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Fellowship Preview: Chief Rebel's Innovative MODA Blends MMO, MOBA, and ARPG Elements - But How Does it Play?

Steven Weber Updated: Posted:
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Coining a new genre is one way to get some eyes on your title, and Chief Rebel, the developers behind the Multiplayer Online Dungeon Adventure (MODA) title Fellowship is attempting to blaze new trails. With the game headed to Closed Alpha testing on the 15th of August, I was lucky enough to sit with the developers and take a chance on a couple adventures during a short demo preview. Dungeon lovers, get ready, because this is a game you’re not going to want to miss.

Fellowship is a novel amalgamation of MMO, MOBA, and ARPG genres, packaged into a succinct dungeon-running adventure system, and sidled with the essence of a hero collector. For the purpose of the preview and upcoming test, players have a choice of two tanks, two DPS, and two healers to make up your team of four. The intention is for a tank, healer, and two DPS characters to take on the various dungeons and adventures that you’ll be tasked with.

I was advised that, due to the nature of the preview, I should select one of the two DPS characters, either the ranged elven-looking frost-wielding ranged caster Rime, or the lavishly adorned, damage-over-time (DoT) firemage Ardeos. Preliminary data suggested that Rime was the popular character of choice, (the developers told me), so make no mistake I chose Ardeos due to his unique ability to utilize DoTs. I was told that melee DPS was on the way, but it wasn’t available for the current build. Later, I was also told that players should be able to expect a number of versatile characters for all archetypes, with the DPS role having a wider variety due to the nature of the team compositions.

Within moments we were off and running in the social hub where players will be able to eventually meet and show off their gear. I was brought to a series of training dummies where I was informed that Ardeos has some very unique skills that will require my full attention. Essentially, as a firemage, I’m tasked with building up DoTs on enemies and accruing ‘embers’ which can then be consumed to immediately trigger several second’s worth of damage in a burst. There were subtle variations of how to apply and execute your burst damage, and it certainly took a lot of attention to ensure I was applying my damage properly.

It was also helpful, and perhaps slightly nerve-wracking to see a DPS meter that begins tracking your damage at every encounter. However, it didn’t take long before I hit my stride, and Ardeos was melting hordes. To get to the hordes, however, our team chose a quickplay dungeon called Sailor’s Abyss. The main distinction between the quickplay dungeon and an adventure is the difficulty, and length of time to complete it. This also included a special interrupt ability that each character has, as it was disabled on the quickplay map, but can be unlocked with a modifier later on. As one would surmise, the interrupt ability could stop an enemy from casting an ability, which I learned is paramount to success in certain adventure encounters.

Making a Dungeon a Done-geon

Quickplay has a simplistic goal, kill the boss and fill the kill score to one-hundred percent. That doesn’t mean that you can simply throw caution to the wind and slap the keys, but most encounters were easily handled, as our team used our mounts to traverse between some of the lengthier stints between mobs. Battling and completing these dungeons rewards you with gear and experience, and as you rank up, you’ll be able to diversify your character through the talents you choose.

As a MODA, the key focus is team play, and Chief Rebel has nailed down the core trinity mechanics like a veteran studio, with few glaring flaws. Fellowship is certainly a game in an Alpha state, and some simple quality of life improvements could go a long way in making the flow of combat more palatable. As a firemage, my prime directive is to apply fire to numerous enemies, and then detonate it all for extreme burst damage. However, there were times an enemy would die, or my targets wouldn’t switch how I wanted, and it made it difficult to prioritize placing my DoTs efficiently.

Target on cast or more are of effect abilities (AOE) would really help in those situations, instead of having to click around to different enemies on the screen. I also noticed that casting itself could be problematic in certain situations. The final boss of the dungeon, the Archbishop would often send out ground attacks that could appear underneath you, or summon an area where you needed to move within safe areas on the map which didn’t lend itself to an immobile caster like Ardeos. He also summoned orbs that you had to kill quickly, and a DoT class isn’t necessarily the best at quick burst, even if sustained damage and overall DPS might be better in the long run.

