Fellowship is bringing a new spin to the world of RPG dungeon-crawlers with its streamlined design philosophy. A ‘MODA’ (Multiplayer Online Dungeon Adventure) set to take the genre away from subscription models, Fellowship is pulling all the stops to make RPGs more accessible.
The 2025 RPG game Fellowship is poised to release in October, kicked back a week from its original launch date to make room for further polishing and fine-tuning. Rather than focusing on its new fantasy world or reinventing the dungeon-crawler wheel, Fellowship is intent on cutting to the chase. The main draw of the title is allowing players to skip the grind that comes with MMOs and other games that centre on clearing dungeons, bringing fans straight to the good stuff. Game Rant sat down with members of the Chief Rebel team, including game designers Will Maiden and Isabell Mars and UX designer Ambjörn Olsson, who spoke more on Fellowship and its goals. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
How Fellowship Skips The MMO Grind
Game Rant: Part of Fellowship‘s mission statement is to break down the ‘barriers to entry’ to dungeon-crawling content (as seen in other RPGs). Why is this important to the team?
Olsson: To not only get the hardcore dungeon pushers in but to open the barrier and interest for a wider variety of players, to share the joy of dungeon crawling between all levels of skill.
Maiden: How many times has someone recommended a TV show to you but told you it really only gets good in season two or three? The endgame of MMOs is often the best kept secret in gaming, it’s such a compelling way to play, but requires a significant time (and money, if you’re playing a subscription-based game) investment to get access to that experience and community.
One of the initial goals of Fellowship was to bring the endgame to players who didn’t have access to it previously. By making Fellowship a fixed, accessible price with no subscription, and by providing pre-made characters that streamline the best archetypes of an RPG into a pick-up-and-play hero.
Mars: We want the jump in and play experience that you get from so many other session-based games, whenever you feel like it. We want to open up the possibility to play with any of your friends straight away, no matter how much either of you have spent playing before. The goal is to allow you to jump straight into the fun, without having to feel that you have to complete hours and hours of chores before you’re ready to play the “actual” game. I personally can’t count the amount of times I’ve wanted to jump in and play a game with high barriers to entry in the middle of the season, being weeks behind my friends, and getting burnt out at just the thought of it. That’s what we want to avoid.
And when we talk about the “Jump in and play straight away,” that also includes how easily you can find a group and get into a dungeon. With Fellowship, we have been constantly working on lowering that barrier to entry. For example, from our Quickplay or matchmaking system: you don’t have to apply for groups and get declined, instead you can just press “Play” and find yourself in a dungeon within minutes.
Chief Rebel Team Member: We’ve aimed for an experience that provides players with a quick entry to an end-game experience that usually takes a big time commitment and can feel daunting to many. Fellowship aims to get you straight into the action with a guided experience where the difficulty ramps up as you learn the game, introducing new mechanics and things to spice up your gameplay along the way.
Game Rant: What do you consider the big ‘barriers to entry’ when it comes to dungeons in MMOs? How is Fellowship built around these?
Olsson: Knowledge of mechanics, difficulty level, knowledge of your hero and play time. We’ve built Fellowship solely around running dungeons and the possibility to instantly start playing from the second you log in, which hopefully will help regarding barriers such as having to spend hours to gear up and learn your hero before doing dungeons. Our idea is to skip right to the fun part!
Mars: First it’s your character’s strength, whether that is through levels or gear. In other MMOs, you simply cannot start the fun endgame content without spending hours getting your character to the right level and strength. And even when you do, you need to find yourself a group to play with, which can very easily become ‘elitist’ with the online tier lists and meta specs.
Maiden: Definitely knowledge. Playing a dungeon-based game is about learning, about repetition, and perfection. Random elements and unpredictable outcomes all work against the experience we’re trying to create. Like actors rehearsing a role, they are learning the dungeon, learning how their heroes play, their abilities, strengths and weaknesses, so that they can defeat the dungeon as efficiently as possible. That’s part of the hero and dungeon design, and also in the loot we reward as well.
