Fellowship recreates the thrill of MMO dungeons without the MMO and I'm scared of what it will do to my free time
Fellowship fits like a glove on me, a former 16-year-old World of Warcraft raider who mistakenly thought Blizzard would be the only one who could scratch that itch again. Stockholm-based studio Chief Rebel proved me wrong while we cleared out two MMO-style dungeons in a hands-on preview I had with the game last month.
It hit me the moment I logged in and had rows of spell icons and health bars staring back at me. Fellowship's UI looks exactly like my WoW one did back in 2010, when everyone used the ElvUI mod to minimize Blizzard's gaudy health and mana bars into flattened rectangles with text. Whoever made it knows MMO players want nothing to get in the way of seeing whatever horrible gunk a dungeon boss might spit onto the ground.
For both dungeons, I played an elf sorceress named Rime, a hero who resembles a frost mage in WoW. Chief Rebel was inspired by the variety of characters in MOBAs and sought to make a co-op experience that doesn't require you to spend weeks questing and leveling up like you would in an MMO. Heroes in Fellowship gain power from their skill trees and gear as you play, but you won't have any homework to do before you're allowed to join a dungeon party.
The game's hub area, with its overgrown steps and bent redwoods, mirrors the tabletop miniature-like fantasy aesthetic that is synonymous with Warcraft. It's actually so close that I'm not sure I could tell the difference, even as someone who is so keen on Warcraft's art style that I can identify it from a zoomed-in screenshot of a dock texture in GuessThe.Game (I'm normal, I swear). A mission table sits in the middle of the oddly familiar courtyard next to some training dummies to test your spells on. Clicking on it opens a window for choosing which dungeon you want to run and how hard you want them to be. Of course, I recognize this too.
Fellowship is essentially what you get if WoW's Mythic+ dungeons were the entire game.
Mythic+ dungeons in WoW are basically a sport at this point, or so I
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