The story around Fury is, I think, a great study in how to kill an otherwise decent game.

To start with, the requirements to play were simply herculean. For some reason the game was incredibly RAM intensive. Loading a "warzone" where the game was actually played could take up to five minutes of your hard drive thrashing with paging files until you got up to a non-trivial amount of RAM. Unfortunately, the game started only one minute after you entered the warzone, whether you were fully loaded in or not. Because of the fast pace of the game, this meant you could be dead 5 or 6 times before you even got to see what was happening. I played the occasional game, before I upgraded my RAM, where the game was literally *over* by the time my character entered. (However, I will point out that once loaded, it ran quite well. Decent framerates on their low-end renderer.. sure, didn't look pretty but the gamplay was enough to keep me going at it) Yet as a PVP game, it requires a certain critical mass of players to ensure that there's a broad enough range of skill to keep some people from being continually overpowered.

Also the contol system was rather unique. It's a FPS with multiple (up to 20) "spells" that you can cast to attack or defend with. The only way to attack was to cast one of the spells with the appropriate keypress, and the mouse was for controlling movement, with mouse1 moving you forward and mouse2 allowing free control of the camera. This was made even less clear by the fact that you had a weapon slot and put your weapon in there. The weapon is really just a limiter (certain spells could only use certain weapons) but of course people were thinking that "Hey, I'm using a pole-arm, and there are 16 different varieties of pole-arms, this must be what I attack with.. what's the default attack"? But the trick is, there wasn't any default attack, it was all of these spells, each of which requires a different key. Somewhat complex, yes, but nothing terrible -- or at least it wouldn't be if they'd have had a decent tutorial system that made that kind of thing clear. Without it though, I can't tell the number of times I saw some poor bugger saying "How do I attack?" (And I was even one of them when I first started)

Now, you'd think you could get around this complexity by simply rebinding your keys and mouse properly, correct? Yet their UI was actually something that the company admitted they had lost track of. Nobody was assigned to oversee it, and so by the time their "$1,000,000 Fury Challenge" rolled around, it was a mess. Weird things too, like the "k" key could not be reassigned to anything, even though it wasn't assigned to anything already. Things like Shift and Ctrl were hard-coded in what they did, and in a game where you might be dealing with 20 keys or more, the ability to remap those kind of things is crucial for your playstyle.

This of course brings us to the whole million dollar challenge thing. Note to other companies thinking to try this? Don't. Not until you're so far into release you're not even thinking about bugs, and are pretty sure you're even finished polishing. You should definitely not be at the stage where design problems with the fundamental nature of play haven't been addressed. The most obvious case in point was their "free-for-all" system. Consider, you have in place a PvP game in which one mode is a 32 player free-for-all. Everybody targets everybody. Except you don't put in any disincentive to teaming up with someone, other than only one person can be in first place. Then on top of that you add real world prizes such as high end graphic cards and the like. In short, the free-for-all system quickly became a team based game, that did nothing but anger those who tried to play it that weren't already in a solid team.

Adding to the difficulty was, at least in my view, a misplaced sense of priorities on the part of the dev team. Instead of trying to ensure that the game was accessible to all (by addressing such issues as a better tutorial, proper UI configurability, and lower hardware requirements,) they spent their time trying to balance the various skills in response to the regular, hard-core players. This lead to significant "grognard capture" as Greg Costikyan likes to put it. Two teams with very similar levels of skill could have a great game, but if the skill level differed more than a tiny amount, it quickly turned into a rout. The justification for this was that their matchmaking system would ensure that people got matched with others of similar skill levels, and that at that point what would matter was that the skills were balanced -- something best accomplished by the expert players. Unfortunately, that presupposes a certain critical mass of people playing. A critical mass of people you're not going to get if when the new player goes into a game he gets repeatedly steamrolled in the first few moments of it. (It also makes some other assumptions about people's skills all being able to be placed on a smooth gradient, but I won't get into that here)

Finally, you couple the million dollar challenge with grognard capture and what you get is a whole bunch of new users (at least, those who could make the hardware hurdle) signing in, getting repeatedly owned by some hardcore players that are certainly not going to go easy on them for fear of jeapordizing their place in the challenge, and deciding "Screw this".

Of course, what makes it worse is the release date was right around the Orange Box.. which means anybody who decided to say "Screw this" has the extremly polished TF2 to go to for their PVP needs, and gets all the Half-Life stuff and Portal squeezed in to boot.

I'm glad to see that they haven't necessarily decided to kill the project all toghter. Moving it to China might give it the time (and developers) to work out the kinks and have it in fairly good position come late April, when people have finished off their christmas presents, for folks to give it another try. I had enough fun with it that I do believe if it does achieve it's critical mass of players to handle the skill-balance differences, the game will be a hell of a lot of fun.