Fellowship's Endless Mode
Game Rant: A great deal of emphasis is placed on Fellowship being ‘endlessly scalable.’ What will this look like in practice, and will the loot available to players scale with this ever-rising difficulty?
Olsson: When you’ve finished each of the leagues in our “Challenge” mode, you will enter “Endless” mode, in which the loot will scale for the first few levels and then it will stop. Making it ultimately up to the players to perfectly execute higher and higher difficulty levels to get their spot on the leaderboard!
Mars: Our dungeons are endlessly scalable, which means as long as there’s a will, there’s a way. The difficulty of our dungeons is endless: the enemies’ strength increases each difficulty, and the difficulty never ends.
However, to add in the leaderboard climb to allow the best of the best to have an even fight among each other, there is a gear cap after a certain dungeon difficulty. So, while the dungeon strength increases, eventually the player’s strength does not, which means the players now have to figure out how to deal with these endlessly harder encounters, while not getting stronger themselves.
Game Rant: How does this endless scalability interact with the mission to make dungeons more accessible from the outset (compared to other RPGs)?
Olsson: In Fellowship you will start out with “leagues” which will guide the player into our way of doing dungeons and showing the players how it works. As players climb upwards in the leagues and make progress, they will encounter new mechanics and more difficult enemies which will prepare them for Endless mode!
Mars: Through the majority of the game, until you reach Endless, the gear you obtain from dungeons is matched to the difficulty of that dungeon. Since you can enter your first dungeon within your very first minute of gameplay, the idea is that you can still enjoy challenging and interesting encounters, no matter your character’s strength.
Also, as you progress through the game, and as your gear grows, so does the dungeon difficulty, not only through enemy strength, but also through the new mechanics added to enemies. Ultimately, our goal is for each player, no matter their level, to have a fun and challenging experience in our dungeons.
Maiden: Endless is our “endgame”, if you can call it that. I think a lot of casual, or interested players will look at the leagues as the “progression” and see that as a good milestone to try to achieve. We wanted to make sure there’s something for every type of player. For casual players, the Quickplay mode will allow players to jump into the game and be adventuring in minutes, not needing to worry about scaling difficulties, or gear; just picking a hero and learning the mechanics. Once they feel they’re ready for a scaling challenge, they can climb the leagues and start to chase loot for real. Here, some casual players will find their “limit”, but we hope most will see how compelling it is to challenge themselves and push through higher difficulties.
Unlocking Endless is a real achievement, and from then on, it’s all about player skill. Loot is capped, so it’s going to come down to how well players have learned their heroes, learned the dungeons, and have a response to the ever-increasing difficulties the mode throws at them. For the most competitive members of the community, this is going to be what Fellowship is all about.
Fellowship's World And Heroes
Game Rant: How does Fellowship approach the tank-healer-DPS trinity? What new spin does the game bring to these tried-and-true party roles?
Mars: I think we all have our love and trust in the holy trinity set up, and we work a lot from “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it”, so we are not trying to re-invent the wheel for such a backbone of the dungeon run mechanics that we know and love. We try to instead design our heroes with variety, from familiar playstyles to more unique mechanics.
The goal is to have a hero for everyone, and we know that everyone enjoys different playstyles. Some want to focus on healing, some want to be as tanky as possible, some want to keep track of dot uptimes, and we are trying our best to find a way for all of these playstyles within the holy trinity. What’s important for us is that every role feels like they are truly needed in the group. We want to make sure that for those who want; there is damage to be dealt, even for the tanks, or the healing is crucial to survive a tough fight, and the damage output is needed to finish the dungeon on time. Every role has its purpose, and we are constantly balancing the game to make sure that it stays true.
Game Rant: How much character exploration will Fellowship‘s Heroes receive? What motivated the implementation of different named Heroes over more ground-up character creation and customization?
Maiden: The focus of our game is primarily on creating interesting heroes with archetypal abilities that introduce interesting ways to play. When we started Fellowship, the idea of having 100+ hours of time with your character in a regular MMO or Action RPG was something we wanted to speed-run, so players could take a hero off-the-shelf and immediately know what they were about and how they would play. Like in MOBAs, you take one look at a hero and see their key ability rotation and know what they are about if you want to play them. That accessibility is part of the mission statement of Fellowship and something that’s been tough to break for players who want a blank slate to project themselves onto.
