From the moment Fellowship was announced, it promised to deliver a fresh take on the dungeon-crawling experience — one that tones down the grind of traditional MMOs and dives straight into the action instead. Blending elements from MMOs, MOBAs, and ARPGs, this multiplayer online dungeon adventure (MODA) makes endgame-style dungeons accessible from the very start. With a variety of playable heroes, an emphasis on cooperative play, and dungeons that continuously scale in difficulty, Fellowship is already shaping up to be an exciting PvE alternative for fans of teamwork-driven, loot-heavy adventures.
Game Rant recently had the privilege of going hands-on with Fellowship ahead of its upcoming February 24 public playtest, taking a dive into one of its dungeons alongside members of the development team at Chief Rebel. From challenging boss fights to tightly designed cooperative gameplay, the dungeon run truly did rely on teamwork, adaptability, and skill. With a competitive leaderboard system, unique difficulty modifiers, and a streamlined loot system, Fellowship is looking to deliver a dungeon-crawling experience that’s both accessible and replayable. Here’s how my first adventure into Fellowship’s perilous, loot-filled dungeons went.
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Fellowship Is All About Instant Action
The standout feature of Fellowship boils down to the very reason it was developed in the first place: to get players into the action as quickly as possible. Rather than requiring players to grind for hours just to get the experience and gear they need to tackle challenging end-game dungeons, Fellowship opens the door for them right off the bat. After all, the whole point of Fellowship is dungeons, dungeons, and more dungeons. When all is said and done, it actually turns out to be a well-executed concept that should be enough to keep players hooked for a long time.
During our brief, 50-minute session with the game, we got to run through the Wraithtide Isles dungeon with several members of the Chief Rebel development team, and it was a blast. Before we headed into the dungeon, however, we arrived at the hero selection screen where we were presented with a choice between six playable heroes — two tanks, two DPS, and two healers. While all the heroes looked compelling in their own right, Chief Rebel suggested we start with Rime, a spellcasting damage dealer with a shallow learning curve. As it turns out, we already had our eye on her anyway, as we were really looking forward to dealing some major damage during our dungeon run with the team.
For lore fans, each hero in Fellowship has their own biography, even though the game doesn’t make the story its primary focus.
Upon selecting our hero, we were taken to Fellowship‘s central hub area, the Stronghold, which allows players to do some preliminary tasks before heading into a dungeon. At the Stronghold, players can swap heroes, adjust talents, equip gear, train abilities on dummies, party up with other players, track leaderboard rankings, and, most importantly, show off their hard-earned loot and gear. The Stronghold is actually a really sizable area with plenty of sights, and it’s an especially great place for Fellowship to show off its gorgeous art style — which is like a World of Warcraft and Torchlight hybrid, heavily saturated stylized fantasy and cartoon realism.
Before heading into a dungeon, we spent some time at the training dummies in the Stronghold familiarizing ourselves with Rime’s skills, most of which are damage-dealing frost spells. We only had access to 10 of Rime’s skills during the preview, but Chief Rebel said every hero would actually have a total of 15. Each hero has unique mechanics too, with at least one of Rime’s coming down to casting certain spells, like Freezing Torrent and Bursting Ice, to generate Winter Orbs, which are then used to cast some of her more powerful spells, like Glacial Blast and Ice Comet.
Once all of our preparations were complete, we headed over to the Stronghold’s War Table, the primary interface in Fellowship where players select and customize their dungeon runs. When navigating the War Table menu, players can choose between Quickplay, Find Game, and Host Game, depending on their needs. Quickplay will get them right into the action but land them in shorter, casual 10-15 minute dungeon runs. Find Game, on the other hand, will give them access to Fellowship‘s Ranked Dungeons, which are more like the typical end-game dungeon in an MMO but offer better rewards than Quickplay.
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Fellowship’s Dungeons Live Up to the Game’s Name
For the preview, we took on the Wraithtide Isles Ranked Dungeon, so the challenge was greater than it might have been in a Quickplay dungeon. Thankfully, with the dev team beside us the whole way, we defeated every boss but the last in this particular Fellowship dungeon without wiping. The dungeon run itself was a great opportunity for Fellowship to prove why it bears that name in the first place, requiring a level of teamwork that manages to find the perfect balance between casual and hardcore, thanks to its built-in systems designed to produce a more streamlined co-op experience.
