Stockholm-based independent developer Chief Rebel and publisher Arc Games have announced that Fellowship, an upcoming ‘multiplayer online adventure game’ (MODA), will be playable in a Public Playtest available during next week’s Steam Next Fest from February 24 to March 3.
For the Public Playtest, there will be servers available in North America, Europe, and Asia. In this preview build, players will have the chance to experience six heroes (two Tanks, two DPS – including a new DPS, Tariq, and two Healers) that will be in Fellowship’s roster, go on dungeon runs (both Ranked Dungeons and Quick Play Dungeons), take on challenging enemies and acquire epic loot.
Ahead of the Public Playtest, Wccftech was invited for a private play session with the developers. The best analogy really is dungeons from massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs), played after selecting a roster of predefined heroes, each in a specific role of the so-called Holy Trinity (Tank/DPS/Healer). Fellowship strips practically everything else, such as open world and narrative content, focusing entirely on the dungeon mechanics, with the goal of providing a highly replayable cooperative experience with some competitive elements through leaderboards and the like. The replayability is also enhanced by Curses, which are gameplay modifiers on the dungeons that are mechanical extra layers that you have to deal with, and these keep rotating for each difficulty and each dungeon you do.
As someone who has spent an inordinate amount of time on MMORPGs, the core concept definitely has a lot of merit. However, I found the execution lacking, mainly because it sticks way too closely to what MMORPGs have been doing for over twenty years. I’m referring particularly to the tab-target combat system, which felt very static and somehow even worse than World of Warcraft’s in this regard. The dungeon mechanics I’ve seen, while introductory, are interesting; but it won’t be enough if the combat itself is too stale. In short, yes, I would have attempted action combat, or at least a hybrid system like those featured in games like Guild Wars 2 and The Elder Scrolls Online.
The graphics are also not at all impressive for a game that’s made with Unreal Engine 5. It obviously follows the Blizzard mandate to deliver stylized graphics and ensure maximum compatibility, but one thing’s for sure, you won’t be playing Fellowship because of its visuals.
Anyway, here’s my conversation with Chief Rebel during the play session. The studio was established in 2018 by developers who previously worked on games like World of Warcraft, Diablo, Helldivers, Battlefield, Tom Clancy’s The Division, Just Cause, and more.
What’s the core premise behind your game?
In many MMOs, this high-complexity PVE content is gated behind hundreds of hours of leveling up. We want to make sure that Fellowship is approachable for newer players and something quick to jump in for veterans.
I see there’s a kill score count. Can you explain what it does?
The kill score kind of totals the amount of enemies that we should kill in a dungeon run, so we can’t just find some clever route to skip to the bosses. If you hit M on your keyboard, by mousing over enemies on the map, you can kind of see what percentage of the kill score they fill. As a tank who’s kind of leading the direction we’re going, I can pick out which routes I want lead the party through. But you have to fill the kill score to 100% and kill all the bosses to complete the dungeon, but there’s a lot more enemies than 100% in the dungeon.
The intention is, especially when you get to the higher tier and the leaderboard chasing, part of the strategy is finding a good route through the dungeon, what paths should the party skip, what are more dangerous or maybe worth taking, even though they’re dangerous using pull downs and all that.
When the timer gets turned on, then you also have to beat the dungeon within the timer to get to the next difficulty, but you’re still gonna get all the loot that you would get from the dungeon, regardless of whether you beat the timer. We don’t activate the timer until difficulty 4, though.
I assume the timer is going to be a key factor in climbing the leaderboard.
Yes, absolutely. The timer affects the score as well, so when players start to get to the really high difficulties, it’s gonna be a matter of practically milliseconds to determine who’s number one on the leaderboard.
By the way, as you can see on the left, we have all kinds of metrics for players to look at just to be able to see how they are improving and how different talents or stats on their gear is affecting their damage or damage mitigation or healing.
You can see each of us there above the action bar. You see our health bars (I’m the purple dude), and you can see on the damage meter how we’re doing on that damage, and then, if you mouse over those, you can actually view a breakdown of what abilities are contributing to your damage.
This is also really important if you’re going to get into optimizing your gameplay and being competitive and learning how to complete dungeons at really high difficulty, but it’s not as important when starting out because, of course, we tune the game to be very forgiving in the beginning.
One of the barriers for a lot of players in some of these types of games is stuff like the DPS meter isn’t built into these MMOs. It’s something that you have to go online and search for and you gotta download add-ons and all that. As a player trying to find your role in the community, it can be a bit difficult to find your footing.
So, we don’t really have any intentions of allowing player-made addons in Fellowship. Instead, we want to make sure that we’re providing everything that veteran players want and expect in the game itself to ensure a level playing field for everybody.
