One of the great thrills when playing a massively multiplayer online role-playing game is partnering up with other players to venture into clandestine dungeon runs that will test a party's unity and skill set to defeat mobs and score some satisfying loot. Many MMORPGs lean heavily into dungeon runs and have the natural expectation for players to work up to these showstopping encounters.
But with the upcoming Fellowship from developer Chief Rebel, this game offers an experience that's a first – a multiplayer online dungeon adventure (MODA) that's all about diving into the MMO-style dungeon runs with its suite of hero characters. And with the solid success the devs found from the recent Steam Next Fest play period – which brought in around 250,000 players – there's already a community building up for the upcoming MODA.
In an exclusive interview with Chief Rebel community director Hamish Bode, he spoke about the feedback they acquired during the Steam Next Fest playtest, the origin of Fellowship's approach to offering players the MMORPG experience without the massive time investment, and how the developers are looking to the community to help flesh out the narrative of the game world.
Editor's Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Fellowship presents an interesting take on the MMORPG-style of action and co-op play, focusing on instanced dungeon runs with a party of players. Can you take me back to the origins of this project and explain what led to the game we have now?
Interestingly, the initial seed of the idea was a PvP MOBA-style game. We didn't start with this treatment and vision that we have now, but we were excited about doing the collaborative MOBA instead of having the PvP of it all. A lot of the big ones out there have these seasonal events sometimes that are PvE-focused, and when you look at them, you're like, "This is kind of fun," but there's never really a game around that type of experience.
The dev team, of course, has a lot of different influences as well, so we kind of like to describe it that we've taken the things that we love from the MOBAs, team co-op experiences, some of the stuff that we love from action-RPGs, and that's something that we noticed from the Steam NextFest playthroughs and stuff, people started picking up on that. Of course, the stuff familiar from Fellowship is more from the MMO side. But yeah, we can think of this mashup of our favorite and best parts of the genres.
The game recently participated in the Steam Next Fest, which was a big opportunity for you guys to get the game out for people to try for the first time. Firstly, how was the overall community response to that playtest?
We had previously done a smaller-scale alpha test and were delighted with that initial response. We knew that the builds we had done previously were for a launch production and pretty bulletproof, so we went into the Steam Next Fest hoping that it went as smoothly as our first test did and still exceeded our expectations, which was awesome. What was cool was that we already had this dedicated community. Still, seeing people who hadn't even heard of us before because we've been pretty quiet, just jumping in and playing it for the first time, those unique player counts exceeded our expectations.
We had about a quarter of a million people play, and I'm always looking at the numbers and seeing how many people came in. You'd expect with the demo people jumping in and playing for 20 or 30 minutes, but our average play time was high, so that's always a super good sign that you're onto something. And then just seeing our Discord community really itching to get their hands on what will soon be early access is very exciting. But yeah, there was a lot to unpack from Next Fest.
Yeah, and that's actually what my next question was. These event periods have proven to be a valuable way to build an audience and gain some feedback from fans. What key takeaways from the Next Fest from the playtest that stuck out for the dev team?
There's been so much feedback to examine, which was the big job afterward. I remember going through our Discord, where we ran all of our feedback. Because this is my job on the community side going through all of that, I calculated how many messages we had in our feedback. It was over 120,000 messages just on the chat, and so I think we ended up having about 200,000 bits of feedback to pass, which was a lot, but there are ways to do that now, and while none of it was shocking or alarming I would say, which is the best kind of place you can be in.
The biggest example of feedback, which we know is going to be crucial for us to nail in the main game, is how our group finder works. One particular issue we had during the Next Fest playtest was that we saw an overrepresentation of people queuing up as healers, which is pretty uncommon in any game as people usually queue as DPS and/or tanks. So, it's important to make finding parties frictionless so players can get into a game as quickly as possible. We don't have an open world for you to run around in, so finding that next game in a timely way is something we're improving on.
