the attempt to get greater numbers of players into it, those who wanted to cut off beta till we were at a point where we were happy to show off the game, and those for whom it was a 9-5 job and didn’t really care.
f13.net: I assume marketing got their wish in the contest you all did as you neared the inevitable early release? How did that turn out?
Adam: Fury Challenge… In principle, it sounded like a great idea. Fury is a competitive game, so let’s have a tournament for our open beta event. A few people were concerned about the desire to hype 1 million dollars in prizes as that’s above and beyond the reality threshold of most gamers. However, bigger was thought to be better and it was believed that the greater the prize pool, the more players would be interested in it.
Of course, hindsight really is 20-20. Looking back and with “perfect knowledge”, I wouldn’t have done Fury Challenge as a competition/tournament for Fury’s Open Beta. It really changed the mindset of a lot of players and, ultimately, I think it caused more problems than it was worth. A lot of uber competitive and highly skilled players who wouldn’t have normally played Fury came in and they drove a lot of the more casual players off.
f13.net: And the people that wanted to delay the game, was it a budget decision to not go this route? Or did it run deeper than that?
Adam: It really did come down to the cost. The salary for 60 developers is an awful lot of money each month when the expected return cannot be quantified.
f13.net: And the third camp, the day-jobbers. Was this a large contingent of the company? Everyone knows people are in games for passion and not for money, so this group existing - while it probably exists at every company - obviously doesn't help morale within the rank. What was their effect on development through the course of Fury?
Adam: Unfortunately, it was a meaningful part of the team and it seriously hurt morale. The passionate individuals hated that the others didn’t do more. The individuals who weren’t really interested in the game, would be even less productive due to the scorn from those who were busting their asses. Further compounding the issue was a real lack of buy in about what the game was actually meant to be as well as a finger pointing between the different departments in the team.
Overall, the conflicts between those who were doing it because they understood the game and wanted to make a great game, those who wanted to make a great game and didn’t understand Fury, and those who wanted to go home at 5:30 hurt the team as a whole. It’s been a real lesson for me. I won’t work on another project where so many of the staff don’t care about the game they are making.
f13.net: Did Gamecock support whatever decisions you all made concerning the game?
Adam: I can only speak from the design side, and the answer is yes. A few times they pointed out issues and problems with the game and in all cases that I recall, they were “known issues” on the designer’s wish list for change and improvements.
f13.net: Following the Fury Challenge, what sort of plan was in place to make Fury a success?
Adam: During Fury Challenge, the state of the game and the opinion of players became very obvious. That’s what lead to the 11th hour changes to the game where we removed ranked advancement, offered UA/UAA to player and added in the Bloodbath Training grounds (amongst other things).
It’s also began to change the mindset and the approach of a few key people which enabled us to implement a lot of the improvements players will see in the Age of the Chosen update next week.
f13.net: Can you talk a bit about the PR received, specifically in previews and then the post-release reviews?
Adam: Our interaction with games media has been very frustrating at times. If you look at the Fury previews from a site and compare them to the reviews, in most cases you’ll find they are complete and polar opposites. Where a site ‘loved’ us in previews, they ‘hated’ us in reviews. This all comes down to the different experiences players have when playing in a controlled setting like a show or preview session versus playing in the uncontrolled environment of a live server.
People don’t like to lose and one of the main reasons they play games is to be successful and win. In Fury, even in the ideal case with an infinitely large player pop, all players are going to lose 50% of the time. Unfortunately, in extremely low pop scenarios, it’s a case of 80%-20% or even worse.
In the post release reviews, journalists were hopping in and getting matched against some of the best players in the game. This resulted in them being slaughtered which isn’t a fun experience for anyone, especially when you are learning a new game. Predictably, this meant the game was ‘stupid’ and not fun for anyone. This easily changes a person’s mindset so that they are no longer trying to find the good in the game and are instead looking for all the bad things.
Counteracting this issue has been a major focus for us leading up to Fury’s first content update. In a classic MMOG, you spend most of your time killing Mobs and occasionally PVP. When you do decide to PVP, if you get your ass kicked, you can go back to the safety of PVE. In Fury, that safety net doesn’t exist. So instead of going back to PVE, they quit the game and tell all their friends not to play. With Age of the Chosen, we’re beginning to add an essential safety net that will allow player to learn the game.
f13.net: So Age of the Chosen introduces bots into the game but keeps the PVP as the big focus. Was this something that was planned for a while and never implemented or is it an opportunity taken to placate and introduce people to the Fury you want everyone to play?
