Auran down

[Ridah]

Auran studios, the guys behind Fury have shut shop for good today.

Kotaku AU link..

Just spoke to some ex-colleagues of mine from Auran. Auran Developments (who hires the dev team) has just gone into liquidation and has shut up shop. The guys don’t get paid this week, they don’t get their holidays paid out, and they don’t get redundancy packages.

What the former CEO of Auran had to say about this..

Auran: the facts

The Directors of Auran Developments, the company that employs all the Auran staff, have today called in a Voluntary Administrator (like Chapter 11 in the US). All the staff were dismissed today. Despite earlier reports, staff will be paid for all their work to date, their annual leave entitlements, redundancy payments and long service leave.

Whilst this is the end of Auran Developments, it is far from the end of FURY and Trainz.

Trainz is the world’s leading rail simulator and has a community of more than 250,000 registered users around the world. It is published in dozens of countries and there are many products in the market today. The bulk of the Trainz team will continue to work on current projects and these projects will be released next year.

With Fury, we built up a team to make a world beating game and sadly we have not reached our goals – yet. Our performance to date has meant we could no longer fund the 70 strong dev team. However, FURY: Age of the Chosen will be launched as planned Friday 8pm GMT. We have put together a small but committed team to continue developing FURY on an ongoing basis. This core team, as we announced last week, are a passionate group of people committed to making FURY a success. We will be releasing bug fixes, content and feature updates on a regular basis and in fact they will be more frequent with our new agile team.

I believe that once people hear about F:AotC and the new Free to Play business model, we’ll start building up the player numbers and revenues that will make the game successful.

I expect the naysayers will have different thoughts, but they haven’t played the new build…yet.

So I guess when you release something crap, you won't last long in the business eh?

[kcxiv]

lol, clicking this, i thought it was some WoW raid boss.

[Tuco]

What did he drop?

Originally Posted by Ridah

So I guess when you [drop] something crap

Ah, gay.

[...]

Originally Posted by kcxiv

lol, clicking this, i thought it was some WoW raid boss.

ha! me too, my first thought was like "who? does anyone even give a shit anymore about bosses going down?"

[WarderX]

Hey remember that week when everyone on gameriot was giving Fury a gigantic collective rim job?

[Algol Devilstar]

I guess Fury shit on their face =/

[Grave]

If only people still cared enough to post about downing bosses and raiding in the MMO forum again...

Best we get these days is Makata shitting on our monitors.

[Draegan]

You'll get people talking about the Sunwell when it comes out.

[Lyrical]

Earlier this week, I was thinking about buying this MMO. I am glad I held off :d

[I'm Rich Bitch]

Looks like Fury drained all their capital. Although I like Fury, I think their problem was due to:

1. No learning curve. You entered Fury and immediately got your ass kicked over and over. No "Kill 10 rats" quests.
2. Too many skills available. There was no uphill climb of gaining skills and they had hundreds (yes hundreds) of redundant skills. You have these available at the start and just wonder "wtf".
3. Undefined genre. It was not a MMORPG and not a FPS. It was sort of both but not really. There was no world to explore but it was too MMO for FPS people. FPS people want guns not swords.

That said, I think you guys should try it out because they had a unique combat system that does not use mana. You build up charges with lesser damage spells and close with the big hit spells once you have enough charges. PoTBS uses a similiar system. Also, they has 4 schools of spells and one school would subtract charges when used from another school. This prevents a very high damage spell caster build to also be a uber healer for example. I think it was a nice system. Also, this makes a classless character system. You are limited on the abilities you can use so you have to plan accordingly. This is great. No need to reroll an alt. Just switch out your abilities.

Also, I like the character movement. From what I have seen of the Spellborn videos, movement will be similar. Both games use the Unreal 3.0 engine.

I think the failure of Fury will give Game Makers and the people who fund them more ammunition to make more WoW clones for the foreseeable future. Therefore, we can look forward to more "holy trinity|auto attack|LFG|level based|grinding|wood elf|half elf|dark elf|flying elf|high elf|low elf|bad elf|elf this|elf that|bad orc|good orc|flying orc|poop in sock raiding|kill 10 rats or boars|tank and spank" MMORPGs forever. This will eventually kill the genre due to lack of innovation.

It is sort of ironic that the amazing success of WoW will probably kill the genre because no one will think outside the box. They will just try to copy WoW and hope to get a small percentage of their customer base. The biggest game out next year, WAR, will use this approach.

[Vagoo]

in other news prohibition was repealed in 1933

[FoghornDeadhorn]

Originally Posted by Draegan

You'll get people talking about the Sunwell when it comes out.

Yeah it's been months since the end boss in WoW was killed, thus the lack of threads on the subject.

[Kodylan]

Originally Posted by I'm Rich Bitch

Stuff...

The new player experience was awful late in beta as well -- did they ever fix that? I remember getting matched up with people that had been playing for a long time and I had zero chance of killing them as a newly created character, yet I was placed into the same matches with them time and time again.

[I'm Rich Bitch]

Originally Posted by Kodylan

The new player experience was awful late in beta as well -- did they ever fix that? I remember getting matched up with people that had been playing for a long time and I had zero chance of killing them as a newly created character, yet I was placed into the same matches with them time and time again.

No they did not fix it. The matchmaker can only work if a lot of people are playing the game to match you will other Noobs. As you know now, there are very few people who play so it can be considered broken. If you are new to Fury and start it you will die without knowing what happened in a fraction of a second. If you do the group elimination, the matchmaker will match your unorganized, pick up group with a uber, established, Clan that will kill your entire group in a matter of seconds, literally about 10 secs. Add to that the fact that clan groups team up in the free for all to kill other people. In other words, they pair up to kill the single Players. There is no way to win in that situation.

Take a look at the game just as an academic exercise. There is no way you can be good in the game at this point. The people who have played the game will beat your ass into next year over an over and very quickly.

[spronk]

Originally Posted by I'm Rich Bitch

I think the failure of Fury will give Game Makers and the people who fund them more ammunition to make more WoW clones for the foreseeable future. Therefore, we can look forward to more "holy trinity|auto attack|LFG|level based|grinding|wood elf|half elf|dark elf|flying elf|high elf|low elf|bad elf|elf this|elf that|bad orc|good orc|flying orc|poop in sock raiding|kill 10 rats or boars|tank and spank" MMORPGs forever. This will eventually kill the genre due to lack of innovation.

It is sort of ironic that the amazing success of WoW will probably kill the genre because no one will think outside the box. They will just try to copy WoW and hope to get a small percentage of their customer base. The biggest game out next year, WAR, will use this approach.

Blizzard themselves are working on their own new MMO so I think your predictions of MMO innovation death is premature.

Most of the smart game devs I know realize the real lesson from WoW is that post 2005 a successful MMO has only 1 shot at success - at launch time. It must be complete, well thought out [designed], and obvious where the game is going to be 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, and 2 years down the road.

Redoing classes days or weeks before launch (Fury), insanely buggy content (Hellgate), incomplete game (Tabula Rasa) are all recipes for abject failure. The only really good non-Blizzard MMO launch imo of the last 2 years has been LOTRo, although its more of a niche product.

Sadly few companies have the cash or management talent to take the time to see a MMO to a truly successful launch. Tabula Rasa or Hellgate could have been insanely great games, given another 6-12 months bake time. WoW launched prematurely as well, v1.0 had huge issues, but their competition at the time was EQ. Now any new MMOs competition is WoW, so they have to be better.