Something that did stick out for me when doing research was that many people were surprised about the blend of MMORPG and hero-class gameplay – in that there are defined characters to play as spread across archetypes. Given that MMORPGs tend to offer a degree of customization and player freedom, were there any bits of feedback you took away from the hero character balancing, and what will the customization be like?
Yeah, we get that feedback a lot, especially because visually, our game appears very similar to a traditional MMO, and naturally, that builds the expectations of a similar experience. Extensive character customization is interesting for us because we understand that people expect it when they look at our game. Still, we do have some particular reasons why it doesn't necessarily fit the macro design of our game, and there are a couple of main reasons for that.
We are really excited about what the hero format allows us to do mechanically for this game. One of the examples we talk about is that we have more liberty in design on a mechanical level. As we bring in new heroes into the pool, it won't necessarily upset anyone because if we bring someone that's kind of out of left field, that could be the meta for a season or two, or if something falls out of favor in the meta. We aren't going to have that issue where that's the character that someone has created, and then they don't have relevance in the game anymore.
We expect that people will experience our take on the hero system in a similar way that you would more with an action-RPG or a MOBA than you would with an MMO. However, I understand that for some people, it's that kind of dissonance you have with the expectation visually. That said, I will add that one of the things that I think we've tried to do more of an explicit job with is showing just how much the gear impacts the visual appearance of the hero you're playing.
Another interesting thing about Fellowship is that it doesn't have those open zones or large maps to explore, which other games have helped to build lore and storytelling. What ways are the development team working at
There is lore to take in if you're looking for it, and we're big fans of games like Dark Souls. Speaking personally, that's one of the references that I like to use when we talk about narrative. There are no big cutscenes with exposition or that sort of stuff, but if you look for the lore, it is there within the dungeons and HUB area. It's still early, but we're not entirely sure what it will look like as we build the game over many years, hopefully, which I think we're in a good spot to do.
We've also kind of talked about expanding on our gear system as well. We didn't have it in the Next Fest demo, but we didn't have anything for the weapon slots. but we are working on that as well. We have super rare legendary items and those sorts of things, and are those opportunities to add lore into the game? Absolutely. So that's one side of that aspect, but the other thing we talk about a lot on the community side being very excited about this idea – and this is maybe getting a little bit meta – but I envision the lore of the game being owned by the stories that players tell each other [within the game.] When you think about the conversations that already happen online about these four people who did this dungeon and this thing happened, that becomes canon within this expanded game discourse, even if it isn't happening in a cutscene or that sort of thing. So, I think the narrative will have a kind of a player-owned online space.
This brings up the interesting discussion of Game-Story vs. Player-Story when it comes to game narrative — like how some players would be deliberately clumsy characters in Dark Souls and then fumble their way through a dark fantasy narrative, and that would be their story.
I don't know if you play any tabletop games, but you can imagine a population of players sitting in a tavern arguing about what really happened in some dungeons or game events. They'd say, "No, this is how it went; these four people did this strategy, and this is what happened," then another person would say, "No, no, this is the way that it went down." Some players would talk about how they weren't wearing any armor and that they did a 'naked run.'
You see, this type of discussion happens a lot in games; it's a kind of social narrative within the online gaming space and how people interact with themes of infamy and notoriety, especially in the content they create. I think I'm really excited to see how that player-owned narrative shapes up. We have leaderboards, so that's always going to drive a bunch of competition, and those stories would be cool.
To wrap up, the community response was quite favorable after the playtest. Do you and the dev team feel strongly about the path forward with Fellowship's take on a full game of instanced dungeon runs?
I'm incredibly excited about the community response and what's to come. I have to stop myself from oversharing because there are so many cool things that people will be psyched about. I think one of the things that I'm most excited about is heading into our early access. I think that will be really cool, but I'm more excited about what's to come and to see where we are 5 years from now. This comes full circle to our early discussion about the hero model.
The next time people see our new build for the game, we will have three tanks, five DPS, and a couple of healers. So, we'll have around 10 heroes when people see the next roster we're ready to share. I don't think players quite grasp what we have in store yet, which makes me very excited to eventually show what we have planned.
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