Massively^™

Masthead Studios has licensed SpeedTree modeling software to add a higher degree of realism to their upcoming MMO Earthrise. The software suite is now used extensively in the game industry for foliage modeling. What, you've never heard of SpeedTree? Well you've almost certainly seen it before. You're not likely to stop and notice the trees and shrubs as the FBI and military are trying to cut you down with automatic weapons in GTA IV. You probably won't admire the indigenous plantlife while you're trying to frag your opponents in Unreal Tournament III either. But the unnoticed backdrop for your carnage in these games was built with SpeedTree. While we may not pay attention to them directly, these details that permeate our virtual environments can have a big impact on our immersion in those settings. Neverwinter Nights 2, Crackdown and Viking: Battle for Asgard are other prominent titles enhanced by SpeedTree.

Earthrise is in good company on the MMO front with Masthead's decision to use SpeedTree, joining the ranks of Stargate Worlds, Fury, and Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures. If the actual game environments can live up to the screenshots Masthead Studios has released, Earthrise stands to be one gorgeous MMO.

In a recent blog post, Elder Game's Eric Heimburg takes a sardonic look at some of the more heavily worn bumps on the road that is MMO development. Without naming any names, Heimburg suggests developers conduct an intervention if their company meets a certain number of the criteria, lest their game join the cavalcade of mediocre to crappy MMO releases on the market.

Among the more prescient of the criteria in this blogger's mind is the one where instead of having a lead designer, companies design by committee, or the one where the publisher imposes changes to the core game from outside. If only fans had a clearer picture of the way their favorite developers were structured, they could apply these criteria beforehand and weigh the odds of a stinker before sinking their hard-earned cash on it. Makes you wonder how many of these criteria Auran met before Fury fell flat on its face.

Fury, the maligned combat MMO by Auran Games, has had a pretty rough history. Despite the critical drubbing, the low player numbers, and the loss of a huge portion of its development crew, Auran has managed to stay together with a skeleton crew, working on the problems that made Fury such a target for ridicule.

Well, according to an interview with CEO Tony Hilliam, conducted by australiangamer.com, they've made significant changes to the title and renamed it FuryLeague, which will focus more on the competitive aspects, and less on the MMO features. Additionally, there is the prospect of winning game gold that can be converted to real money, which, because the game is skill-based instead of luck-based, means that it's not gambling and is therefore legal.

The full interview is available, and the Qualifying Season has already begun. Admit it: you're just as curious as we are. Give it a spin and let us know what you think!

[Via Kotaku]

John Romero and Mike Wilson might be indulging in increasingly childish verbal fisticuffs over the famous "John Romero's about to make you his bitch!" advertisement, but all of that testosterone-laden scuffling kind of glosses over the fact that antagonizing and belittling your players is not a great way to gain a solid following. Especially if your players are over ten years old.

Well, according to Signe at F13, Auran (or whoever's really in back of the game Fury these days - funnily enough it appears to be Mike Wilson's Gamecock) wants you to suck it down and stop being such a shameful girly loser in what has to be one of the outright worst MMO incentive emails I've seen so far, endearingly titled "LOSER! LOSER! LLLOOOOSSSSEEEERRRRR!"

Before everyone permanently erases the memory of Fury from their minds, you may want to check out TechDomain's review for the other side of the story. They've written what they say is "a fair review that accurately reflects the state of the game". The game has not received much praise from the media, but TechDomain's review paints it in a much more positive light, and also includes input from a few vocal community members from Fury's forums.

In the end, their verdict of the game is that it needs polish and has a lot of minor cons that may deter new players from sticking around, but "the core game is functioning and functioning well". If after checking out the review you'd like to decide for yourself whether Fury is worth playing, keep in mind that the basic version of the game is now totally free to play.

There's a forum post at atomicmpc.com that involves itself with the fact that Fury is still being sold in retail outlets (Electronics Boutique specifically named, though apparently there are others), when the game is free to download and free to play. As written here, though, it's not quite so cut-and-dried, as there is a slight benefit to owning the physical disc.

My question, however, is this: given the depth of negative press Auran has gotten for Fury, is it worth paying for at all? Across the board, Fury's gotten nothing but horrible reviews, and I'm surprised the game exists at all. This is an industry story on the level of Duke Nukem Forever, or Daikatana. Is the disc worth owning for any reason other than a White Elephant gift?

The entire Auran staff may have been let go earlier this week, but former Producer David Gillespie has a post up on his personal blog that defends Auran's staff, and the decisions made by management. This is the "Game flopped and the entire team was laid off, but the staff were the best!" law -- a far too frequent occurrence in the gaming industry. This law works in opposites, too. Sid Meier eats babies.

David Gillespie left Auran long before it went into administration, but he obviously had a lot of respect for everyone there. I didn't know Auran were the same developers responsible for 90's RTS classic Dark Reign, though. And there's an industry lesson to learn from this -- no matter how talented your team, how great your working environment, how successful your studio has been up till now -- if you make a commercial MMO that's a failure, you're in a whole world of trouble.

Maybe now that Fury is free, I should download it just to see what it was really like-- but on second thoughts, I think I'll pass for now.

[Via warcry.com]

Yesterday, Games Radar ran a piece on the ugliest video game box art of 2007, which got me to thinking about some of the MMO boxes sitting up on the shelf next to my desk. Now, one of the earliest things that ever drew my best friend into EverQuest so long ago was the presence of a hottie blond elf babe on the cover. Being a dutiful friend, I joined him -- and I have to admit, she's definitely not hard on the eyes. Since then we've seen a lot of box art across the genre; some truly excellent, some utterly pathetic.

