For many folks, one of the more entertaining aspects of playing an MMORPG is running through its dungeons (though of course that varies from game to game and PUG to PUG). For that kind of player, the leveling experience to get to those tasty morsels during standard progression and at endgame are nothing more than window dressing. So what if there were a game that cut out the standard open world and leveling “fat” and was nothing but dungeons? That’s the elevator pitch for Fellowship, an upcoming multiplayer title from publisher Arc Games and Swedish developer Chief Rebel.
I was granted the opportunity to hop into an alpha test build of this title with CEO and game director Axel Lindberg, design director Bretton Hamilton, and community director Hamish Bode for some brief four-player plumbing of the game, and while I haven’t had nearly enough time to form a full impression, I did get a sense of where this game is going – and some questions about how it will handle the voracious appetite of MMO players.
It should be pointed out first of all that Chief Rebel isn’t exactly going into this sort of game type completely blind, as its head count includes devs who have worked on games like Diablo, Helldivers, The Division, and World of Warcraft. The devs also talked up their overall enjoyment of MMOs, MOBAs, and grouping with others, which is what led the founders to create what they’re calling a multiplayer online dungeon adventure title, or MODA for short.
At the brass tacks level, Fellowship is pretty simple: Players gather in groups of four either through matchmaking or by forming groups ahead of time, head to a table in the middle of the ready room, and select their delve, which comes in two flavors: Adventures, which are shorter and more simplified, and Ranked, which are longer and more challenging.
Many of the inspirations of the genres and titles that influenced Fellowship were almost immediately apparent when I logged in. The visuals carried a bright, painterly, and stylized look, while animations for movement and attacking were pretty silky, even for an alpha build of the game. There’s plenty of MMO sensibility in the design of the pre-built heroes as well, which follow the holy trinity of tank, DPS, and healer archetypes. For the most part, the first steps into Fellowship felt immediately familiar.
That said, there are some unique spins going on here as far as I could tell. I elected to go with a classic sword-and-board tank character by the name of Helena in order to get my feet wet, and I found a playstyle that managed to balance familiar archetypal trappings and unique resource management gameplay. In the case of my character, it was building up resources enough to maintain a toughness meter (represented by a shield on my screen) that increased my resistance to damage while being whittled down by attacks. Most of my time as this character was spent with the usual aggro-herding and ensuring my toughness stayed as full as possible.
I was able to go through only about one and a half dungeons in my hour-long play session, but I had a pretty early sense of how dungeon gameplay works in Fellowship. Once again tried-and-true gameplay was on display, as we moved through rooms of trash mobs until we hit a boss arena, while the boss mechanics themselves were generally well telegraphed and easy to read. Fights involved managing things like keeping a knockback attack away from my party, dodging a series of large attack telegraphs, and keeping pools of pain away from the rest of the group. Things here felt a bit too familiar, but then the round wheel works perfectly well and I was having a good time regardless.
Where things can get a bit more interesting is with the use of modifiers to the ranked dungeons. Before kicking off a run, players can apply or disengage different effects like the need to interrupt certain attacks, map-wide effects like raining meteors, or the very familiar wrinkle of player attacks drawing aggro away from the tank. Naturally, tuning these modifiers improves the rewards that drop from dungeons, but the devs assured me that the game’s challenge levels are trying to move on a more simple slope by way of gradual dungeon unlocks. As for how those modifiers felt, they did make the dungeon I ran through just that bit more distinct, especially against the boss.
As one might expect, gear is the star of the character progression show, but there are other features that will be in the game to help players improve their favorite characters, like new talents, set bonuses, and relics, though much of these features weren’t really touched on in the time I was in-game. I also have to point out that an hour was nowhere near enough for me to get a sense of character progression; I had just enough time to get one pair of boots.
On top of the unanswered question of how progression may feel in Fellowship, another one came to mind: How will Chief Rebel manage the breakneck pace that players often set when it comes to clearing dungeon content? The devs assured me that they had kept this in mind; they argued that since they don’t have to build a game world, quest lines, or narrative, they believe they can introduce new dungeons and new heroes at a pace that will keep up with demand. Even so, there was some concession that testing the game at scale will be the only way to know whether these concerns can truly be addressed.
As for the addition of new heroes, I asked whether there will be a point when there might be too many of them and how deep that well could go. The general thought was that there are a lot of unique roles that the studio can put together, and if players don’t end up liking a character, they can easily swap around for another one without having to do a lot of grinding.
I also asked the devs about the general mindset when it comes to balancing the game. Here I was informed that a focus on player feedback and fun will be the general North Star, with the usual but heartening promise that the team wants to work with players to make the kind of game its audience wants.
That audience will be able to put that to the test soon. A closed alpha test is set to begin between August 15th and 20th, with six heroes on offer to try out – two characters for each archetype – though it will unfortunately be under an NDA. As for final launch, that is currently earmarked for sometime in 2025 on PC. It will be a buy-to-play title with a cosmetics-only cash shop, with a final number of heroes and dungeons yet to be determined.
All in all Fellowship appears to have some promise and fun, particularly for those who love MMO dungeon running as their primary activity. That said, it’s still not completely clear whether Chief Rebel is truly prepared for the pace at which MMORPG players can blitz to the top of progression and then claim to be bored. Time is going to have to tell the tale here as testing moves forward, but this one is certainly on my personal radar.
