Preview: Fellowship May Just End Up Being The "Dungeons Only" MMO I've Wanted For A Long Time

You may have already seen the announcement that a small studio in Stockholm called Chief Rebel is working on a new "MODA." What? You've never heard that term before? Ok good, I thought I was the only one.

Turns out a "MODA" is a "Multiplayer Online Dungeon Adventure". I'll admit, that may not actually answer your question so allow me to elaborate. Fellowship, Chief Rebel's project being developed under the Arc Games umbrella, is all about PvE. That's it. Looking for some PvP action? Go somewhere else, it isn't here and it never will be. Like running dungeons in MMORPGs like World of Warcraft? Stick around, this one may be worth keeping an eye on.

I've included the announcement trailer below if you want the team's take on the project, but last week I actually got to sit in with CEO and Game Director Axel Lindberg, Design Director Bretton Hamilton, and Community Director Hamish Bode to try out the alpha version of the game.

Here's the high level view: take the hero selection of a MOBA, blend in the dungeons of tab-targeting MMORPGs, and throw in a dash of ARPG mechanics and customization and put it into one game. You won't create your own character here. Instead, you'll pick from a number of already created heroes that have specific abilities and roles.

Rime, the character I opted for in my play session, is a ranged, ice magic using, DPS hero. If you want to tank or heal, you're also covered. In fact, since you're leveling up each character individually, you can swap anytime you want between dungeon runs if you like.

The rest of Fellowship is going to feel VERY familiar to MMORPG players who run dungeons and raids. Don't let "familiar" make you comfortable though. Just because you may have an idea of how to play a tab-targeted dungeon and you get the basic abilities of your hero, that doesn't mean things will be "easy." You'll be customizing your hero not only through armor and cosmetics, but also with a skill tree that allows you to spend earned points on new abilities or improvements to your current abilities. Think of World of Warcraft's old talent tree where you picked one of 3 options when you hit every 10th level...with a caveat: you can actually pick all three in a given level if you like, you aren't locked into a single selection per tier.

Once you've picked a hero, it's time to queue up with friends or use the matchmaking tool to find a group. Our team ran two dungeons together. We didn't finish the second one due to time, but time brings up an interesting point. There's actually 2 different modes here. One is a more casual and faster experience. Smaller adventures can be completed in about 15 minutes with an "ok" group and really all you're trying to do is kill monsters to fill your bar, then take down the boss. A more in-depth ranked gameplay is also available. This is a bit more challenging. Not only are the dungeons bigger, have more bosses, and allow alternate pathing through them, but you can actually set up modifiers that increase general difficulty, add effects to increase the challenge (think WoW Mythic Affixes that you can select), or you can turn on additional debuffs to your group. Should you opt for this harder experience, you're rewarded with higher tier gear and you could start grabbing gear with set bonuses, too.

Our first mini-adventure was pretty easy, but it would make a nice introduction to new players. It was a pretty straight forward 4-person dungeon leading to a boss on a busted pirate ship. All content is 4-person right now. I DID see a "Raid" tab on one menu, but the team said that's not a "for sure" inclusion yet, but they are thinking about it.

Mechanics seemed to have enough visual queues that you can pick up each fight after a death or two. In one attack, the boss triggered an "out-in-out" dance. Get far, then close, then far from the boss. I missed the first one as I was slinging my ice spells from a range that ended up being TOO far away. Instead, I tried to use the mast of the ship to put me out of the boss's line-of-sight.

The team noticed what I had just done and even said, "Hmm, you tried to line-of-sight that...maybe we should think about letting that be possible." I got the mechanic the second time around.

After downing the boss, we picked up our loot and went back to our "Homestead" area. You see, there's no open world here. It is all dungeons, all the time, baby. Your homestead, though, does give you a place to group up and pull your party members together. You can also show off some of your vault gear, mounts you've collected, and other spoils you've gained. This feature may expand to actually be more customizable in the future, but don't think of it as "housing" quite yet. It's more your personal space that you can invite your group to before kicking off your next adventure.

Speaking of, our next adventure saw us taking on a larger dungeon and turning the difficulty up. The team thought my DPS was good enough (yay! they didn't boot me!) to raise the bar a bit, so off we went. On the topic of DPS, meters are already in the game for you, you're set.

This next challenge was certainly many steps up from our initial small adventure. We worked our way to the first boss and this time had to use interrupts and kicks to stop certain spells. You don't have to worry about these in some of the more basic adventures, but yes, you will need to be watching out for things that need to be kicked as you step up the difficulty.

The boss had quite a few mechanics and we did wipe a few times. I caught on right away to me being at range and having to kite floating orbs around and then get them destroyed in a cleave, but I initially missed a soak mechanic and ended up eating it hard. I'd like to blame our healer, but yeah...it was totally me. On our third try we took down the beast and I really wanted to continue on, but sadly we were out of time.

One of the things I expressed to the team was that I was getting the feeling that Fellowship borrowed a lot from other games, but not in a bad way. It felt to me like the team's vision was kind of a "let's take this thing from that game, and this thing from that game and put them both in here." If those "things" were introduced in a game 10 years ago, who cares! It works, let's use it. It was a great approach and easy to get into quickly.

This approach extended to the visual aspect of Fellowship, too. The game looks very much like a World of Warcraft-inspired MMO. It's slightly on the cartoon-y side but not Saturday Morning cartoon-y, the UI/frames look very mush like an old ELVUI right now, but I am sure that will change in the future. This is just an alpha build, after all.

In short, as someone who VERY much wanted Wayfinder to be my "let's do JUST the dungeons part of an MMO without the grind to get to them" but ending up a little disappointed on that front, Fellowship could be exactly what I want.

The team wasn't ready to give me payment specifics yet, but they did say there would be a box fee, so don't expect this to be a free-to-play title. They have said that any "shop" added would be all about cosmetics. To me, the way the game seemed to be built and inspired by MMOs, MOBAs, and ARPGs, I imagined that the game could exist in a F2P space with heroes and cosmetics being the primary financing, but they are going box fee first. At least that's the plan at the moment.

Look, I do a LOT of previews. Some of them are so early that I can't really get an idea of what a team is trying to achieve. Fellowship doesn't fall into that bucket. I got the vision right away and yeah, it isn't a complex vision, but the game itself (even in alpha) made that vision crystal clear. I am eagerly awaiting spending some more time in Fellowship soon and can't wait to see how the game gets polished up over time. There's a strong alpha shell here, let's see where it goes from here.

I obviously brought up the topic of content. MMO players already bulldoze their way through a full MMO in a far faster time than developers expect. Now we're talking about JUST having the dungeons part of those games. Chief Rebel thinks they can keep up with demand since they are focused on only dungeons and heroes, they don't have to spend time on other aspects of an MMO. If I had one concern that I want to see put to bed, this would be it. Content needs to come at a quick pace or players simply aren't going to stick around.

I'll be watching this one, though, and if you like PvE, I would encourage you to do so, too.

An NDA-bound closed alpha kicks off on August 15th and run through the 20th on PC. Full release is slated for 2025. Hit up the Chief Rebel official site and the Fellowship site for all the details and to sign up for alpha.