Adam: As a bit of background, around the middle of the project we spent a while debating whether we needed to include PVE in the game. We ended up excluding it as we didn’t have enough time/money to do all the PVP features we wanted, let alone add in PVE content. Fast forward to today, Carnage, and the introduction of bots - it’s all something we had been considering in the back of our minds.
We want to make the best competitive game out there, and competition doesn’t just mean PVP. PVE can be extremely competitive, and I could make a very strong argument that the uber guilds trying to get world firsts at new WOW content are far more competitive than a lot of the name brand Counterstrike teams. The key difference is Direct competition versus Indirect competition and in Fury we want to have both.
So you’re likely to see more NPC and bot game types in the future. These won’t be your classic MMO persistent world PVE encounters. Fury is a competitive game, so all our new game types will continue to focus of player versus player competition. In the case of the NPC encounters, the competition will focus on things like best completion times, best score, survived longest and so on. To properly support this, all rewards and recognition will come from ladders which enable individuals and clans to prove they are the best.
f13.net: Have you been able to determine what the casual player wants more? Obviously WoW is the benchmark here, despite the amount of silly raid content. If you were to do it over, would you have added more worldliness to attract the explorer type?
Adam: No, I don’t think that I would have. Adding more of a world would have made us more of an MMORPG and yet I don’t think it would have given us more of an MMOG appeal. Despite my use of MMOG and the comparisons made between us and other MMORPGs, Fury is not an MMO. We’re an “arena combat game”. The constant comparisons to MMOGs and the marketing/PR failure to separate ourselves from that genre have hurt us. I would have taken extra time to make Fury more distinct, more unique “arena combat” and give players more to do w/o crossing over into the PVE world of an MMORPG.
f13.net: When you say “arena combat game,” I have to wonder if you doomed yourself to be compared to other Arena combat style games. I'm sure you've noticed, but this year saw some of the best Arena games we've ever seen. Between Team Fortress 2, many of the modes in COD4, and UT3 (ironically made by the folks behind the Fury engine), do you think the time of release was your worst enemy?
Adam: As good as those games are, and I own and play a number of them, I view Fury, with its RPG combat and incarnation building as being categorically different from all the shooters you listed. All are fundamentally FPS games with no character development and no persistence. Fury is intended to appeal to players who want more cerebral combat and gameplay as opposed to the instinctive gameplay of an FPS.
Really, I think that if Fury would have been all that we had hoped it would be, the guys who bought TF2/COD/UT would have looked at Fury. While they might not have liked Fury’s combat system, I don’t think they would have written it off entirely.
f13.net: Having played Fury through various incarnations and having played with friends, we all describe it as frantic and very instinctual. Compared to say, every other MMOG out there. Now, granted, it's a hybrid MMOG, but there's no question that the comparison to TF2 and such is reasonably fair. Having a set of hotkeys that are more than left and right mouse click made combat incredibly chaotic. I know I heard that complaint a number of times. Do you think, maybe, despite being very streamlined in combat, that perhaps even then it was still too messy and moving to left/right click (say, with the ability to change what was bound with a keypress) would have been a better way to go?
Adam: Your description of Fury as frantic is the sad reality for a lot of people. As I mentioned before, there isn’t an effective safety net for new players, a safe training mechanism via which players can learn and get used to the game. Instead players are thrust into combat against exceptionally skilled opponents who understand exactly how the game works.
It’s more or less like playing WOW for the first time with a friend’s level 60 or 70 characters. It’s daunting. You have no idea what to do. So you button mash since it’s better to be doing something, than doing nothing. Unfortunately, despite what a number of ignorant people believe, Fury is not a button masher and button mashing will get you killed.
As far as control schemes, we debated them for a very long time. In fact this debate drove our creation of the alternate ‘FPS like’ control scheme where left click executes your selected ability. However, the last time I checked the database, no one uses this control scheme which is a real shame. Maybe they don’t know it exists, maybe there’s some bug with it I don’t know about, who knows.
Looking at an LMB/RMB attack system, I think it would have significantly reduced the number of abilities we could make available to players and therefore the level of combat depth the game could support. This would have resulted in a much simpler game, but would it have been successful? I’m not sure.
