Not So Massively: Fellowship’s open beta offers an uncomfortably familiar dungeon running experience
Recently, the fantasy MODA (multiplayer online dungeon adventure) Fellowship ran an open beta weekend, and I decided to stick my nose in to see what it’s about. I knew full well going in that Fellowship developer Chief Rebel was intending to replicate the dungeon experience of major themepark MMOs, but even so, I found myself stunned by just how closely it apes the design of World of Warcraft.
Rather than letting you create your own character, Fellowship offers several pre-made MOBA-style heroes, each of which is locked to one of the traditional tank/healer/DPS trinity roles. You can swap your chosen hero anytime you want, which is nice. I hope unlocking heroes doesn’t become something monetized in the full version of the game.
Being a long-time rogue main in WoW, I started with Mara, an assassin character. The character selection explained she uses energy and combo points to fuel her attacks, so clearly the character is directly inspired by WoW’s rogues. But even knowing that, I was flabbergasted when I zoned in and realized just how much Chief Rebel is copying Blizzard’s homework in this matter.
Bluntly, Mara is just a Subtlety rogue transplanted into a different game. All of the core abilities are there, just under different names. There are a few minor tweaks—Stealth and Shadow Dance got rolled into a single button, and they empower your existing abilities rather than offering new ones—but Mara is still much closer to a patch for the Sub spec than she is to anything original. Even many of the attack animations are perfect or near-perfect recreations of their equivalents in WoW.
The other characters don’t seem to be quite so shamelessly derivative, but they’re still very much wearing their inspirations on their sleeves. You can clearly see which WoW specs they’re based on. You get quite a lot of abilities even at level one, and the tutorial was disabled in this version of the beta, but things are so similar to WoW that I was able to pick up and learn characters very easily. If you haven’t played World of Warcraft, you might find it hard to get your footing.
I didn’t try every character, but I did sample one of each role, and my favorite was Meiko, a martial artist tank. She felt closest to something actually original. She still draws a lot of obvious aesthetic and mechanical inspiration from WoW’s monk, but instead of the energy and chi resource system, her core hook is a combo system where using your builders in different orders unlocks different finishers.
She’s a very complex character with a steep learning curve, and to make things easier on myself, I just focused on memorizing only a few combos off the bat. Still, I found Meiko very rewarding once I got some mastery of her, and it was nice to play something that did feel actually unique to Fellowship.
The gameplay loop of Fellowship is dungeon runs and nothing but dungeon runs. There’s a small hub zone where you can rub elbows with other players, upgrade your gear, and so forth, but otherwise the whole game is just queueing up for dungeon runs. I didn’t see anything resembling a storyline or any broader purpose in the current build.
Although the queues were pretty quick (weirdly, they only took multiple minutes when I tried playing a healer), I still found myself wishing there was something to do while waiting for the queue beyond beating up target dummies. In actual WoW, I could run world quests or gather crafting mats. The hub in Fellowship has a very pretty, soothing environment, but I could still see myself getting very sick of it after a while.
The dungeons themselves are fairly short affairs, usually taking about 10-20 minutes, which feels like a good length for this sort of game. Every one I played had only a single boss fight, with lots of trash leading up to it. I would have preferred more bosses and less trash. The excess of trash is one of my biggest complaints with WoW’s dungeon design, and it doesn’t seem like something that should be emulated. We call it trash for a reason.
Boss fights use a complex UI based on popular World of Warcraft add-ons, and while I know many consider those add-ons essential, I’ve never used them, and I found the extra visual clutter in Fellowship very disorienting. Again, this feels like copying the negatives of WoW’s dungeon philosophy rather than the positives.
I also found player behavior much the same as you’d see in WoW dungeons. The go-go-go rush mentality didn’t seem to have fully propagated to the entire playerbase yet, but I still got to experience such classics as everyone immediately rage quitting after one wipe, DPS running ahead and pulling mobs when I play tank, and tanks keeping chain-pulling hordes of mobs even though I’m out of mana and can’t heal them anymore.
Not helping matters is that there doesn’t seem to currently be any kind of backfill option to replace any players who leave or disconnect (the latter being a semi-regular occurrence in the beta). Hopefully, that will be added later.
There are quite a lot of progression systems in Fellowship to keep you growing and customizing your hero. There’s gear (both dropped and bought from vendors), a progression tree that offers a wealth of rewards from mounts to new abilities, a talent window (interestingly based on the Mists of Pandaria system), and something called gem powers. Wouldn’t surprise me to learn there’s more I didn’t even notice.
Overall, I thought Fellowship felt like a decent take on the MMO dungeon formula, and I did find the art style and sound design very pleasing, but it felt too derivative to be something I’d want to play more of. It’s the same problem I had with all those WoW clone-style MMOs we used to get so many of. When I want to play WoW, I’ll just play WoW.
With Fellowship bringing nothing new to the formula, I don’t see why you’d pick it over the game that is its clear inspiration. I guess the presumable lack of a subscription fee might be a mark in its favor, and there is a non-zero amount of people who have grudges against Blizzard for one reason or another, so perhaps Fellowship might be able to eke by with a niche audience of jilted ex-WoW players. But I can’t see it ever being any kind of breakout hit in its current form.
https://massivelyop.com/2025/09/24/not-so-massively-fellowships-open-beta-offers-an-uncomfortably-familiar-dungeon-running-experience/
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