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The developers of co-op RPG Fellowship had to publish its season 3 patch notes across five separate Steam news posts, which should tell you just how much is changing in its latest update. Along with tons of balance changes, the new season veers away from its MMO-inspired roots to lean harder into being an action RPG with loot and character builds—a decision that didn't immediately go over well.
The team at Chief Rebel are confident that season 3 will be a turning point for Fellowship as a co-op experience that emulates the thrill of running dungeons with your friends without the baggage of MMO busywork. And a lot had to change to make that happen.
For starters, the old loot system had to go. Community director Hamish Bode told PC Gamer during a recent demo of season 3 that too many players would collect the best gear and immediately stop thinking about it. In the new system, "there's always something cool that can happen," Bode said, like finding a pair of gloves that supercharges one of your abilities.
Bode was speaking my language as someone who has spent the last few weeks playing tons of Path of Exile 2. Fellowship won't be quite as deep as loot-heavy games like Diablo, but the revised item system is an attempt to give players interesting choices to make about how they want to build their characters. It also means there's a real chase for gear upgrades that will help you survive the jumps in difficulty for each dungeon tier.
Necklaces, for example, will now carry random defensive bonuses for every hero, giving you a reason to keep checking for an upgrade every time you find new ones. If you get lucky and find an item perfect for your playstyle, you can now boost all the stats on it through the new Tempering system. From what I saw, Chief Rebel was careful not to add unnecessary bloat that would make it feel like you're gambling for power. Loot has variables, but not so much that you'll be waiting days to see something useful.
Bode said the team is "hyper aware" that the last thing players want is for Fellowship to suddenly feel like a grind. "I don't think it's fun when the game just kind of feeds you everything and kind of plays itself for you," he said. "It's a really tricky balance, but we also have crafting systems so you can have more agency over how you want to progress. Even if you, for example, go for a few runs without finding anything, you can salvage those items and pump those resources into the things that are really good for you."
Bringing back the challenge
Season 3's long list of changes also includes things that are a direct response to players who found the last season way too easy. Bode said the team tried to help onboard new players by making the dungeons easier, but failed to account for the sheer power of its new heroes. "People who were running the new tank and the new healer—it's almost worth saying—broke the game a bit," Bode explained. "It's one of the reasons why we leaned so hard into larger scale testing for this season."
Bode said he personally prefers when games give you the elation you get when you finally kill a frustrating Dark Souls boss. "I prefer to have that because it shows people are wanting to progress through something," he said. "If you go too far the other way and people are like this is too easy and they become apathetic and check out, that's a much worse situation for a game to be in, in my opinion."
Season 3 aims to turn things around from the last season with more challenging dungeons, including a new pinnacle dungeon with three brutal bosses. Every week, you'll be able to run a pinnacle dungeon and receive rewards from any other dungeon in the chest at the end. Completing it will also grant you a Bloodstone, which you can use to greatly enhance your gear.
All of this sounds really promising for a game that fills an important niche you can't find anywhere else. I ran two dungeons alongside Bode as the new melee damage hero Gunde and remembered why I still believe in Fellowship. Gunde joins its list of heroes who feel inspired by archetypes I know from WoW but are wrapped around a core mechanic to manage.
Gunde is a berserker who cleaves through packs of enemies with his twin axes, leaving them bleeding: I spent the first dungeon lining up his AoE attacks to keep enemies maimed and the second watching them melt when followed up with a finisher move that does loads of extra damage to bleeding enemies. Gunde isn't the kind of character I'd usually pick in an RPG, but I won't say I didn't enjoy slicing enemies up instead of casting spells for a change.
Fellowship is still less than a year into early access and already feels like a dramatically better game than it did at the start—and I thought it was pretty good back then. Season 3 is the first time I can sense a vision for the game that won't just appeal to people who need something to do at the end of a WoW season, and I'm extremely curious to see where it goes from here.
Season 3 starts today and you can get the game on Steam for $15, or almost half its normal price ($25) until June 29.