Fury’s dev team is really focused on improving the game we have. In next week’s update, a number of changes are going live which and should make it easier for player to play and be successful. We’ve revamped the equipment system and increased the power of Tier 9 and 10 items. This means that if you want to dedicate a lot of your Equip Points to armor, it will be worthwhile. We’ve doubled player hit points and increased the global cooldown to 1.3 seconds. Together, these two significantly increase a player’s life expectancy and give players more time to make combat decisions.
f13.net: Switching gears, I want to talk a bit about the news dropped on Wednesday. Most people interested in Internet Drama have read the post over at Angry-Gamer, or any of the other places that leeched the news. Can you talk about the restructuring a bit? Most folks probably think Auran is just Fury, which couldn't be less true. So, perhaps, some clarification is in order?
Adam: Probably the best thing is to look at Tony’s response which was released today. There’s a copy on IGN at - http://au.pc.ign.com/articles/840/840149p1.html. Despite what a lot of people think, Auran is not just Fury. There are a number of projects and deals in various states of progress, so the doom and gloom crews can’t quite have their parties yet.
On the Fury front, since it’s the one I’m most qualified to talk about, I want to make Fury as successful as possible. I want to work with people who want to make Fury successful. I want a team who wants to be a team. So, as you might expect, I’m actually quite looking forward to it.
As far as the Angry Gamer posting, that pissed me off to no end. It didn’t bother me that the site posted it. It was more that someone at Auran went running off to the net as soon as possible. The reason why that pisses me off is best illustrated by Tony Hilliam’s response when I showed him the link.
Tony’s main concern was that it might cause Tantalus to back out and not want to hire any of the Auran’s staff that are being let go. Tony doesn’t have any obligation to try and find employment for them. He’s doing it because he cares about his staff. Now Tantalus was totally fine with the Angry Gamer posting, but wouldn’t it have been a hell of a thing if they did get pissed off and it was the action of some random Auran employee which cost 20 or so other Auran staff any job at all.
f13.net: With that third camp of folks who didn't care for the game and worked at Auran as a job, why do you think people were even shocked by the news of the layoffs. Surely, there's writing on the wall in every company about the future. Do you think folks tended to just hide their head in the sand due to Auran being more robust than just this title, hoping to just get by?
Adam: Who knows. I don’t interact with them on the kind of social level needed to have this kind of conversation.
I just hope that all of the people who worked on Fury, regardless of their passion, commitment and understanding of the game take the lessons from this project to their next job. In the games industry, you have to be passionate about what you do. If you’re not, you’re going to end up making a mediocre game or trailing on the coat tails of someone else’s passion.
f13.net: What are you going to take with you moving forward from what can only be described as - and here it comes - train wreck?
Adam: From the standpoint of learning and experience, I have personally gained so much from this project. Here’s a few of the lessons:
f13.net: I'm going to lob the last question because it may as well be PR. But to the people that currently enjoy the game, is there anything you'd like to say to put them at ease?
Adam: Don’t think of this as the end, cause it isn't. Think of it as the beginning. For the first time since the project started, we’ll have a core team who know, understand and love the game and want to make it the best it can be.
f13.net: Oh, fuck, almost forgot. JR over at Themis told me to say he loves you.
Adam: ok...
Tri >>>>>> Goons
[discuss]
Adam: I'm the Lead Designer on Fury and the Creative Director at Auran Games.
f13.net: So we met a while ago and Fury was, at that time, in alpha and you were already giving demos. Unlike the current state, which we'll get to, what was the climate like back then? Specifically, speaking to the budget and game development.
Adam: This was during E3 2006 and the climate around the office was fairly positive. For E3, we had focused on creating a vertical gameplay slice that exhibited the core combat system/gameplay as well as the advancement and character development systems. If I remember correctly, at that point we were focused on a release in January, 2007.
What we still had yet to do was crystallize what the game really was. We knew it was arena combat, we knew it was PVP, we just didn’t know everything it needed to be.
f13.net: OK, let's go a little further back. What were things like before E3, 2006? As far as I know, Auran and Fury weren't even on the map in terms of MMORPGs and the American Gaming Hivemind.
Adam: Definitely not. I originally moved to Australia (from the US) in 2003 to work on a game that was originally titled Hwarang and eventually was called Guardian’s Online that was being developed for the Korean publisher Hanbitsoft. The original intention with GO was that it was going to be the end all, be all PVP, siege warfare game with thousands of quests and so on.