We’re looking at character customization options as we grow the game. Certainly, we want players to personalize their take on Tariq, or Vigour, but we never wanted to turn our characters into generic ‘Archer DPS’ or ‘Druid’ classes, as it limited the design space for us to create interesting starting points for players to explore.
Game Rant: Fellowship will be introducing players to a new fantasy world. What’s different about this world compared to other popular fantasy worlds, and will it feel familiar to the worlds found in games similar to Fellowship?
Mars: I think our world is built with opportunities; we put gameplay first. So we want a world that feels familiar from other pop culture movies, books and games through creatures, magic and beautiful landscapes, but to still allow for heroes of all sorts.
Maiden: We actually came into the worldbuilding with too many ideas of what we love and are inspired by, and wanting to say “yes” to everything (just maybe not all at once). Practically speaking, this game is design-led, which means everything exists in service of the gameplay, and from minute-one, we wanted to be sure that we’ve not created a set of strict rules that meant we’d be designing ourselves into a corner for lore reasons if we wanted to do something cool with a future dungeon, hero, boss, or ability with our next update.
With that in mind, Fellowship’s world is one that will grow and be forged alongside the community as we grow over time. Rather than have it all planned out to begin with, we’re writing the world bible in real-time whenever someone comes up with the next cool concept. Expect new lands and empires, new factions, gods and monsters to appear as soon as we have a place for them, but don’t expect a tome of backstory about the sixteen former wearers of the legendary ‘Rings of Thandruar’. It’s not that kinda game.
Game Rant: Can you shed any light on the worldbuilding in Fellowship and/or the core conflict of the game’s world?
Maiden: “Monsters are over there, and they need smashing.” The rest we leave in the hands of our community to write compelling stories of their own.
Game Rant: What did the team take away from the game’s public playtest during Steam Next Fest?
Maiden: Firstly, just a massive validation that this is a game people want to play. I think when you’ve had your head down in the code for so long on a passion project like this, you worry you’re going to throw a party and no one will come. But the feedback was loud and clear: “It’s what I always wanted, but didn’t know I could have it.”
One of our big goals was to introduce a matchmaking system to help people find each other, rather than have endless lists of LFG posts. We got a lot of good feedback on that experience and have spent most of the summer working on iterations of that experience, improving the queue times, reducing the complexity, and smoothing out the overall league progression at the same time. The game is night-and-day different in terms of structure, as we’ve focused on making that experience as accessible and rewarding as possible for new players, and as recognizable and familiar to veterans of the genre.
The dungeon running itself has remained largely unchanged. I think we’ve had that core gameplay experience feeling really good for a while, so most of our focus has been on refining the “structure” of the game. We had a few power players who min-maxed the progression system, so we’ve been running a few internal tests to try to protect players from themselves, which has meant reducing a few choices and creating a more curated progression system, too.
Game Rant: Do you have a roadmap for what the 6 months of Fellowship‘s early access will look like? If you had to quantify it, what percentage of Fellowship‘s full version will be available in the initial early access release?
Maiden: That’s going to depend on the community, by and large. We are treating Early Access as the next step in getting players into the game and getting as much feedback as possible, honestly, so we’re looking primarily at quality of life and accessibility feedback, bug fixing, and balancing for the first few months, I’d imagine. Our team’s still quite small, relatively speaking, and we’ve been working to get the game to a state where we can be up for longer than a few week playtests.
Beyond that, we’ve got a few ideas for features we’d love to work on; we’ve talked openly about Raids, and have hundreds of ideas for more Heroes and Dungeons to expand our variation, and player personalization is a high priority for us as well, but really, the exciting thing about being in Early Access is the immediacy of the feedback we can get from our players now, so all these priorities can shift as we test our leagues and Endless progression with a wider community. I’d say Early Access is about 75–80% of what a final release will look like, but we’ll likely be able to talk in more specifics about what’s in the pipeline for new features over the next few months.
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