Dungeon-diving RPG Fellowship has plans to become "far grander" than a World of Warcraft "side game"

It feels like, in some ways, I've become intrinsically linked to Fellowship. When I first discovered it back in 2024, it immediately struck me as my perfect videogame. Visually reminiscent of World of Warcraft, its combat feels a little bit more like Diablo's, with snappy reactions, buildpaths for days, and MOBA-esque heroes who wouldn't feel out of place in games like League of Legends, Dota 2, and, dare I say it, Heroes of the Storm. But, as community director Hamish Bode tells me, Fellowship is more than just "Mythic+ simulator," it's a game quite unlike any other that distils perhaps the grindiest, most inaccessible parts of MMORPGs down into an experience that's just fun. I've found myself playing more and more of it of late, especially as I lament how behind I am ahead of World of Warcraft: Midnight's release. While I'm hearing the call to return to Azeroth, the Stronghold certainly has its talons in deep.

But I've watched Fellowship's journey from open beta to early access launch, and it's more Rivendell to Mordor than The Shire to Bree. While the game peaked at over 43k players at launch, there were the somewhat inevitable issues with servers straight off the bat, with Chief Rebel's infrastructure simply struggling to keep up with the demand. But, despite this, in a world where even the biggest releases now feel like they come and go within a week, Fellowship's staying power is remarkable: there's something special that keeps drawing people back in.

Chatting to Bode post-launch, then, feels like coming full circle. We first met at Gamescom, then caught up just ahead of the early access release. Now, Fellowship is out in the world, so I ask him how he thinks it all went - a particularly probing question for 10pm his time (sorryyy).

"It's always a glass-half-full thing," he says. "It's always incredible to see how much excitement there is - that's just lovely for the team. Especially when you're a new studio releasing a new IP, it's a completely new beast. You don't know what's going to happen. At the places I've worked before, you had swathes of market information about all of the games you've released before - with Ubisoft it was 'here's everything that happened with Assassin's Creed,' or when I was working on The Division, 'these were all of the Clancy titles that we've had before.' [Chief Rebel] didn't have that, so it was very, very different.

"There's always that fear that you're going to release something and you're like 'oh, are people going to care about it?' We didn't have that problem - that was absolutely not a problem."

That's somewhat of an understatement. As mentioned, Fellowship peaked at 43k concurrents on launch day, with everyone from top-tier WoW streamers to raiding guilds like Method taking it for a spin. I watched as the game exploded on my timeline, the hype at an all-time high. But, as is so often the case with multiplayer games, the servers slowly began to struggle - supply simply couldn't quite meet the demand.

The result is, of course, frustration - I remember the New World servers back in the day, or Final Fantasy 14's Endwalker launch. While Square Enix's approach to the latter's issues remains, to this day, the best way I've ever seen a company deal with queue problems, Chief Rebel comes in as a close second. It kept Fellowship's server-related Steam post updated, was quick to rectify its issues, then gave away a bunch of free, genuinely cool-looking Halloween cosmetics further down the line as an apology. It's a masterpiece in community management for sure, but it's also just refreshing to see developers be so, well, on it.

The issue, however, did persist, so I ask Bode about the team's learnings. "[Server issues] are a sad reality of creating online games," he laments. "We're not immune to it - no matter how big or small your company is, it's just part of the nature of online games. When you think about the amount of variables that go into just the game itself, then you amplify it by the amount of players you have, and then just all these moving parts: it's so much more complex than it seems at face value. Even though I've been doing this for a long time and have been around a lot of launches of various sizes over the years - some famously problematic [Bode worked at Blizzard during the launch of Diablo 3] - with this one, I learnt even more. For as much as I knew, there's so much I didn't know."

"The beta was surprisingly stable and we had the same concurrent users during that time, but when we reached the same concurrent users this time around, things seemed to change," he recalls. "We had some other issues. Player perception was 'oh, you didn't have those issues before, what happened?', but when you're developing a game there are just so many different variables - it can be the smallest, trivial thing; the grain of sand in the machine.