This morning, we'd like to ask what your personal choices for best and worst MMO box art are? For me, best would be hard to pick because I really love fantasy art and I think there are some talented artists doing MMO boxes on that side. That said, I can pick worst out pretty easily. My personal worst would have to go to the person who did the box for Fury. I'm probably going to get some hate for kicking them when they're down, but to be honest, the box design was poor from any standpoint other than being prophetic. For those of you who haven't seen it, take a gander at it above. It looks like it borrowed heavily from the Lord of the Rings Online in it's fire-on-brown theme, but whereas the LotRO box has the ring any fan knows and loves, and the helm faded into the background. The Fury box art has a great big flaming F on the cover, the title, a quote, and some overall blah elements. As far as generating excitement that makes one think of PvP butt-kicking, that certainly isn't it.

So what do you think? Are you equally as fond of hottie elf chicks, or do you prefer the stark name only on your game box? Perhaps you think the hot chick on the cover is overdone and would rather see something new altogether for MMO box art?

Sad news for the Australian games industry. GameSpot has the scoop on Auran, the Aussie developers of Fury, going into voluntary administration (meaning an independent and qualified party will take complete control of the company to attempt to resolve financial difficulties in the best manner possible). From here, subject to a meeting with the company's creditors, they will either be restructured or liquidated. But one thing is a certainty: all staff members, nearly 70 employees, have been laid off.

Auran and Gamecock Media Group have made a press release announcing that a new free-to-download and free-to-play option for Fury will be available with the upcoming "Age of the Chosen" content update on December 14th. Those downloading the game for free (known as "Chosen") will be able to play as much as they want and not be charged anything, but will earn essence and gold at a reduced rate, and cannot trade with other players.

Chosen players can purchase gold with real-life money, or pay to upgrade their account to "Hero" status and earn more gold and essence and have trading privileges. Buying Fury from a retail store will now give you a Hero status account straight away. The Age of the Chosen update will also introduce a 1v1 Elimination mode, and a Carnage mode that involves two teams slaughtering NPC bots and not each other.

The changes to Fury's business model come amidst recent doubts about the game's future -- which were later quelled by Auran CEO Tony Hilliam -- and a painful reception from critics.

[Via GameSpot]

Just in case any of us design a PvP ruleset for a massively multiplayer online game, Scott Jennings has helpfully posted a 13-step guide to "PvP done right" on his personal blog, BrokenToys.org.

It's a potent mixture of common sense, personal opinion, and thousands upon thousands disagreeing that classes are needed. It's a great primer, aphorisms or not, and written wonderfully. Put simply, PvP in a game needs to work -- if it's an impossible concept or impossible to implement, nothing else matters. Personally, I'd go as far as to say the simpler the concept, the better the execution -- of course, that's a huge sweeping statement, but be it Team Fortress 2 or World of Warcraft or Chess, the depth doesn't come from the rules, it comes from the implementation. Except Cricket.

All decisions will upset someone. It's just about having a realistic, well-defined goal for PvP in your game and going from there -- and accepting that there will always be an awful lot of criticism, rage, and Fury.

Last week we reported on a widespread rumor that, due to Fury's commercial flop, Australian developer Auran was going to be the subject of a big lay-off, and that a significant chunk of Fury's development going forward was going to be out-sourced to China. Auran CEO Tony Hilliam recently addressed these concerns, and his comments were posted on Auran's official forum.

While promising to revolutionize the way PvP in MMOs works, critics have lampooned the game for its muddled combat, and the fact that it only loosely qualifies as an MMO in the strictest sense. Interestingly, though Hilliam tries to take an upbeat tone in his remarks, he really doesn't deny any of rumors he claims to be debunking, saying, "The future will focus on a smaller, more agile core team of Fury developers." That's fairly transparent executive speak for "all non-essential personnel are being laid off." He also confirmed rumors that much of the future development is being out-sourced to China.

Perhaps the only solace for these non-essential Auran developers is that neighboring Aussie developer Tantalus is looking to snatch a few of them up to help develop DS and Wii titles. That's at least one bit oh holiday kindness, amidst a pile of bad news.

Just this morning we discussed the latest Fury newsletter, and Auran's plans to save their new but ailing game. They've now announced even more ambitious plans - the first free content update to the game, a patch they're calling Age of the Chosen.

This update appears to be a formal package for some of the bullet points discussed in the game's first newsletter, but there are a few new concepts to this update:

• New Abilities
• New, update-specific Equipment
• NPC consolidations
• An Improved Interface
• A new 1v1 duel type
• The 'Carnage' game type, pitting two teams of players vs. a bot team.

The brand-spanking-new PvP title Fury is going to be seeing a massive update sometime in December. Auran previews that upcoming content in their one-month newsletter. They also go over some recent updates to the game that will hopefully deal with player retention and game enjoyment.

Newsletter author Bossman wastes no time getting down to brass tacks: We investigated some of the match statistics for the journalists who gave FURY poor scores. They all lost and lost badly - none of the guys we checked on had a winning record. Stopping this pwnage is certainly the biggest hurdle we must overcome.

The rest of the newsletter details ways they're going to try to overcome negative press and current criticisms. Some of these elements include:

• Improving the new player experience.
• Reducing the number of abilities, and increasing the differentiation between them.
• Slowing things down just a touch to improve understanding of combat.
• Squashing bugs and improving performance.

It's great to see Auran is sticking to their guns; while their launch vision is obviously flawed I still maintain that the idea behind Fury is a good one. Here's hoping they find their way.