As someone who’s spent thousands of hours in dozens of different MMORPGs over the year, I’ve often heard the phrase, “It’s not about getting to end-game, it’s about the journey to get there.” While that may be true for the MMORPG genre as a whole, I’d argue that in a lot of cases the leveling process simply serves as way too long tutorial.
Developer Chief Rebel and publisher Arc Games has dubbed Fellowship the first-ever “MODA”, or Multiplayer Online Dungeon Adventure. Players skip the long arduous task of leveling and instead jump into a party of four and right into the fun of end-game MMORPG-style dungeon running.
Fellowship is the debut title of Chief Rebel, a brand-new studio comprised of industry veterans who have worked on major titles such as World of Warcraft, Diablo IV, Helldivers 2, and more. The team hopes to take everything they’ve learned from working on popular titles across a variety of genres and taking the best parts to create an original experience with elements of MMOs, MOBAs, and ARPGs.
I recently had the opportunity to get a glimpse of Fellowship by diving into one of its dungeons alongside Chief Rebel CEO and Game Director Axel Lindberg and Fellowship Art Director André Boström, as well as another member of games media. Instead of creating a character and picking a class, you choose from a selection of heroes to play as. Rather than leveling up you characters, you’ll gain unique gear and loot to increase the power of each character. After asking my experience with dungeon running in MMORPGs, Lindberg recommended I try out Helena, one of Fellowships two tank heroes at the moment.
I have experience tanking in MMORPGs, so I was up to the challenge, and I’m glad I took Lindberg’s advice. Fellowship features a tab-target action combat system, similar to MMORPGs like World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV. Each character has unique skills that make them uniquely strong at one of three things: tanking, dealing damage, or healing. In MMO language, this is called the “holy trinity”. While MMORPGs typically use the party composition of one tank, one healer, and three damage deals (DPS) for dungeon running, Fellowship instead trims the number of DPS down to two to fit its four player party size.
As Helena, my skills were wholly based around mitigating damage and increasing my threat generation, AKA ensuring I can keep the attention of enemies while DPS players in my party beat them up. Helena is your traditional tank wielding the ole sword and board (shield). In the middle of my HUD was a blue shield icon, as well as five small circles above it. Helena features a combo point system, similar to Rogues in World of Warcraft. One of my skills generated a combo point while dealing a bit of damage, while another did more damage and generated two combo points at the expense of having a few seconds long cooldown.
Next, I had a skill called Shield Slam that would deal damage in a cone in front of me while also making that blue shield icon grow bigger. The blue shield actually represents Helena’s Toughness, which increases the amount of damage she mitigates when hit by an enemy. The rest of her skill toolkit includes a Taunt, to immediately gain the aggro of a single enemy, a charge that also stunned briefly on hit,, an interrupt skill (more on this later), a shield toss that bounces between enemies and generates threat, and a “cooldown” skill that greatly boosts my Toughness.
It didn’t take long for me to grasp the playstyle of Helena; if you’ve played MMORPGs before, Fellowship will feel right at home. I’d often charge into a group of enemies, cycling through my threat/combo generating skills on the enemies, being cognizant of losing threat on specific enemies in case I need to taunt the aggro back.
In the dungeon we ran, we fought three unique bosses which is honestly where Fellowship really shines. For a game like Fellowship where everything is about running dungeons, it’s important for the bosses to have unique and interesting mechanics, which I’m happy to report Chief Rebel has pulled off. One boss had a mechanic where one of the four players had to use their skills to smack a ball around the area to increase its size Katamari-style. In another, a boss slammed his anchor into the ground before spawning at tidal wave that swept players away, killing them. Players have to right click on the anchor to tether a chain to it, which also chains them to other players. While the wave is washing over the area, players need to be aware of their proximity to others as to not break the chain while continuing the fight.
While I was impressed from the overall dungeon design and boss mechanics Fellowship had to offer, what really sold me was all the quality-of-life features the game had that titan MMORPGs like World of Warcraft don’t even have after all these years. Even in my roughly one hour long playtest I encountered a handful of these features that proved two things to me. First, that the team at Rebel Chief knows this genre. Its clear they’ve done their share of dungeon running in MMORPGs, probably at a high level. Second, they want to innovate the genre and make it better.
One such QOL feature gives all players the ability to to simply hit a key (I believe it was ‘R’, by default) which will place their heroes icon next to the health bar of the targeted enemy. This server as a notification to the rest of your team that you intend on interrupting that enemy. When a player uses their interrupt skill, the icon is replaced by a countdown showing when the interrupt will be off cooldown. Another feature for tanks makes it so that the health bar of enemies change to a completely different color when they lose threat of that enemy, making it much easier to keep track of aggro when fighting big groups of enemies.
My only problem with my hands-on preview of Fellowship is that it only lasted an hour. I wanted to see more dungeons, and try out some of the other heroes. Thankfully, I’ll be able to do so soon, as will anyone else interested in checking out Fellowship. As part of the upcoming Steam Next Fest, Fellowship will have a open public playtest. This test starts on February 24 at 1pm EST and ends on March 3 at 1pm EST, and will have playable servers in North America, Europe, and Asia. After my brief hands-on, it’s easily the game I’m most excited about playing during the upcoming Steam Next Fest. If you’re a fan of dungeon running MMORPGs, especially the Mythic + loop from World of Warcraft, do yourself a favor and check out Fellowship during its open playtest. I know I’ll be there!