Aren’t you worried about online toxicity? Some MMORPGs have tried to move away from DPS meters mainly because of that issue.
I think that toxicity is always something that there’s work to do with. I think that the solution is not to remove the ability for players to understand how to get better. I mean, there’s different types of games. In some, your performance doesn’t really matter, but in a game where your performance matters, you need to have information to be able to know what to change to improve, or you’ll just start to hit your head against the wall.
If there’s any kind of competitiveness, just removing data, I don’t think that’s the solution. I think that needs to be worked with in other ways. We’re trying to find lots of other ways of getting ahead of that as well.
How do you plan on dealing with the ‘meta’ situation in your game?
In a lot of the MMOs or games where you’re playing with a group, inevitably, a meta is going to be established. One of the reasons why you may choose one character or one class over another is because they have a utility ability that’s really important to have at high levels of difficulty. In Fellowship, we’ve moved a lot of those big utility skills like mass dispel to equippable items that you unlock in higher difficulties so that anyone can bring a battle resurrection or a dispel or stuff like that to a party.
One thing you might notice as well is that we’re trying to look into how we can handle some nonverbal communications. If you target one of these buccaneers and you hit V on the keyboard, you’ll put your hero portrait next to their name. If you put your marker up and interrupt the enemy, you can see when we interrupt ours, meaning you’ll know the cooldown on our interrupt skills so we can more easily manage the cooldowns of the whole group. This is another example where, at low difficulties, interrupting is not that important, but when you start to get to very high difficulties, not interrupting might get you one-shotted. So, it’s really important for players to be able to coordinate and work together to ensure they have all the interrupts ready.
How many skills is each hero going to offer?
We’re going to have 15 abilities available for each of the heroes. You unlock more and more abilities as you reach higher difficulties. What you’re starting out with is just the interrupt, the movement skill, and some basic core kit, but then a lot of the abilities that come are CCs, utilities, cooldowns, and things like that.
Can you talk about the various dungeons and boss fights?
Sure. As the difficulty rises, bosses and enemies in the dungeon learn new abilities. What we’re seeing here is this boss’s base kit and then, as you get higher, she’ll get some new tricks that make the boss a little bit more interesting for when you’re ready for the increased challenge.
In Fellowship’s dungeons, we have 3 bosses to kill. They take around 20 to 30 minutes to complete, depending on gear, difficulty, skill level, et cetera. And then we also have Adventures in the game. These are single-boss dungeons that take about 10 to 12 minutes to complete. You can compete in both formats for the leaderboard score. To get higher on the leaderboards, you need to improve the average score of all your dungeons. But if you’re someone for whom half an hour is a bit too much of an investment to put in, you can just jump in and do the 10-minute ones and still get the full conversion and all that.
Does Fellowship include some sort of crafting?
Yeah, we have a bunch of different progression systems. Firstly, there are talents that are hero-specific, where you’ll unlock ways to customize your hero. There’s also the gear itself that has different types of stats, like Crit, Haste, Expertise, and more.
Once you get a little bit higher in difficulty, you’ll start to obtain the transmutation resources. This is kind of a crafting system where you can use transmutation resources and some of the gold you earn to transmute items that you’ve gotten that you don’t need. It kind of functions like a bad luck protection thing for loot. If you keep getting the same cloak all the time, you can transmute those cloaks and if you’re lucky, you can reroll them into something you actually need.
Then we also have scrapping loot, which gives you resources, and you can upgrade loot as well. One of the bigger systems is also once you get gems and sockets unlocked. We’re doing a lot more with gems and sockets than most RPGs do, so it’s not just stats on those gems. The gems also unlock new defensive abilities and offensive abilities, passive ones, props and stuff, and do some cool stuff with your character as well.
At the end of a dungeon, you get your loot for completing it. If you right-click on the chest, but you can click on your items to collect them, and on the right side, you can see what everybody in your party got.
Is there any way to trade these items if you don’t need something and your friend does?
No trading yet. That’ll be something we’ll potentially look into as part of the live service.
How many heroes will be playable at launch?
We haven’t set an exact number. It’ll be somewhere around 8 or 9, maybe, at launch. Of course, we are planning to regularly release new heroes in live service as well as dungeons and adventures and other types of formats of playing as well eventually.
They are all limited to a single role, right?
Yes, we’re not doing multi-role heroes, at least not for the foreseeable future. Right now, we’re focusing on getting a tight core of heroes that deliver on the classical RPG fantasies of big two-handed barbarians and healing priests and shield and sword tanks and stabby rogues and all of that.
One of the benefits of Fellowship being a hero game where you don’t create your character is that, over time, we’re going to be able to explore some really fun and crazy ideas when it comes to heroes. Like, we could have a character that’s a slime blob that clones into other heroes and can use their abilities for a while or any kind of stuff that we want to explore eventually. But we will be starting off with a good, strong foundation of heroes.
