It's hard to be surprised at how much of a slam dunk Fellowship has been for RPG players who love running dungeons in groups. World of Warcraft is in a pre-expansion lull at the moment and everyone is hungry for co-op games. Fellowship couldn't have arrived at a better time.
Even though Fellowship has a long road ahead of it, players have already sunk in a combined 7.2 million hours played. In that time, over 9 million dungeons have been cleared. Bode didn't share the number of dungeons players failed to clear, but he did say that they've died over 49 million times. Ouch.
All of that is really just proof that a game where you can run MMO-style dungeons over and over is exactly the kind of thing people have been hoping someone would make. It's not exploding on Steam like Arc Raiders, but it's been quietly hovering around 8,000 concurrent players, which is a pretty healthy amount for something that hasn't been fully released yet.
The developer update also has a lengthy interview between Bode and game director Axel Lindberg about what's being added over the next few months. A winter event is on its way on December 11 and will be followed by a pre-season reset in early 2026. Basically, all the leaderboards and character progress will be refreshed for the new season to let the developers rebalance the game and introduce new heroes that'll shake up the meta.
Chief Rebel has been tight-lipped about those future heroes, but Lindberg says a tank and support hero are currently in the works. One of them will go live at the same time as the pre-season reset and will come alongside "a large content update." If I had to guess, that would include new dungeons and cosmetics, but Lindberg didn't go into details.
Further out from those updates will be improvements to the new player experience, more dungeons, more difficulty modifiers, and social tools to help players find groups. The Steam page says Fellowship is expected to be in early access for six months, but I could see it taking a bit longer with the amount of stuff that's being promised.
I get the sense that Chief Rebel is prioritizing getting the game into the right place where everything works and players are having a blast rather than trying to hit an arbitrary date. I'll be curious to see how many players will stick around once Blizzard releases WoW's Midnight expansion. Fellowship is designed to be played in way shorter sessions than an MMO though, so there might be a lot of people who will be playing both.
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