Fellowship (PC) Preview

Here’s a question I never thought I would find myself asking: What would World of Warcraft be like if it had all of its content cut out except for Mythic+ dungeons? Well, that’s the central question that Fellowship seems intent on answering. Fellowship seeks to provide players with the experience of running countless dungeons that consistently increase in complexity and difficulty, without the need to first get any characters to max level and ensure they’ve got the best possible equipment for the task. That idea appeals to me because I’ve played WoW for roughly sixteen years, but intentionally never done any Mythic+ dungeons.

Fellowship’s core gameplay loop is quite similar to WoW’s Mythic+ dungeons in nearly every way, yet simultaneously simplified wherever possible. For example, you only need a group of four players (one tank, one healer, and two damage dealers) to run dungeons in Fellowship, whereas you need five players (one extra damage dealer) for the same purpose in WoW. Another difference I quite like is that Fellowship doesn’t require you to loot every individual enemy you slay in a dungeon. Everyone gets to open the same treasure chest after killing the dungeon’s final boss, and that’s the extent of it.

Should you forget to loot the end-of-dungeon treasure chest or if your inventory is too full to carry your new loot, Fellowship will automatically send any missed rewards to you via the in-game mail system. You can access this whenever you’re in the main hub area, and you don’t even have to find a mailbox to use it. This mechanic is wonderful, partly because it means you don’t always need to clean out your inventory between dungeon runs. Selling all your unneeded loot to the local artificer is slightly tedious, so not having to do that often is nice.

The more dungeons you complete, the stronger your chosen hero character will become, and the more skills they’ll learn. As you grow in power, you’ll be able to tackle higher-difficulty versions of dungeons. The way Fellowship goes about this is nearly identical to how WoW does it: The base difficulty level of each dungeon is called “+0,” with every number above zero indicating a higher difficulty. Once you get to about +4 or +5 difficulty, you’ll have to contend with things like making sure you kill a certain number of enemies while clearing the dungeon within a set time limit.

Higher-difficulty dungeons will also have modifiers that can do things like make certain enemy spells deal significantly more damage or cause your party members’ healing spells to be less effective, for example. You’ll be able to see which modifiers are active and exactly what their effects are each time you queue in the group finder. Speaking of the group finder, though, that brings me to one major complaint I have about Fellowship in its current state. It can feel almost impossible to find a full dungeon group, especially if you’re not playing alongside any of your friends.

In my experience with Fellowship’s demo, I had much faster dungeon queues when I played a damage dealer as opposed to a tank or a healer. That’s really strange to me because it’s pretty much the exact inverse of how dungeon queues typically work in World of Warcraft. If you queue in WoW’s Dungeon Finder as a tank or a healer, you’re much more likely to find a group almost immediately compared to waiting for what can feel like ages if you queue as a damage dealer. It’s odd (in a pleasant way) to see so many people voluntarily playing as tanks and healers in Fellowship.

My only other complaint about Fellowship’s demo is that it desperately needs a way to communicate with only your party members as opposed to the existing general chat channel that’s open to the entire server, where there’s frequent confusion because it’s difficult to determine who’s talking to whom at any given time. Speaking of servers, Fellowship currently only has three: one in the eastern United States, one in Europe, and one in Asia. I hope there’s enough interest for its developers to look into adding more servers later on. I didn’t have latency issues connecting to the only U.S. server, though.

Having said all that, I know Fellowship is still just a demo at this point. I’ve heard that its developers have been getting a lot of community feedback via their Discord server while the demo has been available. Hopefully, they’ll be able to address the majority of that feedback and deal with any issues players have experienced. It’s still unknown whether Fellowship will be free-to-play once it launches, and it doesn’t have an announced release date at the time of writing. Regardless, Fellowship has easily earned its spot on my wishlist, and I’m really excited for its full launch.