Why did you settle on a 4-player group format?
We even experimented with 3, but what we noticed is that when you go down to 3, you only have 1 because we really want to lean into the Holy Trinity, which is the tank healer DPS roles. When you have a party of 3, you’re really losing like an X factor, a permutation of the kind of setups you can do with your team.
So, 4 felt like a good number, and just from playtesting, we felt like we’re not missing anything with a group of 4 instead of 5. It still feels like we’re able to give the same complexity. There’s a sweet spot in terms of mechanics.
Is this going to be a shared world hub with more players than just your group?
Yes. Right now, it’s just the four of us connected, but you’ll be able to see up to about 20 to 30 other players. We aren’t loading every single person into this area because it would get full really quickly, but you should be able to see, connect, and interact with other players here in the hub. If someone else logged in now, they would spawn here with us until we hit the cap for the stronghold and then a new one spins up.
Can you discuss what the post-launch would look like for Fellowship?
There’s lots of stuff we could explore. We really want to build this game with our community. Part of us wanting to get it into the players’ hands as soon as possible is for them to help us feel out, hey, what do we want? How do we make the best game for you? We’re hoping to have a really close connection there.
What about monetization?
The plan is to be a premium game. It’s not free to play; it’s not subscription-based. It’ll be premium. We’re not in a rush to unravel a huge microtransaction plan from the very beginning. We’re going to take it a little bit slow. We’re not going to be selling anything that is content, so no dungeons, progression features, heroes, or anything like that.
We want to work with our community to understand, if you love this game, what makes sense for you all to spend money on so we can keep making this. The obvious stuff at the top of our list is skins, mounts, and little pets that follow you around.
Will there be any cosmetic customization of the heroes?
Yeah, we have a mirror behind the tree. This is just turned off right now, but of course, we will allow you to cosmetically change the way you look, which will probably be things you can get through microtransactions, but also, of course, the things that you’re actually collecting, like the dungeon loot and all of that. We talked about hairstyles and stuff like that. I think there’s more to explore there, but nothing final yet.
Would you add a dueling feature to Fellowship?
We’re intentionally going to double down on PVE coop. Not doing PVP allows us a lot more creative freedom and balancing. It puts us in a position where we can really do some cutting-edge stuff regarding the PVE experience. Fellowship, as the name implies, is really about the co-op experience.
What about asymmetrical PvP, like doing simultaneous runs of the same dungeons to see who completes it first?
Yes, that kind of stuff, we’re super interested in. We’ve talked about maybe a ghost mode where you can play even asymmetrically offline against other people’s runs.
We talked about a live Tournament mode thing. We’ve talked about special game modes where you might be in the same map racing towards a boss. There’s lots of cool stuff that we might do.
What about launching on consoles?
I’d say that’s definitely very intimately connected to the gamepad support. So yeah, first, we would implement gamepad support. We don’t have a date for when we would explore that, but we would do that first and then look at consoles.
Would you add story-based content to Fellowship?
That’s a really good example that I consider not something that we would do unless the community clearly shows that that’s what they would like.
If the community is like, hey, we really want a story adventure that focuses on letting us know more about our heroes, then cool, but initially, we’re just really focused on the dungeon loop.
What about larger group content, like raids?
Definitely. When we had our Closed Alpha in August, we forgot to remove the raids tab from our mission table. We’re talking about raids. I think it is a natural step. It’s the same there, though. It’s not something that we’re going to roll out from the very start. It’s, I would say, one of the features that we’re eyeing very intently.
But again, for the health of Fellowship in regards to balancing, I think it’s really good to start with getting the 4-player format of dungeons out into the player’s hands in the wild for a while so that we can make sure that we get all of the balancing and tuning knobs right and the progression systems starting to add those before we increase the complexity.
Increasing the amount of players you bring to a raid, maybe it’s 8 players, maybe it’s 12 – we want to do something a little bit smaller than the classical huge 40-man things because they’re a mess to manage. But there’s some added complexity even for 8 to 12 players, so I think it’s healthy for us to make sure that we’re delivering top-notch 4-player content before we get into that.
Will you add a guild system, too?
I think it’s a pretty natural connection. There’s nothing planned at launch, but we’re going to listen to our community and figure out what kind of social tools they want. The way we approach what happens after early access is that we have a lot of ideas. We also have a lot of designs pretty fleshed out for various features. We’ve talked about raids, we’ve talked about guilds, there’s a whole bunch of stuff.
I think it’s important to have some kind of discourse with the community about exactly how we want to roll that out rather than us making up the next couple of years of features and then being kind of stuck delivering on that, and maybe after two weeks the players are saying we want something else. So, we’re keeping things open. We really want to do this together with the community.
Thank you for your time.