Unfortunately, the price tag for the game was significantly lower than what it should have been and the commitment to the project was rather lacking. To give you an idea, the game had to be point and click, Lineage II style which meant that most of the design team, let alone the other dev team members didn’t want to play.
GO was in development from January 2004 until March 2005, and I think it was officially canceled in May of 2005. When it was canceled, most of the team took a week long forced leave and myself and one of the other designers were given a week long task to create an overview for a PVP arena combat game that the other 40ish developers could start work on the next week.
At the end of the week we had a fairly solid, though very high level overview for the game that would eventually become Fury. Of course, with this being only an overview, and with us needing to select engine tech still, we were a long way off from beginning proper development. However, with the goal to finish and release as quickly as possible, development was started pretty much instantly.
f13.net: Why did you all decide to use an untested engine (Unreal Engine 3) if you were on the fast track with the new game? That seems counter-intuitive to me.
Adam: Primarily because we needed a solid engine and the Unreal engine had proven itself so well in the past. While I wasn’t directly part of the evaluation, a good amount of thought and consideration was given to the use of Unreal 2.5 versus using Unreal 3. In the end, I think the major reason we chose to use Unreal 3 over Unreal 2.5 was the tools support and Epic’s planned timeline for delivering/completing new features.
f13.net: But as we now know, Epic didn't quite deliver on everything it promised. I don't particularly want to dig up that corpse, but I imagine you were left to create a lot of your own tools and such. So let's jump back forward, and talk about post E3 2006. Obviously, you didn't make the planned January, 2007 launch. To be fair, no one thought you would, but how does a date like that even get picked out?
Adam: Well January, 2007 wasn’t the first release date. It had already been pushed back at least once. See the original mandate was to make a game in one year. However, we had also been working on an MMOG and people still wanted to create an MMOG. Given the requirements of such a game, the timeline kept extending. Unfortunately, it wasn’t being extended in any sort of meaningful fashion as we never had enough time to do it “right.” We all too frequently redid work many times.
f13.net: What was the early feedback like from the "press" and the players themselves?
Adam: The feedback was great. Everyone loved the concept and the people who were able to play the early demos loved the gameplay.
f13.net: Alright, so early feedback was good. But then beta came along. This is, the first time as far as I can tell, that you all were no longer in a controlled environment. Talk about that if you could.
Adam: The first external testing started in either January or February 2007. This was the very first alpha playable with all of the character advancement systems in place and players playing from around the world. At this stage, the levels in the game were very unattractive, and we hadn’t begun the first balance passes. Likewise, the only renderer available to players was the high-spec renderer.
Most of the players in at this point were our uber hardcore followers. All were players with very high end systems and very much devoted and committed to PVP. However, in early alpha, they were all having fun when they could get games.
From there, we had a targeted April as being the formal start of beta. Unfortunately, we were still a long way away from beta and we ended up calling the April/May build “pre-beta”. Basically "pre-beta" just meant glorified alpha.
f13.net: What did you learn from the hardcore players?
Adam: That Fury was fun, that the original advancement system sucked, that we needed to get more players in to really test a lot of things properly. Most importantly, in alpha we learned that the game was damn confusing for a lot of people.
f13.net: Once the "pre-beta" hit, how did that feedback change?
Adam: The feedback didn’t change all that much. See in alpha and pre-beta one of our problems is that we had horrendous player churn. If we were making a classic PVE game, we wouldn’t have been showing it off to anyone as it wasn’t at a state we wanted it at. However, since Fury is PVP, we needed to have players in there playing and testing in order to get any kind of feedback and data.
Unfortunately, I think that the volume of players required has hurt us all along. In order to get players, we made alpha/beta keys available pretty freely. Players aren’t used to this, as anything free on the internet must suck. Hence a lot of people coming in were already negatively pre-disposed and when they saw the state of the game, they left with an absolutely horrid opinion.
f13.net: How does a company even cope with this sort of problem?
Adam: We try our best to analyze why players are leaving, and try to make the changes we can to address those problems. In many cases, the problems players were having were issues that we had already foreseen. In these cases, we tried to get the development schedule accelerated to bring them forward. However, that is vastly as case of easier said than done.
