In this Fellowship preview I’m going to be sharing my experience in a recent playtest I had with the developers of the game. And this is actually the second hands-on preview I’ve had with them; the first being in August of last year in an early alpha build. If you’d like to check that video out for my first impressions you can check that out too.
Fellowship Playtesting Coming to Steam Next Fest
Fellowship is coming to Steam Next Fest, from February 24th to March 3rd, where, for a week, you’ll be able to join a free public playtest of the game in its current state. I played a version of the game that will be very close to what you’ll also be able to experience. There will be 6 different heroes, 2 of each archetype from the holy trinity (being Tank, DPS, and Healer). There’s also going to be 3 dungeons to explore, each having increasing difficulties. The higher level dungeon you complete the better loot you can get. There’s also a unique gem system, item transmutation, world and party chat, new Curses (dungeon difficulty modifiers), new mounts, and a lot of visual improvements based on player feedback.
I think fans of the dungeon crawling experience are really going to enjoy playing Fellowship. The core game mechanics, to us, felt very polished. From movement, to combat and casting abilities, visual clarity, from both enemy attacks and the UI design, all made the whole playtest very enjoyable.
When you first boot up the game, you’ll have the option to start a basic tutorial that introduces you to the tank hero, Helena, and the main gameplay controls and features. I think it’s great to start players off as a tank, but I’d also be interested to see if they include tutorials for all the other heroes.
Players familiar with Mythic+ dungeons from World of Warcraft are going to feel right at home here. The modern, minimalist UI is already set up nicely, similar to how lots of high level players have customized their experience. The big difference is that a) you don’t need to first reach max level and gear up, you can just jump right in, and b) you don’t need to download a dozen different addons to track all the things that make your life easier. They are there by default and you can customize the UI in the game’s UI editor, and a few other settings or keybinds too.
After the tutorial, you’ll be placed in your Stronghold, this is your base camp where you can swap your hero, talents and gear, access your storage, practice on training dummies, and queue up for a dungeon. The devs stated they have future plans to make it more of a social hub, where you can hang out with your friends, discuss strategies, and show off your loot.
You’ll be able to matchmake with other players at the Mission Table. For quickplay, you’ll be matched with other players that have completed dungeons of a similar level. If you have a person that has completed higher level dungeons then they’ll be scaled down so as not to trivialize content and everyone can contribute meaningfully. However if you choose “find game” or “host game” you can set specific requirements on players, such as the minimum item level of their character and the minimum dungeon level they’ve completed. Players’ item levels won’t be reduced for this method of matchmaking, that will only happen in quickplay.
In our playtest, we went through the pirate-themed ranked dungeon, Wraithtide Isles on the +1 difficulty. We played as a tank and healer, and the devs filled in the 2 roles as DPS. For ranked dungeons there is a timer, between 30-40 minutes, so it’s not too big of a time commitment if you want to just get one done during a quick break. We did miss our timer by about 3 minutes, but this was also our first time learning our heroes abilities, the dungeon layout, the boss mechanics, and also casually chatting with the devs.
There’s a few awesome quality of life features we discovered that I’m sure players will be very happy to have. One of which is right on the dungeon map itself. In order to complete the dungeon you’ll need to defeat a certain percent of enemies, as well as all three bosses. On the map, you’re able to see every enemy and what percent they reward to the total completion. That’s an awesome thing to have if you want to plan out your route efficiently in advance or if you’re just looking to grab that last pack of mobs, you won’t have to guess.
For all classes there are threat meters that are built right into the enemy nameplates. For tanks this is particularly useful to know if another player is about to take aggro off of you. Also on the nameplates is a way to track your whole team’s interrupt cooldowns. You can target an enemy and press V to have your hero icon show up next to it. It’ll track that heroes interrupt cooldown so that everyone can see who’s focusing which target and if their interrupt is off cooldown.
For healers, by default you can hover over a character in the game or on their party frame and press your ability to heal or dispel them, saving you a click from needing to target them directly, which over the course of a dungeon is a lot of extra clicks. Additionally, for ground targeted spells the game highlights which players will be affected by the area of effect, making sure you can clearly see which players will get healer. This also works for damage dealers versus enemies within your ground targeted attack.
Fellowship Heroes
As I said earlier, there are 6 heroes that you will be able to play, and there’s a decent mix of variety to choose here. The majority of them have builder / spender mechanics, basic abilities building up resources and more specialized abilities spending those resources. Tanks and DPS both have an interrupt, and both healers have a dispel for certain effects on allies.
Tanks
For Tanks we’ve got Helena and Meiko.
Helena is your basic melee tank that uses a sword and shield to charge, bash, shield throw, to build up to 5 resources and then spend them to gain toughness, which increases your defence the more you have of it.
Meiko is not your standard melee tank, and is a bit more advanced. She instead has a number of various ability combos that then determine a finishing move. Depending on the fight you might want to increase your survivability, self heal, AoE or just increase your damage.
Damage Dealers
For DPS there is one ranged and one melee.
Rime is your standard ranged magic damage dealer, an ice or “winter” mage, if you will. She starts with standard single target or multi-target abilities to build up Anima which at certain break points give you Winter Orbs to spend for heavier hitting single or multi-target abilities.
The other DPS is Tariq, a Melee damage dealer akin to a berserker. Tariq is pretty interesting as it’s based on dealing damage and managing an auto-attack swing timer. You’ll want to weave your other abilities between your auto-attacks, then just before your auto-attack is about to land you queue up a powered-up auto-attack, otherwise it’s just a regular auto-attack. This could be a little frustrating if the UI isn’t perfect or the ability animations aren’t finished but the damage has been dealt. He also utilizes builder spender with a fury resource.
Healers
For Healers there are 2 distinct playstyles, both of which also deal damage.
Vigour is your basic healer with both single and AoE healing abilities. He deals damage to build resources, which is then spent on various buffs/debuffs like healing over time, a damage absorption, or damage over time. He also has an AoE frontal cone that both heals friendlies and damages enemies.
Sylvie is a bit more complex of a healer, dealing damage by summoning roots which turn into mushrooms after a certain period of time, which can then deal more damage. Her heals are in the form of butterflies, when cast on a friend they heal over time, they can be stacked to focus one target or also applied to heal on command. The blue butterfly amplifies all your healing done when on yourself or if you want to focus on one target it will significantly amplify their healing taken.
So you can see with these first 6 heroes they’ve hit all the basic archetypes of traditional classes, to suit most playstyles. From the start, even with their basic ability kit, they all feel pretty complete. As you progress there will be more abilities to press with more complex interactions, which I’m very excited to see how things shape up.
There’s not really much negative to say about Fellowship. It feels like they’re doing a great job to carve out a spot in the rpg dungeon crawling community and they’re really taking player feedback to heart. So you can take this upcoming playtest on the 24th as an opportunity to have some fun and let the devs know your feedback. We’ll have to check back later to see how the game has evolved before the full release, which should be coming some time this year.
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