Fellowship Would be Perfect For Casuals if Not for the Season Wipes
- Antal Bokor
- 3 minutes ago
- 3 min read
I knew it was coming. Preseason 2 is coming up, and that means all progression in Fellowship will be wiped. This is a bit troubling to me because Fellowship is the game my group has been playing for the last few weeks. It’s a group consisting entirely of middle-aged men with jobs, kids, and other worldly responsibilities that prevent us from spending hours glued to our computers. Well, I can, because that’s mostly what I do. But they can’t. And a progression wipe sounds like a terrible, unfun thing.
I know Fellowship wasn’t exactly coy about seasonal wipes. Anybody paying attention to the store page would notice it quickly. But if you’re a casual player, you might not even take the time to check.
I see people saying that even casual players can finish the seasonal progression with only a few hours a week. But we’re lucky if we can get in two solid hours of game time. It’s possible we’re outliers, but Fellowship—at least on the surface—looked like a game that would fit that play schedule perfectly. We can knock out around 4-5 dungeons a night, and that’s on our best nights. Not only that, it discourages players from jumping in mid-season. That’s a bummer for the player base.
I know the idea is that everyone starts on equal footing at the start of each season, but the fact is that most players will get through the content and then put down Fellowship until the next season hits.
The preseason wipes do have us talking about changing up the group configuration. I’ve been playing tank, but I was traditionally a healer in World of Warcraft. Alternatively, I can play the new tank (or new healer) coming out with Preseason 2.
Fellowship is a great game for those that want a standalone World of Warcraft Mythic+ experience without all the extra time commitment. If it wasn’t for Fellowship, we couldn’t do this type of content as a group without the massive playtime that the others just don’t have. In fact, I introduced two of the players in our four-person group to WoW-style dungeons through Fellowship.
As far as I know, Fellowship is the only game that captures that MMO feel without actually being an MMO. They strip the "Massive" out of the genre and focus on the small group fun. There’s nothing quite like the classic holy trinity mechanic: one player is built to tank aggro, others focus purely on DPS, and one person tries to keep everyone alive. There is no character creation in Fellowship, which might be a downside for some, but it removes another barrier to entry. I know I would take at least 30 minutes to figure out who I’d want to play, and another 10 just to figure out their name. There’s none of that stress and hassle here.
Developer Chief Rebel does a great job of capturing that World of Warcraft feel, all the way down to the art style. Fellowship is like seeing a really great tribute band at a bar, or seeing a comedian perform a spot-on impression. Some of my amusement comes from the fact that it’s so unabashedly a WoW clone. Well, a clone of a very specific aspect of WoW.
Mechanically, Fellowship is sublime to play. Its starter dungeon difficulty is too easy, but it provided a perfect learning curve for a group that not only never played Mythic+ together, but never even played an MMO-style game together. Learning proper character spell/ability rotations is easy with tooltips that let you know specifically what each skill does. There are even some quality-of-life features that you can’t get in WoW without messing with add-ons, like the ability to track teammates' interrupt cooldown timers.
As you play, your character increases in power by getting items with higher stats. As you level up, you can unlock new abilities and talents through what looks like a convoluted Path of Exile skill web, but is actually just a linear progression.
However, the real progression isn’t in the talent points and gear you acquire, but how far you can travel through the Mythic+ inspired gauntlet of increasing difficulty. These add timers and modifiers that ramp up the challenge and pressure.
The seasonal wipes won’t stop us from playing Fellowship completely. In fact, we’ll probably use it as an excuse to switch up roles. But even then, I don’t know how long that will keep our interest.
There is a solution to this, and ironically, Blizzard has had it in place in the Diablo series for years. Just make a main, non-seasonal "Eternal Realm" progression mode alongside the seasonal characters. I have a feeling Chief Rebel might make this concession in the future, but it might not be before my friends and I are long gone.