The upcoming co-op dungeon-crawling RPG Fellowship seeks to refine the dungeon experience found in the major themepark MMOs, and naturally a lot of attention has been drawn to comparisons between Fellowship and World of Warcraft’s Mythic+ dungeons.
The bones of the structure is there; pick your Hero (Opposed to a character and class), jump into the dungeon with friends, or queue up to find a random party consisting of the holy trinity: one Tank, one Healer and two DPS.
Dungeons are gauntlets of both basic and dangerous trash, leading to a penultimate boss-fight. Or, if you’re in one of the harder capstone dungeons, three bosses in the dungeon. Get your loot, get out, and go again.
Similarities to Mythic+
While the game was designed to be a hero-based dungeon crawler, when directly comparing with World of Warcraft‘s Mythic+ dungeons, you’ll find very familiar mechanics. Heroes that you play feel intentionally familiar to playstyles we’ve come to love in MMOs, but with a twist. Enemies have interruptible spells by Tanks and DPS, some of which are dangerous if cast. Trash can be pulled and manipulated, and enemies can knock you around.
Relics allow further customization for your character in the form of active abilities. Boss fights follow a similar structure of a rotation of abilities on cooldowns rather than FFXIV’s dance-like routines. There’s even DBM-style alerts and DPS / HPS meters baked into the game’s UI, or difficulty scaling that works similar to keys.
However, Fellowship aims to set itself apart in quite a few ways — largely due to their passionate developers with a tighter focus and scope than a large scale MMORPG.
Skipping the Grind to Mythic+
The developers at Chief Rebel‘s big focus is making dungeon content accessible. Not easy, but instead having players be able to jump into the game and experience the content they’re looking to do right away without any leveling, quest or gearing grinds.
Instead of fully customizable characters, Fellowship has chosen to go with pre-made hero designs, similar to a MOBA. This allows people to drop-in or change their hero without having to level up and gear a new character in its entirety.
Each Hero still offers talent trees, unique legendary affixes, weapon abilities, and weapon trees so the ability to build and define your character is still there. The difference is these static heroes allow the developers to get new classes and playstyles out the door much faster than traditional MMOs.
You will still gear and progress the individual hero, but all of that is done through the dungeons and gameplay itself with no lockouts or limits. Heroes have also been confirmed to all be included in the game, with no plans on monetizing them.
Designed to be Played Without Add-ons
World of Warcraft supports add-ons that give new UI and features such as DPS meters and boss alerts, all the way to WeakAuras that can solve communication for raid groups. The problem with this is as the alerts and add-ons systems get more complex, the fights have had to be designed to be more difficult which ends up in a cat-and-mouse cycle where these add-ons become mandatory to progress.
In Fellowship, the UI is designed to be fully customizable while also having these features baked in. The developers have stated there will intentionally not be add-on support, allowing them to tune exactly how much information is presented to the player and focus the difficulty on the content itself.
This doesn’t mean the usual quality-of-life isn’t available, though. You’ll still get meters, alerts, and there’s even a log file to get combat log info from — which has already been setup!
Levels of Play for Everyone From Casuals to Sweats
Rather than an exclusive club of elites, the game’s content and difficulty is targeted at a wider audience of playstyles.
Quickplay is a low difficulty match-making queue that normalizes equipment levels and lets you play with anyone at any level. This is great for casual runs, learning new heroes and roles, or playing with friends at different points of progression. You still get rewarded currencies which you can use to get basic gear and materials used for re-rolling, or cosmetics such as mounts.
Challenge Mode is the game’s prominent system. Here you’ll start getting gear drops and progress your hero into higher level difficulties. After you progress to certain points, you’ll face a capstone dungeon which takes you to the next tier.
Instead of just cranking up the numbers, higher tiers unlock new abilities for mobs and bosses, and new modifiers that changes the way you’ll play each of the dungeons. The difficulty sharply increases later in the game, and while it remains possible for experienced players and teams, more casual players can push their item level and gear progression safely to help overcome challenges.
Endless Mode is the final difficulty, which offers capped loot but uncapped enemy difficulty and bosses. This will push the limits of players and their knowledge of the dungeons and heroes, all to contribute ranks on the in-game leader boards which the bleeding edge style player can chase.
Bringing Twists to the Dungeon Formula
While some of the shorter one-boss dungeons currently in the game would feel right at home in some of the MMOs many of us have been playing for so long, and they are played quite comfortable in their design. Their newer designed content and capstone dungeons, however, feel completely distinct.
Wraithtide Vault was the capstone dungeon for the 5-day open beta so not many of the players got to see it. When cresting the hill you’ll see an entire new dungeon with new enemy types, and a wide map with far more branching paths than usual.
The treasure within the vault was crazy concepts such as chaining yourselves together and dodging waves of sharks, hoping the first player doesn’t die or you’ll all get washed away with the trash mobs. Or, an elemental made out of gold which asks the tank to give their best dung-beetle impression.
Targeting a Specific Audience
Fellowship is very intentional about what it is, and what it is not. Fellowship is not challenging World of Warcraft or any other long, well-established MMORPG for their thrones.
Instead, Fellowship is a self-proclaimed “Multiplayer Online Dungeon Adventure”, or MODA, designed for jumping in with your friends and playing the dungeon content you already know and love. For people who are interested in the Mythic+ experience but not interested in all of the surrounding elements around it, or not interested in paying a subscription for it.
We’re yet to see if this unique take is in demand enough to warrant an entire game designed around it, but with the success of the open beta reaching over 18,000 concurrent players and indie-developed ‘raiding’ games such as Rabbit and Steel with 9000 reviews, this might be just the beginning for the raiding-focused dungeon crawler.
Fellowship Launches into Early Access in October
The game is due to release on October 16th into Early Access, which is aimed to only be about 6-months long. Be sure to wishlist the game on Steam or check out our other hero guides to get a more in-depth look at how they play.