The Wraithtide Isles dungeon played out like a typical World of Warcraft dungeon, although it felt more like a WoW dungeon on a MOBA-style map than anything else. The paths were somewhat narrow, crafted to be little more than a mob-filled route to the next boss. Campfires also occasionally appeared on the path, which acted as a way for us to update our spawn point, thereby further emphasizing that the whole point of this run was to defeat the bosses and not just the mobs between them.
The standout feature of Fellowship boils down to the very reason it was developed in the first place: to get players into the action as quickly as possible.
What stunned us the most about this dungeon run was the amount of work that was clearly poured into ensuring Fellowship is highly accessible and shouldn’t, in theory, only appeal to hardcore dungeon crawlers. Specifically, each dungeon run in Fellowship is pre-equipped with accessibility features that might normally only be available through external add-ons in other games like it. For example, there are countdown timers for each boss’ attack, a DPS and healing meter, and even the ability to non-verbally communicate to the rest of the team when one player’s interrupt skill is on cooldown.
In fact, interrupting enemy attacks is a core mechanic in Fellowship, and it’s a significant part of the game’s team-oriented gameplay. Players can tag an enemy with their character icon to let the rest of the team know that they will be handling interrupts for that enemy. When that player’s interrupt skill is used, their character icon then shows how much time is left on that skill’s cooldown. It’s a brilliant way of ensuring that even players who don’t have a mic can still effectively communicate with the rest of their team, and it’s likely to result in more casual players being drawn to Fellowship.
Each one of the bosses in Wraithtide Isles had unique mechanics, and not just minor differences either — like larger health pools, for instance. Every boss truly felt like a brand-new experience, to the point that the last boss we attempted to take down wiped us twice because his mechanics weren’t that easy to discern so quickly. Ultimately, it made the dungeon run as a whole feel like an unfamiliar adventure in spite of our familiarity with games like WoW, and while it might seem like things would only get easier as players learn all the boss fights in Fellowship, the game’s dungeons increase in difficulty as players progress, with each boss’ mechanics even changing in turn.
The end of the dungeon saw a giant Reward Chest appear near the boss’ corpse with rewards awaiting us inside. Upon looting the chest at the end of a dungeon in Fellowship, these rewards are sent back to the Equipment Chest in the Stronghold, preventing players from switching armor sets on the fly. Once one dungeon is complete, however, players can simply travel back to the Stronghold and prepare for the next run, making the whole experience one seamless loop of endgame dungeons and spoils.
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Fellowship Hands-On Preview: Final Thoughts
If Fellowship set out to capture the thrill of dungeon-crawling without the usual barriers, then based on our hands-on experience with it, it’s well on its way to achieving that goal. By removing the grind-heavy progression of traditional MMOs and delivering endgame-sized challenges right from the start, Fellowship makes dungeons its core focus. The seamless co-op mechanics, intuitive communication tools, and adaptive difficulty scaling make it accessible to both casual and hardcore players, while the variety of bosses, loot progression, and team-based strategy promise long-term replayability.
Of course, a lot will depend on how Fellowship evolves leading up to its full launch, especially in terms of post-playtest feedback and ongoing content updates. But if our time in Wraithtide Isles was any indication, Fellowship already feels like a solid blend of MMO dungeon-running and MOBA-style hero combat, wrapped in an easy-to-learn, team-first experience. The game’s commitment to accessibility, balanced difficulty, and rewarding team play could be what sets it apart, even with its unique MODA approach. With the public playtest right around the corner, players will soon get the chance to test the experience for themselves. And if Fellowship continues refining what already works so well, it may just become the next go-to multiplayer dungeon adventure.
- Developer(s)
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Chief Rebel
- Publisher(s)
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Arc Games
Fellowship‘s public playtest via Steam during Steam Next Fest begins on February 24 and lasts until March 3, with its PC early access launch slated for later this year.
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