WoW players should try Fellowship's dungeon-only take on MMOs—it's like a fast and breezy version of WoW's party play

Fellowship offers a tantalizing opportunity for MMO fans who don't want to grind: Just bang out some fun dungeons instead. In even better news, the game is finally available for the public to try after roughly seven years of development, and is currently one of the most popular Steam Next Fest demos.

Fellowship combines a MOBA-like selection of characters that earn abilities and gear and a near-clone of World of Warcraft-style dungeon gameplay and aesthetics.

The similarities to WoW aren't too surprising, since former Blizzard developers are part of the Sweden-based Chief Rebel team, including head of art Kajfa Tam, who worked on Diablo and Heroes of the Storm.

The Public Playtest is free to play this week (February 24-March 3) for Steam Next Fest, with a selection of six heroes and seven dungeons, three of them Ranked and four designated for relaxed-mode Quick Play. Fellowship is headed into early access later this year, community director Hamish Bode says.

CEO and game director Axel Lindberg says Chief Rebel and publisher Arc Games plan to release Fellowship as a premium game, with an up-front purchase price and no subscription. Later microtransactions will keep development going, but will be cosmetic items such as mounts, rather than access to specific heroes or dungeons, which will be open.

"The competitive end-game dungeon experience is often locked behind hours of grinding or subscriptions," Bode says. "It's often something that isn't accessible for a lot of people. We wanted to make sure people can get to the fun stuff quick."

Striking while the big boss is weak

The test's timing is excellent: WoW's own hardcore dungeon mode struggled in the new War Within expansion last fall after some major changes, with some of the lowest participation numbers the game has seen in a long time.

If you've ever done Mythic Plus difficulty dungeons in WoW and didn't really want to quest or grind out those character levels, or watched in horror as your favorite class became the pariah in the latest season's meta groups, Fellowship was made for you. Its dungeons are endlessly scaling, with new features and gear launching in seasons. The higher you go, the more gear and mounts and hero abilities you unlock.

I had the opportunity to do a Fellowship dungeon with Bode, Lindberg, and art director André Boström. I also had an exclusive sneak peek at a character not yet available in game: Mara (shown above), who Lindberg describes as a "status effect-focused melee DPS … a speedy, damage over time effect specialist." Mara isn't in the playtest, but may be available for early access. An earlier post by an artist hinted that she may have some shapeshifting abilities.

A familiar interface

As a longtime WoW Mythic Plus dungeon runner, I immediately felt at home logging into Fellowship. The UI looks like WoW if you use ElvUI or one of the other popular UI mods for that game.

Things that might normally require add-ons—a damage meter, for example, or the ability to heal by mousing over your party's frames or nameplates—are all built into the game as standard features. Dragging elements of the display around is as easy as a shortcut key. A built-in option (defaulting to keybind V, which like all binds is customizable) allows players to mark the targets they're going to interrupt.

"We have people on the team with varying experience in playing end-game MMO content," Lindberg says. "When we got the interrupt markers in, I was noticing how much they started to talk about interrupt orders, and like, oh, you got my interrupt, that was mine." He laughs. "So it was really cool to see … we're making them toxic, too."

"No no, they're just being cooperative," Boström quipped.

All those UI elements are a good thing, because at least for now, Fellowship won't allow mods.

"We want to be sure that everyone comes in on an even footing, and that there's not a lot of hidden, obscure, secret things that you need to know to be able to get into it," Lindberg says. He adds that the team is trying to build in all of the major features that most players use mods for.

"[Having mods is] a double-edge sword," Bode says. "It sometimes feels like a lot of those mods end up becoming the game. The game kind of starts playing itself at that point, and we really want people to avoid that."

Back at home base

Between dungeons, you chill in a stronghold that includes training dummies and a station that allows you to swap gear with the shiny new pieces you've collected in your runs.

Because these characters are pre-made, you're not going to be messing around with quests, talents or character customizations. That's a bit of a bummer to hardcore roleplayers, but it's just the ticket for a bit of lighthearted fun that you can pick up and put down at will.

During the current test, you have access to six characters, two each of damage, healing and tanking heroes. The Quick Play dungeons generally take 10-15 minutes, and full Ranked dungeons add a timer and wrap up in 20 to 30.

