I didn't have a lot of doubts going into Fellowship one last time before its early access release this week. I knew from the first time I got my hands on it last year that it had the potential to be the kind of game MMO players have wanted for a long time—including me. And Fellowship just kept improving each time I saw it.
The pitch is simple: It's MMO-style dungeons but without the MMO grind. You party up in a group of four—one tank, one healer, two damage-dealers—and work together to clear out packs of enemies and bosses for better and better loot.
There's no need to level up a character and churn through hundreds of quests. You pick one of the game's MOBA-like heroes, queue up, and spam dungeons for as long as you'd like.
It's one of those ideas that I am surprised nobody really capitalized on for this long. There are plenty of World of Warcraft players who play the game purely for the thrill of grouping up and doing dungeons. Fellowship is trying to fill a niche that surprisingly doesn't really exist elsewhere.
And that's what drove Chief Rebel to make Fellowship as its first game. Many of its developers came from much bigger studios and saw an opportunity to help make something that would've been much harder to pitch in that environment. Game director and CEO Axel Lindberg tells PC Gamer that it had to be an indie studio to make something like Fellowship.
"Our pitch—essentially building a full game around the cooperative dungeon running experience—would have been passed on for being 'too narrow,'" he says. "In AAA, games are expected to justify their scope and cost with massive feature lists and broad appeal. As an independent studio, we don’t have that pressure. We can zero in on an idea and execute it how we like."
When the game was announced, I saw some MMO players raise an eyebrow at the idea of not creating your own character. Fellowship is a hero-based game that was heavily inspired by MOBAs and the team has told me that it knows that might be a hang-up for some people. But it's also core to how Chief Rebel wants the game to appeal to those who maybe haven't touched an MMO dungeon in their life.
"I think a lot of games in the AAA space try to start with that sharp focus but in mid-production have been requested to change things to potentially make it so the game caters towards a wider audience," community director Hamish Bode says. "We don’t necessarily have that problem."
After running a very popular open beta earlier this year, the team went in and streamlined a lot of the basic experience of running dungeons and progressing your character. Now, instead of picking a bunch of different difficulty modifiers to increase the challenge and rewards of the dungeon, the game does that for you as you climb through its new ranking system. A Quick Play option will be available if you need to squeeze in a run on your lunch break, but the meat of the game is pushing into harder and harder dungeons.
Running and gunning
For my recent hands-on session, I was given access to its newest damage-dealing hero Elarion. He's an archer who can use many of his abilities while moving, which is extraordinarily powerful when facing bosses that force you to dodge attacks and environmental hazards.
The very first thing I noticed was how smooth his skills flowed into each other. The developers aren't shy about their time playing WoW and it shows. It didn't take me very long to figure out Elarion's loop of skills because they're designed to encourage you to chain them together for specific scenarios.
As Bode bolted from monster pack to monster pack as our tank, I marked enemies and rained down arrows on top of them to clear them out before their attacks put too much pressure on our healer. And on the boss, I focused on charging up my single-target shots while doing my best to stay out of things like rotating frost beams and patches of fire.
At one point, two totems sprouted out of the ground with icons above them next to three orbs with similar icons. Bode let me guess what the solution was while gently reminding me that we'd be taking tons of damage until I figured it out. Embarrassingly, I thought the solution was to shoot the orb that didn't match the totems, but it's actually the complete opposite. Thankfully, nobody was seriously harmed in the time it took for me to pop the right orbs. And I remembered the trick for the boss that uses the same mechanic later on.
The final boss was a gigantic ice man who calls in waves that roll into the arena. They knock you back when they hit you, which is a big problem when there are nearby icicles that will chain you in place and twisters zig-zagging through the room. I'm pretty sure I only survived to the end because I could wiggle in between everything while spamming arrows.
I've played enough WoW to know just how powerful mobility is in a game where most of the challenge is trying to squeeze your abilities into the few moments you have to stand still. Fellowship has leaderboards for the fastest clears of its hardest dungeons and my first thought was how the team plans to balance characters like Elarion—and everything from the bosses to the dungeon layouts themselves—during early access.
Bode says there's a team of community members they actively discuss and test things with and that over the next six months (or more) in early access, it'll do its best to take the time to consider every change.
"Of course, it’s important to handle feedback carefully," Bode says. "We’ve been able to avoid the sort of “kneejerk reaction” side of development that can happen sometimes where it’s easy to overreact and change things after one round of feedback. Instead, we’ve been able to take a step back, look for patterns, and ask why people are responding a certain way before making changes."
"The key is that we love the game we’re making, and we play it ourselves every day," Lindberg says. "That makes it easier to stay true to our vision—we don’t fear losing it. We’re always testing new ideas with the community, discussing what works, and tossing out what doesn’t. If something isn’t fun, it doesn’t make it in."
The team is already working on new heroes, new skins and cosmetics, new enemy difficulty modifiers, and new dungeons to release over time. For right now, the focus seems to be on getting people into the game and seeing how players start to develop builds for the heroes and optimal routes through the dungeons. And while I had my fun on Elarion, I think it's time for me to finally give healing a shot now that I can drag my friends into the game with me.
Fellowship is available now on Steam.