We also worked even harder to try and get more keys out and more players into the game. Just think about that for a minute. We know players are having issues with the game, we know it’s not at a state that we really want to show it off, yet we’re trying to get even more players in as we need to do scale testing and the like. It’s a total Catch-22.
f13.net: Internally, what happened at the studio in response to this churn rate and finding out the public's opinion of the game?
Adam: Internally, we kind of had three camps of people. Those who wanted to do more marketing in the attempt to get greater numbers of players into it, those who wanted to cut off beta till we were at a point where we were happy to show off the game, and those for whom it was a 9-5 job and didn’t really care.
f13.net: I assume marketing got their wish in the contest you all did as you neared the inevitable early release? How did that turn out?
Adam: Fury Challenge… In principle, it sounded like a great idea. Fury is a competitive game, so let’s have a tournament for our open beta event. A few people were concerned about the desire to hype 1 million dollars in prizes as that’s above and beyond the reality threshold of most gamers. However, bigger was thought to be better and it was believed that the greater the prize pool, the more players would be interested in it.
Of course, hindsight really is 20-20. Looking back and with “perfect knowledge”, I wouldn’t have done Fury Challenge as a competition/tournament for Fury’s Open Beta. It really changed the mindset of a lot of players and, ultimately, I think it caused more problems than it was worth. A lot of uber competitive and highly skilled players who wouldn’t have normally played Fury came in and they drove a lot of the more casual players off.
f13.net: And the people that wanted to delay the game, was it a budget decision to not go this route? Or did it run deeper than that?
Adam: It really did come down to the cost. The salary for 60 developers is an awful lot of money each month when the expected return cannot be quantified.
f13.net: And the third camp, the day-jobbers. Was this a large contingent of the company? Everyone knows people are in games for passion and not for money, so this group existing - while it probably exists at every company - obviously doesn't help morale within the rank. What was their effect on development through the course of Fury?
Adam: Unfortunately, it was a meaningful part of the team and it seriously hurt morale. The passionate individuals hated that the others didn’t do more. The individuals who weren’t really interested in the game, would be even less productive due to the scorn from those who were busting their asses. Further compounding the issue was a real lack of buy in about what the game was actually meant to be as well as a finger pointing between the different departments in the team.
Overall, the conflicts between those who were doing it because they understood the game and wanted to make a great game, those who wanted to make a great game and didn’t understand Fury, and those who wanted to go home at 5:30 hurt the team as a whole. It’s been a real lesson for me. I won’t work on another project where so many of the staff don’t care about the game they are making.
f13.net: Did Gamecock support whatever decisions you all made concerning the game?
Adam: I can only speak from the design side, and the answer is yes. A few times they pointed out issues and problems with the game and in all cases that I recall, they were “known issues” on the designer’s wish list for change and improvements.
f13.net: Following the Fury Challenge, what sort of plan was in place to make Fury a success?
Adam: During Fury Challenge, the state of the game and the opinion of players became very obvious. That’s what lead to the 11th hour changes to the game where we removed ranked advancement, offered UA/UAA to player and added in the Bloodbath Training grounds (amongst other things).
It’s also began to change the mindset and the approach of a few key people which enabled us to implement a lot of the improvements players will see in the Age of the Chosen update next week.
f13.net: Can you talk a bit about the PR received, specifically in previews and then the post-release reviews?
Adam: Our interaction with games media has been very frustrating at times. If you look at the Fury previews from a site and compare them to the reviews, in most cases you’ll find they are complete and polar opposites. Where a site ‘loved’ us in previews, they ‘hated’ us in reviews. This all comes down to the different experiences players have when playing in a controlled setting like a show or preview session versus playing in the uncontrolled environment of a live server.
People don’t like to lose and one of the main reasons they play games is to be successful and win. In Fury, even in the ideal case with an infinitely large player pop, all players are going to lose 50% of the time. Unfortunately, in extremely low pop scenarios, it’s a case of 80%-20% or even worse.
In the post release reviews, journalists were hopping in and getting matched against some of the best players in the game. This resulted in them being slaughtered which isn’t a fun experience for anyone, especially when you are learning a new game. Predictably, this meant the game was ‘stupid’ and not fun for anyone. This easily changes a person’s mindset so that they are no longer trying to find the good in the game and are instead looking for all the bad things.