More advanced difficulty levels include new Curses to exploit or avoid, which are strongly reminiscent of WoW's Mythic Plus dungeons' Affixes, and award better gear. Each dungeon and level has pre-set combinations of modifiers and Curses, which change from dungeon to dungeon.

WoW dungeons with new twists

I chose a basic frost mage character named Rime, which had a pretty decent set of builder-spender type instant, channeled and cast-time single-target and AOE abilities that reminded me a bit of a simplified arcane mage from WoW. We jumped into the Ranked Wraithtide Isles dungeon, a nautical-themed adventure with mechanics that would feel familiar to anyone who's played WoW in recent years.

That's not to say this game is just another WoW ripoff; it feels more like what heavy dungeon-runners in WoW might build if they were devs with a metric ton of free time. Many of the mechanics and character abilities are fresh-but-familiar, the sorts of things you might find in a brand-new WoW or Final Fantasy patch.

The intriguing hero Tariq, for example, takes a standard melee hack-and-slash character and turns it into a rhythm game. You fill up his super-slow, nearly five-second swing timer with three procs or global-cooldown abilities. Those cast near the end of the timer cause his big hits to do more damage.

One major difference is the group size: four players instead of five, a holdover from when this game was originally developed to be a PvE MOBA. Groups are one tank, one healer and two DPS.

Big changes after last fall's alpha

Lindberg said this playtest includes changes made to the game after a closed alpha last fall. Players then liked the readability of the action (which remained very good in my walkthrough) and the dungeons, but weren't a fan of the UI and its art elements—or lack thereof. That received an overhaul, and the version I saw was clean, crisp and as noted above, strongly reminiscent of the most popular WoW UI packages.

Another addition is a matchmaking system, which automatically puts groups together on the fly if gamers need to find friends. In the alpha, all groups were manually assembled by players.

The group system will either find the first game available and "squish" your gear to match so it's still a challenge in Quick Play, or allow players to both host games (with set conditions for players who want to join, such as looking for specific characters or player leaderboard scores) or join games (with set conditions for groups they're looking for) for score in Ranked.

"You can go get your coffee, and when you're back, hopefully you'll have a group ready to go," Lindberg said.

Diving into the dungeon

The pacing of the encounters was smooth, primarily requiring us to stay out of dangerous effects, share incoming damage, or interact with the environment. We had a timer that we could play against, though it wasn't required.

A kill score meter counting the trash we annihilated would be familiar to any Mythic Plus player, and showed the required amount of small monsters that needed murdering. (Mousing over the dungeon map shows you what upcoming packs or creatures will count for.) Campfires throughout the dungeon acted as respawn points when triggered by players.

The bosses weren't particularly difficult, but then we weren't doing it on a very high level—just a plus one. The only major trouble we ran into was when I was trying to take a quick screen shot in the middle of a boss fight and ended up with a shark for a hat. Oops.

In later difficulties, the encounters become more challenging, and the hero kits pick up complexity. When you start as a DPS, for example, all you have are damage spells. At top levels, you'll have the full collection of defensive abilities, crowd control, slows and knockbacks and cooldowns, until each hero has 15 separate options. Defensive abilities in Fellowship are interesting; they're much shorter than most in other games, but much more powerful, requiring quick reflexes for big results.

Higher difficulties also offer relics, which are items that offer group utility such as stealth, battle resurrections, potion-like effects or dispels.

A glimpse into the next release of Fellowship

If you look closely while you're playing through the dungeons, you'll see some hints of the future. The image above is one of those spoilers: an as-yet unnamed boss hanging from the ceiling in the current Demonbrand Ruins dungeon.

"As players approach it, the boss will escape by crashing through the wall, opening the path for players to reach the final boss [of Demonbrand]", Bode says. "Our players will have to wait to see just how much of a challenge this Demon will pose in the future, but I can say that the fight we're designing leans into the fantasy of hunting this giant monster back to its lair. The aim is to have players experience a fight on a completely different scale to what we've done so far."

Another hint lurks behind the Prison of Al'zerac's frozen gate in the Cithrel's Ascent dungeon, where players can catch a glimpse of a huge dragon (and future dungeon boss).

"We couldn't help ourselves when we had the opportunity to tease just a bit of what’s to come," Bode says. "Once we get into early access for Fellowship later this year, we’ll be opening up new content with inventive mechanics that we’re really intrigued to see our players take on. Our community has already been an integral part of that conversation, and are shaping our game more than they could imagine."