Obviously, it’s hard to discern what the game is like at the top level from a fledgling set of encounters. My victory of the Sailor’s Abyss dungeon resulted in a gear piece with haste on it, alluding to the potential for faster casting which would mitigate some of the long-cast mishaps I ran into. There will undoubtedly be a lot of balancing going on throughout the much-needed testing stages.

All the Raiders in the House Say ‘Fellowship’

The foundation of Fellowship wholeheartedly appealed to me as an MMORPG player who just happens to love a good dungeon. The mechanics of the dungeon, and by extension the adventure I ended up playing lends itself to a player who loves a PvE group challenge. In this early stage, we’re not looking at huge groups of players coordinating multi-hour raid encounters – though there is an option for raids that was not a part of the test. But experiencing everything an adventure has to offer, complete with killing every mob on the map, could easily take a half an hour or longer. A cohesive group could add modifiers to add a time-limit, further complicating their adventure, but reaping greater rewards if they complete it.

The scalability of Fellowship is without a doubt the core game loop. Upon completing a challenge, you can increase the level of difficulty, which grants better rewards, which then gets compounded by modifiers known as Ascensions. The difficulty modifier will increase the general stats of the rewards you obtain, but the more Ascensions you add, the wider variety of rewards you have access to and greater number of secondary stats will appear. For example, adding even just one Acension to a dungeon gave me access to two new gear pieces. Gear is necessary for you to grow in strength but there’s also a cosmetic system tied to gear. Once you obtain a gear piece the style is yours to use on any gear piece.

If you’re the kind of player that likes a lot of style options, you’ll probably want to sift through the different dungeons and adventures and toy with all of the Ascensions you have access to. The final piece of the loot-table puzzle is the addition of Curses. Ascensions modify the rules of the dungeon, such as limiting time, or requiring you to utilize interrupts for enemies. These fundamentally make the encounters difficult by adding mechanical challenges to your adventures. Curses, on the other hand, will add modifiers to the dungeon or enemies you will need to face. This might summon a random meteor shower during a fight, or cause enemies to explode on death, hurting all of your party members.

By combining these options, you can build your own dungeon difficulty in a way that you always find rewarding, and then scale up that difficulty to an indeterminate end-game scale. There is a lot of potential in Fellowship to really hammer home group play in a way that it takes most games dozens of hours of grinding to generate. By my second adventure, our plucky team was already coordinating interrupt cycles, focus fire, and strategic map positioning. We even wiped a few times due to our poor rotation planning. That’s probably one of the best parts of the game at this point. They’ve taken real MMORPG dungeon encounters and turned it into the primary game loop, without the fuss of an entire prerequisite wrapped around the end game. You essentially start at end game, and only move forward.

I can’t say for sure whether the logistics of Fellowship will work out in the long run. Dungeons and Raids consistently come with their own sets of problems that need to be handled. A good example is what happens when a team member drops out. Another is finding the proper team comps. That doesn’t even start to get into the level and gear disparity that will eventually hit over time, and finding matches that you’ll want to play rather than playing whatever is available. It can get lonely at the top, and finding a well geared team in the right team comp, willing to run your desired difficulty, that won’t immediately drop bait and run when things get difficult, is often a tall order in any game. Now, focusing an entire game around that could be ingenious, or it could be face-gratingly frustrating.

I can only hope that Chief Rebel can find a way to make this all work. The premise of a MODA actually speaks to me. I’m not sure how they’ll manage to fix a lot of these common issues. I know if I’m in a dungeon and my healer drops out (despite me often playing a healer), it’s clear that we’re in trouble. But I’m happy to give the passionate team the benefit of the doubt, simply because they’ve put so much effort into an experience that I feel many MMOs fail to consistently achieve. If you’d like a chance to give the game a try for yourself, you can sign up for the upcoming closed alpha now. Otherwise, you'll have to wait for launch which is currently slated for some time next year. 


StevenWeber

Steven Weber

Steven has been a writer at MMORPG.COM since 2017. A lover of many different genres, he finds he spends most of his game time in action RPGs, and talking about himself in 3rd person on his biography page.