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The one genre that has taken up most of my time as a gamer ever since I got my first computer has been MMOs. Diving into these vast and immersive worlds has always been alluring to me. However, it isn’t without its drawbacks, and one of the main ones is, ironically, the social aspect. While it is great when it comes to role-play events or trading, the truth is that the instanced content, especially the most difficult ones, are always daunting, which is why I’ve never become a hardcore raider. Fortunately, Fellowship has finally nudged me into the right dungeoneering path in a way that never feels overwhelming, scary, or tedious.
Dungeons for Days
When it comes to MMO players, I fall under the umbrella of those who prefer the journey instead of the destination. In other words, diving into the endgame has always been something extremely optional for me. That’s not to say I have not participated in it. I did some Savage Raiding during Endwalker and found a proper raid group during Legion. However, there were always a few things that drove me away from that scene: toxicity and organization. While both of those things tend to be outside of the developers’ control, they are still deterrents. Fortunately, these things don’t happen in Fellowship, which is something I’m incredibly grateful for.
Fellowship, as a MODA, skips all the long story or quest requirements to unlock dungeons and puts you straight into fast-paced dungeoneering action that is extremely approachable and, frankly, highly addictive.
When you fire up Fellowship, you get to pick between different characters, each belonging to a role of the holy MMO trinity: tank, DPS, and healer. Since tanking has always been scary for me, I picked DPS, and I’m glad I did. Some things work against some roles in the early game, but more on that later.
You’re dropped into the game’s hub and quickly familiarize yourself with all the systems, the cosmetic mirror, the scrapper, the different vendors that give you your starter armor and crafting materials, and so on. Then, there’s a training area of sorts, which I hope more players get to use, as knowing your rotation before a dungeon is helpful. And after all of that, you can just press the big Play button and start delving into one of the many dungeons in the game.
After a short queue, especially during Quickplay, you’ll be dropped into an instance with three other players, unless you have a pre-made group ahead of it, and will start beating enemies left and right until you reach the final boss. Every wave of enemies tends to be easy to beat, and it all boils down to how knowledgeable your tank is at pulling. Some might go berserk and pull the whole area just to be met with a quick and punishing death, while also leaving the healer with a lot of frustration, which leads me to my first, and practically only complaint regarding the onboarding experience.
While many players coming into this MODA are certainly WoW players, and even if they don’t brandish their MMO home like a badge, you can tell they come from Azeroth because they kick you as soon as you say, “First time.” The truth is, there are plenty of newcomers, and the onboarding process when in a dungeon isn’t the best. See, there is a tutorial you can play, but this one teaches you the basics on a surface level, and never in a real-time environment. New tanks and healers will find themselves overwhelmed when other members ask them to pull the whole room or demand healers to increase their healing output, despite the tank not knowing how to hold aggro.
This could be fixed by making the early dungeoneering process more beginner-friendly, in the sense of splitting enemy packs into different, smaller rooms, just like FFXIV does. This would let tanks and healers familiarize themselves with their rotations, while also letting them see just how many enemies they can handle without struggling. Again, this didn’t affect me too much since I’ve been on the MMO landscape for a while, but I brought my wife into some dungeon runs, and she felt the early experience quite daunting.
At Your Own Pace
After reaching item level 15, you’ll get to experience the leagues of Fellowship, with the earliest one to grab called Contender. I spent around two hours gearing up, farming dungeons to get my starter armor and accessories, and frankly, I thought all runs would have the same level of difficulty — oh boy, was I wrong. Once I got dropped into the Contender league, I really had to lock in and start paying attention to every mechanic, cooldown, and damage window to take down enemy packs. It gave me the same rush of a Mythic+ run, but without the toxicity.
To give you an example, I jumped into Silken Hollow on Contender 3 difficulty, which is the instance that really hooked me in. We started with a few enemy packs, died to at least two of them because the tank felt a bit overconfident, but tried again and made it to the final boss. That final spider that will forever haunt me made the whole arena into a web-riddled nightmare while spawning smaller spiders and poison pools, and guess what? We died. Oh, we died a lot. But we never faltered or got angry at the other party members. We respawned, headed to the boss room, and snapped its eight legs right off to reap those shiny rewards.
Despite being in early access, Fellowship already has all the engagement and fun of the endgame of an MMO, yet it is more approachable and gets straight to the point. Another thing that I loved about it was how easy it is to build your character in terms of talents, gems, and more modifiers. There’s a lot of depth in the process, don’t get me wrong, but it doesn’t feel as daunting as in other games with instanced content.
Of course, that doesn’t mean the game is perfect. The onboarding process could use some work, especially for Tanks and Healers, who usually have the more demanding jobs in a party. Also, people who leave a group just because they died once, or those who kick others for the fun of it, should really get some sort of punishment; these things really bring down the mood when trying to do a dungeon run.
The Dawn of MODAs
Fellowship is pretty pioneering in the newly burgeoning MODA genre, and so far, it’s successful in what it sets out to achieve. Its characters are great, all with interesting kits, the dungeons have an excellent design and pacing, with interesting gameplay mechanics, and the gear system is easy to understand but still has that skill ceiling you need to breach to get the most out of it. Frankly, I’m excited to see where Fellowship goes next, as I’d love to see more characters, dungeons, and of course, more of that sweet loot I can’t stop chasing.