"We had a few of those, and when you're right in the middle of it, those first 72 hours feel like an eternity. And I remember saying during that time, 'I know that the team is going to fix this relatively quickly, because we know what we're looking at,' and they did. And to be fair, we still have a lot of work to do. We're an early access title that's been fortunate enough to have had enough people jumping in and finding all of those edge cases that we want to go and fix."

But server issues aside, players and media outlets across the internet (myself included) have described Fellowship as taking all of the 'best parts of World of Warcraft' and refining them into something even more special. While meant as a compliment (at least on our end) it's a connection that Bode feels "mixed" about. "It's euphoric, because obviously you want to have those comparisons. It's hard to say that there are any better games in the history of gaming than WoW. It's also really exciting to hear [that] from people who come from that world.

"But I was just listening to the The Bench [WoW] Podcast today, and [there was discussion about] 'oh, if [Fellowship] is just Mythic+ plus, I've already got that,' then [they] tried it out and have been no-lifing Fellowship. And what I find really interesting is that, from those people who thought one thing like 'oh, this is an M+ simulator,' it's like, here's why that's maybe a mischaracterization. That to me is really exciting because, while I'm extremely excited to be mentioned in the same conversation [as WoW], I do have hopes and dreams for Fellowship that are far grander than always being like a side game for something else.

"The clarity of the proposition we're putting forward is one of the strongest things about Fellowship," he continues. "That identity will become clearer and more clarified, and the player experience will be really polished. One of the comparisons that I hope that we can live up to is what Valve and Riot did with Dota 2 back in 2012. That was a really exciting time because you had people who were like 'well, it's this thing, it seems pretty simple, what's that all about?' I was watching some footage of really early versions of Dota 2 - even Dota 1 - and I was like 'oh, they've come such a long way,' and I hope that the journey of Fellowship from now to a decade from now shows that same kind of growth."

But the industry has changed, and new multiplayer games face an arguably tougher battle than ever for visibility and players. How does Fellowship make it to its next decade, then - especially as the space grows ever-more competitive?

"The industry has changed so much and will continue to change. I think it's kind of dangerous not to be aware of that - if you look at something and go 'it needs to be this, or it needs to be that,' I think you can kind of shoot yourself in the foot. I'm excited that we're taking a seasonal model with the game, so that it gives players more entry points to come in and [ensures] that we keep that barrier to entry really low. I think, especially the way that people want to experience games now, it can feel like 'oh, if the game's run away from me, I can never catch up; it's way beyond me.'

"I have that feeling about the MMO space generally," he says. "I've never touched Final Fantasy [14] because I'm like 'do I have the time, I'm going to be behind?' - I'd really like to, but then it would kind of just be a scientific experiment. I recently played Season 3 of Mythic+ having not played WoW since before Cataclysm, but I probably wouldn't have done that unless I had the scientific reasoning to do so, because it can feel like it's too hard to jump into something."

The focus, then, is keeping the barrier to entry low, and Bode notes that "one of the absolute best-in-class for doing this - and also with their persistence and really listening to their community - is Digital Extremes with Warframe." That elicits a smile from this relatively new Tenno. "They've trusted their direction, their players have come along with them on that journey, and when you look at their Steam chart it's just this perfect, slow growth. [Warframe] wasn't this overhyped thing - I didn't hear about Warframe until it was three years old, and I think that's the same for a lot of people. People are coming into it now and being like 'oh, what's this thing?' That's the kind of thing that, if I was looking for my ideal of growing a game or type of game that we're trying to create, that would be my closest reference."

While Fellowship 1.0 is still a long way off (Bode notes that there's a "big disclaimer" on the "six months" its Steam page suggests), the team isn't slowing down. While the game's resets have been pushed into next year, there are two new heroes in the works - one "support-style tank" with a "big ass two-handed sword," while the other is a "healer focused on temporal magic" that's "very fun and quite cerebral." I know which of the two I'm going for. Then, we've got a Christmastime event to look forward to.

The future is bright. "We're quite excited about being experimental and creative with our hero designs," Bode says with a smile. "There's these two, and then the stuff that comes next is pretty crazy. So we'll see."