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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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?
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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