This New Dungeon-Crawling MMO Is So Close to Greatness

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I’ve played a lot of MMOs, and while they’re all about playing with others, it’s cool when you can still enjoy things on your own. But honestly, a lot of them make you really work for it – hours of solo quests just to get strong enough for the fun stuff like dungeons. That’s why I’m so excited about Fellowship! It’s a new MMO focused on dungeon crawling, and the best part is, you can just jump right in. The dungeons scale to your level, and the characters are built for action, so there’s no endless grind before the fun begins.

Unlike games like World of Warcraft or Throne and Liberty, Fellowship doesn’t offer much for players who prefer to play alone. The game is designed around group play, so you’ll spend most of your time joining quick-play activities or scaling dungeons with teams of four. These teams need a mix of roles – tanks to protect, healers to keep everyone alive, and damage dealers to take down enemies – and you’ll choose from a set list of characters. Once your team is ready, you’ll begin exploring dungeons together. This strong focus on multiplayer is both what makes Fellowship good and what holds it back.

Fellowship Drops You Right Into the Dungeons, But Still Rewards the Grind

If you’re just starting out with Fellowship, the game will guide you through a tutorial to help you learn the ropes. Players who are already familiar with games like World of Warcraft‘s Mythic Dungeons might find it unnecessary and can skip it. The tutorial teaches the basic gameplay as a Tank. While helpful, it would be great if you could also do a solo practice run with each character before jumping into the full dungeons. You can try out Healers and DPS classes at camp against practice targets, but it doesn’t quite compare to a real practice run without the stress of playing with a team.

Currently in Early Access, Fellowship lets you choose from several pre-made characters within each class – 2 tanks, 5 damage dealers, and 2 healers. While each character is ready to play right away, you can return to your base camp to improve and customize them. You’ll find new armor to purchase, weapons to upgrade, and skills to unlock and enhance. This upgrading happens between each run and is the main activity you’ll do on your own in Fellowship. It’s a great system that makes every run feel worthwhile, as you’ll earn loot, automatically unlock skills, and gather money and supplies for further upgrades.

Keeping all your character upgrade options in one central base camp makes it perfect for quick and fun play sessions. The base camp is compact, putting everything you need to improve your character right at your fingertips. This lets you quickly return to exploring dungeons while still enjoying the feeling of progression and character building between runs. This core gameplay loop in Fellowship is brilliantly designed. It delivers the excitement of dungeon crawling without unnecessary RPG details that some players might want to avoid. However, while this streamlined approach is a strength, it could also be seen as a weakness.

Your First Few Dungeon Crawls in Fellowship Might Be Rough If You’re Going Solo

Fellowship focuses on challenging dungeon adventures without a lot of extra story or details, which sounds good on paper. However, it immediately puts new players into groups with others. This means the game’s success depends heavily on its community, just like many online multiplayer games. If there aren’t enough players available, or if experienced players aren’t friendly to newcomers, it can create a difficult experience.

When I first started playing Fellowship, I noticed a few things that could be tough for beginners. Early in the game, I was the only one without a mount, which made it obvious I was new. Since the game also displays how much damage each player deals, newcomers might become a focus of frustration. You’ll have to learn quickly to avoid getting criticized by your team.

Once you learn the game’s controls and how it differs from other dungeon crawlers, many of the initial difficulties become less noticeable. However, these early challenges can discourage new players. This problem is often made worse by how experienced players treat newcomers. While in-game text chat during runs was mostly quiet, when people did chat, it wasn’t always friendly. Newer players were sometimes accused of using bots or criticized harshly for mistakes. It’s easy to be blunt in text-only chat during a fast-paced dungeon, but this negativity could drive some players away from the game entirely.

Look, if you’re like me and sometimes just want to dive into a game on your own, this one’s different. There’s no solo play here, so you have to interact with other players – I remember feeling that with Throne and Liberty last year. But thankfully, Fellowship lets me create my own group with friends, people I know from other games, or even real life. That’s awesome because we can tackle dungeons and stuff without the endless grind you get in World of Warcraft. If I’m playing with my usual crew, I know we’ll have a blast, even while figuring things out. Honestly, if you’re going in blind and relying on random matchmaking, it might be hit or miss – that’s true of most games, really. But when multiplayer is the only way to play, it definitely adds some pressure.

Like Any Multiplayer-Only Game, Fellowship Could Have a Matchmaking Problem

Fellowship is a game built entirely around playing with others. You can’t explore dungeons with computer-controlled characters or play alone – it’s designed this way, and it works great if you have a group of friends looking for a challenging multiplayer experience. If you’re part of a regular gaming group wanting a new, fast-paced, and enjoyable game, Fellowship will likely be a good fit. While it can be a little tricky to learn, and the camera angles aren’t always ideal, the core gameplay is already very fun, even in its early stages. However, the game’s success will depend on having a good matchmaking system for players who want to join random groups.

Fellowship lets you explore dungeons in a few different ways. Quickplay is the fastest – it quickly puts you in a dungeon, but when the game is new, it doesn’t always match players based on skill because everyone is still leveling up. Quickplay groups try to balance the team with healers, damage dealers, and tanks, but you might end up with a mix of experienced players and newcomers. This imbalance is more noticeable early on, but it gets better as players gain experience and level up.

One downside of a game focused entirely on multiplayer is that you can’t play if there aren’t enough players available. During my time with Fellowship, I occasionally couldn’t find a group at all. I once waited ten minutes for a low-level dungeon without success, and the quick-match feature didn’t work any better. Player numbers are always a worry for online games, but a game completely reliant on multiplayer will struggle even more. While the issue I experienced might have been a temporary glitch – Fellowship still has a healthy player base on Steam, peaking around 40,000 daily – the game definitely needs to improve its matchmaking system during Early Access to ensure a successful full release.

Fellowship has a solid foundation and shows a lot of promise. The core gameplay – fighting and teaming up with others – is enjoyable, and the game rewards players well for their efforts. While it has the potential to be truly engaging, a key to its success will be improving how players connect with each other online. If you have friends to play with, Fellowship is a great choice right now. With future updates that clarify the matchmaking process and improve the tutorial, it could become even more accessible and fun for everyone, even newcomers.

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2025-10-27 16:41