Counteracting this issue has been a major focus for us leading up to Fury’s first content update. In a classic MMOG, you spend most of your time killing Mobs and occasionally PVP. When you do decide to PVP, if you get your ass kicked, you can go back to the safety of PVE. In Fury, that safety net doesn’t exist. So instead of going back to PVE, they quit the game and tell all their friends not to play. With Age of the Chosen, we’re beginning to add an essential safety net that will allow player to learn the game.
f13.net: So Age of the Chosen introduces bots into the game but keeps the PVP as the big focus. Was this something that was planned for a while and never implemented or is it an opportunity taken to placate and introduce people to the Fury you want everyone to play?
Adam: As a bit of background, around the middle of the project we spent a while debating whether we needed to include PVE in the game. We ended up excluding it as we didn’t have enough time/money to do all the PVP features we wanted, let alone add in PVE content. Fast forward to today, Carnage, and the introduction of bots - it’s all something we had been considering in the back of our minds.
We want to make the best competitive game out there, and competition doesn’t just mean PVP. PVE can be extremely competitive, and I could make a very strong argument that the uber guilds trying to get world firsts at new WOW content are far more competitive than a lot of the name brand Counterstrike teams. The key difference is Direct competition versus Indirect competition and in Fury we want to have both.
So you’re likely to see more NPC and bot game types in the future. These won’t be your classic MMO persistent world PVE encounters. Fury is a competitive game, so all our new game types will continue to focus of player versus player competition. In the case of the NPC encounters, the competition will focus on things like best completion times, best score, survived longest and so on. To properly support this, all rewards and recognition will come from ladders which enable individuals and clans to prove they are the best.
f13.net: Have you been able to determine what the casual player wants more? Obviously WoW is the benchmark here, despite the amount of silly raid content. If you were to do it over, would you have added more worldliness to attract the explorer type?
Adam: No, I don’t think that I would have. Adding more of a world would have made us more of an MMORPG and yet I don’t think it would have given us more of an MMOG appeal. Despite my use of MMOG and the comparisons made between us and other MMORPGs, Fury is not an MMO. We’re an “arena combat game”. The constant comparisons to MMOGs and the marketing/PR failure to separate ourselves from that genre have hurt us. I would have taken extra time to make Fury more distinct, more unique “arena combat” and give players more to do w/o crossing over into the PVE world of an MMORPG.
f13.net: When you say “arena combat game,” I have to wonder if you doomed yourself to be compared to other Arena combat style games. I'm sure you've noticed, but this year saw some of the best Arena games we've ever seen. Between Team Fortress 2, many of the modes in COD4, and UT3 (ironically made by the folks behind the Fury engine), do you think the time of release was your worst enemy?
Adam: As good as those games are, and I own and play a number of them, I view Fury, with its RPG combat and incarnation building as being categorically different from all the shooters you listed. All are fundamentally FPS games with no character development and no persistence. Fury is intended to appeal to players who want more cerebral combat and gameplay as opposed to the instinctive gameplay of an FPS.
Really, I think that if Fury would have been all that we had hoped it would be, the guys who bought TF2/COD/UT would have looked at Fury. While they might not have liked Fury’s combat system, I don’t think they would have written it off entirely.
f13.net: Having played Fury through various incarnations and having played with friends, we all describe it as frantic and very instinctual. Compared to say, every other MMOG out there. Now, granted, it's a hybrid MMOG, but there's no question that the comparison to TF2 and such is reasonably fair. Having a set of hotkeys that are more than left and right mouse click made combat incredibly chaotic. I know I heard that complaint a number of times. Do you think, maybe, despite being very streamlined in combat, that perhaps even then it was still too messy and moving to left/right click (say, with the ability to change what was bound with a keypress) would have been a better way to go?
Adam: Your description of Fury as frantic is the sad reality for a lot of people. As I mentioned before, there isn’t an effective safety net for new players, a safe training mechanism via which players can learn and get used to the game. Instead players are thrust into combat against exceptionally skilled opponents who understand exactly how the game works.
It’s more or less like playing WOW for the first time with a friend’s level 60 or 70 characters. It’s daunting. You have no idea what to do. So you button mash since it’s better to be doing something, than doing nothing. Unfortunately, despite what a number of ignorant people believe, Fury is not a button masher and button mashing will get you killed.
