How Fellowship Skips the MMO Grind

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I’m really excited about the upcoming *Fellowship*! Honestly, it’s not just the world or how it plays that has me hooked – it’s what the developers, Chief Rebel, are *trying* to do with the MMO and dungeon-crawler scene. They’re planning to make things way more accessible and easier to get into when it releases later this year, and that’s a huge deal to me.

Chief Rebel’s role-playing game, *Fellowship*, is launching in Early Access later this year with a focus on immediate action. Instead of making players spend a lot of time leveling up before reaching the best content, *Fellowship* aims to put players right into challenging dungeons typically reserved for later stages of other games. Game Rant recently spoke with game designers Isabell Märs and Will Maiden from the *Fellowship* team, who discussed the game’s design principles of being easy to pick up and enjoy.

How Chief Rebel’s Fellowship Removes The MMO Grind

The MMO Grind And Its Issues

In games, from large online worlds like *World of Warcraft* to single-player role-playing games, ‘grinding’ – repeatedly defeating weaker enemies to gain experience and items – has long been a common practice. As games have become longer and more complex, this type of repetitive gameplay has actually become even more prevalent.

The repetitive cycle of completing tasks for rewards is a core part of most role-playing games, and many players enjoy it. However, it’s also a common complaint. When talking about the design of *Fellowship*, the development team explained they wanted to skip this tedious process and let players jump straight into the exciting parts of the game.

You know how frustrating it is when someone tells you to start a TV show, but says it doesn’t *really* get good until way later? That’s kind of how it is with a lot of online games. The *best* parts, the really engaging stuff with a great community, often don’t unlock until you’ve played for a long time – and sometimes spent a lot of money! That’s what the creators of Fellowship were hoping to fix. They wanted to let players experience that awesome endgame content without all the initial grind and expense.

The Ways Fellowship Cuts Out To The Chase

The team also shared details on how *Fellowship*’s gameplay supports their vision. According to Maiden, they achieved this by offering the game at a fixed price with no subscription fees, and by creating ready-to-play characters that represent classic RPG archetypes, making it easy for players to jump right in.

This design direction is making *Fellowship* feel more like traditional online games where you join matches, and the developers are intentionally moving in that direction. Märs explained that *Fellowship* will include a ‘Quickplay’ mode and generally play like games with shorter, self-contained sessions.

It’s frustrating when you want to join a game late in the season and feel overwhelmed by how much you’ve missed, or get discouraged just thinking about catching up – that’s what we’re trying to prevent. When we say we want players to be able to “jump in and play,” we mean it should be easy to find a group and start a dungeon. With Fellowship, we’ve focused on making that happen. For example, our Quickplay system lets you start playing in minutes – you don’t need to apply to groups and worry about being rejected.

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2025-09-25 13:04