Fellowship is a game that wears its inspiration on its entire shirt. What if, instead of rolling a new character in an MMORPG, leveling that character up, and THEN crawling through dungeons and experiencing endgame, was a little less personal but expedited? Enter Fellowship, a hero-based dungeon crawler.
Immediately, I noticed that Fellowship had taken inspiration from World of Warcraft. Even in just moving around, using abilities, finding UI elements… Fellowship is its own game, but dang if it doesn’t get its inspiration from World of Warcraft.
During the demo I played with the publisher, I selected a character, joined a group of three other people, and entered the dungeon from a map. After entering the dungeon, we were given light objectives (kill X amount of baddies to progress) and made it through the bosses to get loot before being dumped back out to the lobby space.
The game is a short-form 4-player co-op dungeon crawler with leaderboards, an MMO-style lobby, and hero characters. And yeah, I had a pretty good time playing it. With the way that the MMO scene has been struggling, Fellowship might be the way out.
Fellowship is developed by a studio out of Stockholm named Chief Rebel. They boast developers from World of Warcraft, The Division, and Diablo. Coining the phrase, “multiplayer online dungeon adventure,” they believe that Fellowship is the first-ever “MODA.”
The goal of Fellowship is to take the grind out of MMOs to give players what they really want. This doesn’t speak to me as a player. The fluff and grind is the fun part. I find the dungeon experience miserable.
However, I was willing to let Arc Games, the publisher of Fellowship, take me on an adventure to try it out. I was graciously given the opportunity to try out the newest hero in the Fellowship canon, Elarion.
Elarion is a mythic bowman, a sentient of starlight, ya’know, a night elf. Known as the Skystrider, I was able to move about while casting abilities and pump the DPS like nobody’s business.
Truly, I was enjoying myself. It was then that I realized, while the pomp, frills, and fluff of an MMO were exciting and something I really enjoyed, they weren’t what everyone truly enjoyed. I stopped thinking about what I didn’t like and started considering how easy it’d be to get my friends to play this game.
If you’re anything like me, trying to convince a group of adults to come together and play an MMORPG, especially a classic one like World of Warcraft, that’s a bit of a commitment. That’s saying, “This is the game I’m going to be playing for the foreseeable future.”
Fellowship helps you by avoiding this tricky conversation. Instead of convincing friends to play a singular experience for a while, Fellowship allows you to jump in, play a few dungeons, and ease up on the chores an MMORPG has to offer.
Fellowship is far from feature complete; that’s why it’s entering Early Access. But it was enough that the publishing team kept wanting to show me more, even though I only had a short time with the game.
Everything I was being shown was also a sign of good things to come. Difficulty options, modifiers on dungeons not unlike mythic+ dungeons from World of Warcraft, and there was even the whisper of an endless mode.
Fellowship’s Foundation and the Future
Banking on the MMO “holy trinity” of Tank/DPS/Healer, Fellowship provides a new coat of paint and some new boundaries on a familiar system. Currently, nine heroes are available to choose from, meaning you’re not stuck playing the same heroes the entire time.
Loot improves your gear score, and each of the nine heroes available currently has their own leveling/gear path along with a big talent system. You unlock gear, skins, mounts, etc, the more adventures you go on.
And for the adventurer on the go, Fellowship has a quickplay mode, which is a small, one-boss dungeon meant to be completed in 10 – 20 minutes.
The mark of whether or not this game will survive is based entirely on its community, communication between the devs and that community, and making good on promises to the community.
With regular updates, Fellowship could be a force to be reckoned with and something that drastically changes the MMO space for the future. I had a good time playing Fellowship, and I can only imagine how much fun it’ll be to play with friends and fully explore the world they have to offer.