As far as control schemes, we debated them for a very long time. In fact this debate drove our creation of the alternate ‘FPS like’ control scheme where left click executes your selected ability. However, the last time I checked the database, no one uses this control scheme which is a real shame. Maybe they don’t know it exists, maybe there’s some bug with it I don’t know about, who knows.
Looking at an LMB/RMB attack system, I think it would have significantly reduced the number of abilities we could make available to players and therefore the level of combat depth the game could support. This would have resulted in a much simpler game, but would it have been successful? I’m not sure.
Fury’s dev team is really focused on improving the game we have. In next week’s update, a number of changes are going live which and should make it easier for player to play and be successful. We’ve revamped the equipment system and increased the power of Tier 9 and 10 items. This means that if you want to dedicate a lot of your Equip Points to armor, it will be worthwhile. We’ve doubled player hit points and increased the global cooldown to 1.3 seconds. Together, these two significantly increase a player’s life expectancy and give players more time to make combat decisions.
f13.net: Switching gears, I want to talk a bit about the news dropped on Wednesday. Most people interested in Internet Drama have read the post over at Angry-Gamer, or any of the other places that leeched the news. Can you talk about the restructuring a bit? Most folks probably think Auran is just Fury, which couldn't be less true. So, perhaps, some clarification is in order?
Adam: Probably the best thing is to look at Tony’s response which was released today. There’s a copy on IGN at - http://au.pc.ign.com/articles/840/840149p1.html. Despite what a lot of people think, Auran is not just Fury. There are a number of projects and deals in various states of progress, so the doom and gloom crews can’t quite have their parties yet.
On the Fury front, since it’s the one I’m most qualified to talk about, I want to make Fury as successful as possible. I want to work with people who want to make Fury successful. I want a team who wants to be a team. So, as you might expect, I’m actually quite looking forward to it.
As far as the Angry Gamer posting, that pissed me off to no end. It didn’t bother me that the site posted it. It was more that someone at Auran went running off to the net as soon as possible. The reason why that pisses me off is best illustrated by Tony Hilliam’s response when I showed him the link.
Tony’s main concern was that it might cause Tantalus to back out and not want to hire any of the Auran’s staff that are being let go. Tony doesn’t have any obligation to try and find employment for them. He’s doing it because he cares about his staff. Now Tantalus was totally fine with the Angry Gamer posting, but wouldn’t it have been a hell of a thing if they did get pissed off and it was the action of some random Auran employee which cost 20 or so other Auran staff any job at all.
f13.net: With that third camp of folks who didn't care for the game and worked at Auran as a job, why do you think people were even shocked by the news of the layoffs. Surely, there's writing on the wall in every company about the future. Do you think folks tended to just hide their head in the sand due to Auran being more robust than just this title, hoping to just get by?
Adam: Who knows. I don’t interact with them on the kind of social level needed to have this kind of conversation.
I just hope that all of the people who worked on Fury, regardless of their passion, commitment and understanding of the game take the lessons from this project to their next job. In the games industry, you have to be passionate about what you do. If you’re not, you’re going to end up making a mediocre game or trailing on the coat tails of someone else’s passion.
f13.net: What are you going to take with you moving forward from what can only be described as - and here it comes - train wreck?
Adam: From the standpoint of learning and experience, I have personally gained so much from this project. Here’s a few of the lessons:
- At the beginning, always make a prototype that will serve as the Kernel for the game. Anyone coming onto the project should be able to play the prototype and understand just what it is you’re making.
- Know what you’re making so you can solidify the game’s design, scope and budget early.
- Ensure that the project leads all buy into the game’s vision and direction and that they communicate it to their teams.
- Schedule enough time for iteration and revisions. Games are entertainment and you’re not going to get it right the first time.
- If prospective employees don’t play the genre of the game you’re making, don’t hire them.
- “Finish the game first and then we’ll make it fun” is not an effective approach.
- If you see all of these red flags and know nothing is going to change, find another job.
f13.net: I'm going to lob the last question because it may as well be PR. But to the people that currently enjoy the game, is there anything you'd like to say to put them at ease?
Adam: Don’t think of this as the end, cause it isn't. Think of it as the beginning. For the first time since the project started, we’ll have a core team who know, understand and love the game and want to make it the best it can be.
f13.net: Oh, fuck, almost forgot. JR over at Themis told me to say he loves you.
Adam: ok...
Tri >>>>>> Goons
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