Jonric: How much leeway do players have in terms of customizing their starting characters? What steps are involved in the creation stage, and what key decisions have to be made at this time?

Joseph Hewitt: The avatars follow the game's general art theme of a Euro / Asian-based fantasy. All are humans, though some of the customization options available in the game might be considered to cross that line.

War Zones are the exclusive domain of players. There are no PvE mobs in Fury, so you never have to worry about collecting 10 rat tails or 15 wolf pelts in order to complete a quest.

At character creation, the player picks the basic options such as gender, facial features, hairstyle, color and so on. All appearance options can be changed later on in the game, including additional options not available at creation. Name and gender are the only binding decisions made at this time. You could even go as far to say that besides your avatar's name and gender there are no other decisions regarding its development that are locked in stone, even past creation and into the game itself. With our freeform, skill-based "incarnations", we wanted to make sure the player was never afraid to just try something and experiment.

Jonric: How does the character development system work over time? What are incarnations and how many can a player have?

Adam Carpenter: In Fury, there are no classes or rigid roles. Instead, players create incarnations for their avatars. Each incarnation is a collection of abilities and equipment that the players themselves developed. Incarnations can be customized as much or as little as a player wants. Furthermore, players are free to refine their incarnations to perfectly match their play styles, intended roles or for specific game types. There is no cost or penalty for changing around an incarnation's build, and each avatar can save over 200 incarnations. You can switch to between incarnations any time you are in a sanctuary.

Creating an incarnation is comparable to deck construction in a collectable card game like Magic: The Gathering. An avatar's rank determines how many points it will have available to use when adding abilities and equipment to each incarnation.

Advancement is done through trials, which are our PvP equivalent to quests. Completing them rewards an avatar with new and more powerful abilities. Additionally, completing trials increases an avatar's rank, which in turn, provides them with points with which to customize incarnations.

Players are free to progress through the trials as they see fit. For example, they can start on magic trials, switch to melee ones, and then complete a few involving healing. The choice is entirely up to them. Given enough time and dedication, it's actually possible to learn each of the 400 abilities in the game. Completing trials also adds to the potential diversity of an avatar's incarnations, and as there are no exclusions, players never have to worry that they might permanently gimp their avatars.

Male in chain armor - the background is part of the School of Death

Jonric: What will combat be like, and what did you mean when you said earlier that it will be fast-paced but based on mental rather than twitch skills?

Adam Carpenter: Fury's combat system is fast-paced and emphasizes skill-based decisions. It's unlike anything done before in that it fuses the best elements of the RPG and FPS genres. Like a classic MMO, you select a target and then use specific abilities against them. Unlike most MMORPGs, combat is fast-paced, with the majority (over 90 percent) of abilities being instant cast. This is very different from other games where you begin casting a fireball and have to stand still for three or four seconds before it actually fires off.

In classic RPG combat, it is easy to fall into a pattern where you cycle buttons 1, 2, 3 and 4 non-stop until your opponent is dead. With Fury, we wanted to get away from this, and to actually create meaningful combat decisions for players. What we came up with was an additional layer that we call the meta game.

Under the meta game, all abilities are aligned with one of four elemental energies. Some abilities create charges on an avatar when used. Other abilities consume an avatar's charges. In order to use their most powerful abilities, avatars must first build up elemental charges on themselves. To make things even more interesting, the more charges an avatar has, the more powerful their aligned abilities are. Thus one of the real decisions is sustained damage versus burst damage, and when one of the options is more appropriate than the other.

All combat in Fury takes place in the War Zones where players are competing against enemies from other realms. There are four different game types to fight in, and they range in size from four on four to 32 vs. 32.

Jonric: How will players find battles to participate in, what steps are you taking to make sure they're evenly matched?

Adam Carpenter: Two of the key objectives of Fury are to grant players well-matched fights, and to do that in a reasonable time. Our matchmaking system combines players from the same realm into equally skilled groups and teams, and then finds opposing teams of the same skill level from another realm. This ensures that PUGs fight PUGs, and roll groups are matched against roll groups. On the time front, our unique server model means that we are expecting wait times for games to average 30 to 60 seconds with a "long" wait being on the order of four minutes.

Jonric: Can we expect to encounter many NPCs in Fury? What kinds of roles do they fulfill, and are there any AI-controlled enemies?

Adam Carpenter: NPCs in Fury serve as trainers, vendors, and also direct avatars in their trials. For the most part, NPCs only exist within the sanctuaries. Excepting special cases like Vortex' Perkon, War Zones are the exclusive domain of players. There are no PvE mobs in Fury, so you never have to worry about collecting 10 rat tails or 15 wolf pelts in order to complete a quest.