Fellowship Early Impressions – Are MODAs Here to Stay?

Fellowship brings the first-ever MODA or multiplayer online dungeon adventure genre to the mainstream, giving players the addictive gameplay loop seen in most MMORPGs but without all the needless clutter for those who just want to play dungeons.

After playing for 25 hours over the past few days, here are my thoughts on Fellowship – also with a perspective from decades of playing World of Warcraft as well.

Fellowship is truly exciting and engaging, but will it last?

One big aspect of Fellowship is that it isn’t an RPG where you “create” your character from scratch – you choose from an expansive roster of characters with varying playstyles. All these characters fall into three main roles: Tank, Damage, and Healer. With an eye-catching roster, Fellowship becomes very engaging when you want to try out all these characters and find the perfect fit for you.

Generally, you have your typical classes like a ranged mage caster, your ranger, a physical melee attacker, the mitigation and healing-based tanks, and those burst and party-wide healers.

All of these are available in the game, and if you literally come from playing World of Warcraft’s M+ or mythic dungeons, everything almost feels like second nature when you try them out, which also isn’t surprising, as Fellowship was marketed as a streamlined World of Warcraft M+ simulator, removing the fluff and focusing on the gameplay.

With a lot of interesting characters available right away, players still have this sense of progression in getting better gear, acquiring all talent points, learning dungeon mechanics, and completing achievements.

The reason M+ worked well with World of Warcraft is that it gave players more accessibility to earn the best gear in a non-tedious way. In WoW, players want to get the best gear and strengthen their character as much as possible, but only to a point where they can finish the hardest content, which is usually raiding.

In Fellowship, you have the same loop and goal, but only to finish the major Capstone Dungeons. You’ll literally go through hundreds of dungeons in a small map pool with increasingly harder playthroughs. There’s a bit of a difference in each tier, since there will be added dungeon modifiers, such as giving certain enemies new abilities, which could completely change your team’s strategy.

It is fun for a while, but when you aren’t playing with a core party, it can get exhausting really fast. For one, you can’t expect everyone to learn all the mechanics, so having a random party for every dungeon means you could possibly deal with some who aren’t familiar with certain mechanics, making it a grueling grind.

It is fine to normally progress with new players, but when you hit a brick wall where you need to grind for hours just to get gear upgrades, you’ll really wish you had a stable group to progress together. In Fellowship’s current state, there’s a lot of improvement to be made, but the core foundation of this MODA game has been wonderful so far. Would I recommend the game this early? I definitely would, especially for players who loved playing dungeons in MMORPGs.

How Can Fellowship Improve from Here?

Given that Fellowship is still in early access, it is almost always expected to see some gaps and holes, but you can see the potential of the game already. The biggest improvement they could add right now would be the addition of Guilds or Clans.

It is hard to grow with other players if it is hard to interact with them. Every coop-heavy game needs this feature, especially when you are trying to look for players who are like-minded.

Fellowship could also use an adventure guide where players could look at boss mechanics so they can easily learn on their own from within the game. Even if it isn’t as comprehensive as written or video guides, it will still be useful to read through boss attacks and mechanics in a very accessible way.

Apart from these additions, Fellowship feels like a complete game right now. It can only get better with more content, such as new characters, game modes, and class customizations in the future.

I’d even go so far as to say maybe IP collaborations could do really well in the future.

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