Fellowship: A Eulogy for What Could Have Been
I’ve been playing video games since before most of you were born. I remember when a game shipped on a cartridge and you got what you got. No patches. No seasons. No storefronts selling you skins while the servers are on fire. So when I say that Fellowship makes me want to sigh into my coffee and stare out a rain-streaked window, I mean it with the weary affection of a man who has seen too many promising games stumble and fall.
Fellowship is a multiplayer online dungeon crawler that strips away the fat of a traditional MMO and asks one simple question: do you love running dungeons? Because that’s all you’re going to do. You pick a hero from the tank, healer, or DPS trinity. You queue up. You fight through a handful of mobs and a boss. You get a piece of gear. You do it again. The core loop is tight, the combat has weight, and the class design is genuinely intricate. I’ve read better worldbuilding in a second-hand paperback, but the mechanics? They’re solid. The art style is charming, the music is pleasant, and when you’re in a good group with voice chat, it scratches that old Baldur’s Gate II dungeon itch better than anything since World of Warcraft’s heyday.
But here’s where the story turns tragic. Fellowship is being strangled by its own seasonal structure. Every new season—and the game has already had a few—follows the exact same cycle. Launch day brings a spike of players. Everyone is excited. The queues are fast, the dungeons feel fresh, and for about 48 to 72 hours, the game is genuinely incredible. Then the population falls off a cliff. By the end of the first week, you’re sitting in matchmaking for twenty, thirty, sometimes sixty minutes. You spend more time staring at a queue timer than you do actually playing. I’ve seen reports of two-hour queues. Two hours. For a ten-minute dungeon. Back in my day, a game shipped complete, and you didn’t need a spreadsheet to find a group.
The problem is that the game design actively encourages people to stop playing once they hit their seasonal goals. The progression system burns bright and then collapses under its own weight. Timegating is not content. Artificially slowing progression is not retention. Making players wait forever in queues is not difficulty. And the seasonal resets wipe everything—your gear, your progress, your hard work—so you can do it all over again. Some people like that. I’ve never met one in person, but I’m told they exist. For the rest of us, it feels like running on a treadmill that occasionally shocks you.
Then there’s the balance. Oh, the balance. New heroes are added each season, and they arrive like a bull in a china shop. The current tank, Xavian, does more damage than the DPS classes, heals better than the healers, and is nearly as tanky as the dedicated tank. The new healer, Aeona, is so far ahead of the other two that you’re practically griefing your group if you don’t pick her. I’ve seen leaderboards where you have to scroll forty-eight pages before you find a non-Xavian tank. Forty-eight pages. In a game with maybe a few hundred active players. This isn’t balance; it’s a king-making contest, and the devs are handing out crowns to whoever they release last.
And the community? It’s split. Some players swear it’s the most welcoming, helpful bunch they’ve ever met. Others describe it as toxic. I suspect both are true—it depends on when you play. Early in a season, everyone is happy. Late in a season, the only people left are the hardcore elite, and they have zero patience for anyone who doesn’t know every interrupt, every route, every boss mechanic by heart. The game has no in-game chat system beyond whispers and party chat. No global channel. No Looking for Group tool. You’re expected to use Discord or third-party websites to find groups. That’s not a feature; that’s a missing feature. It’s like selling a car without a steering wheel and telling people to use a third-party app to turn.
The dungeons themselves are fine. They’re short, focused, and the boss mechanics are readable. But there are only about eight of them, and you’ll run them hundreds of times. The repetition is brutal. The only thing that changes as you climb the “Eternal” difficulty levels is that trash mobs get a few extra spells and hit harder. There’s no randomization of enemy placement, no new bosses, no surprises. You learn the routes, you memorize the interrupts, and then you do it again. And again. And again. I’ve read more engaging dungeon descriptions in a choose-your-own-adventure book from the 1980s.
Then there’s the elephant in the room: the “capstone” dungeons. To advance from one league to the next, you must complete a special capstone dungeon. You cannot queue for it solo or with random players. You must have a pre-made group of four. No exceptions. This is, and I cannot stress this enough, an absolutely baffling design decision. It gates progression behind having friends who are online at the same time, at the same gear level, and willing to do a harder dungeon. If you’re a solo player, you’re stuck. You either find a group on Discord or you don’t play. Period.
Now, I’ve seen the defenders. They say, “It’s early access. The devs are small. They’ll fix it.” And maybe they will. But I’ve been playing early access games since the term was invented, and I’ve learned that “early access” is often a euphemism for “we sold you a beta test.” Fellowship launched with broken servers for the first two days. It still has queue issues. It still has balance problems that go unaddressed for entire seasons. The devs are selling cosmetics in an “early access” game, which tells me they’re not hurting for cash, but they are hurting for direction. The most recent season introduced titan-forging—a mechanic that was widely hated in World of Warcraft and was eventually removed. Why would you copy a failed system? Why would you timegate the Eternal mode, which is supposed to be the endless challenge? Why would you revamp the loot system into an ARPG-style drop system when the entire game is built around fixed dungeon rewards?
I want to be clear: the foundation here is good. The combat is good. The class design is good. The dungeon mechanics are good. But the long-term structure is terrible. This game feels less like a living multiplayer game and more like a seasonal event that expires after three days. Unless the developers seriously rethink progression pacing, matchmaking health, and how seasonal resets function, this game is going to keep repeating the same cycle: huge launch, rapid collapse, dead queues, repeat. That is not sustainable for a multiplayer-only game.
Here’s my advice. If you have three friends who are willing to play with you regularly, and you’re okay with the seasonal reset wiping your progress every few months, and you don’t mind waiting in queues for longer than you play, then Fellowship can be a fun distraction. If you’re a solo player, if you value long-term progression, if you want a game you can pick up and play at any time without scheduling your life around it, then stay away. Keep expectations low. Very low. I’ve seen promising games die before. This one is circling the drain, and I hope it finds a way to pull back. But I’m not holding my breath.