This co-op RPG is coming for World of Warcraft’s best feature and it’s not even an MMO

MMOs are one of the few genres of game where you have to do homework before you get to the good stuff. The best gear and the best dungeons are dangled in front of you for dozens of hours as you quest your way to max level. It takes a real commitment to familiarize yourself with years of systems stacked on top of each other, and I wouldn’t blame anyone — especially those new to MMOs — for turning right around and logging out.

But behind all of that lies an experience where you and your friends can go dungeon-crawling together and feel the thrill of overcoming challenging boss fights through teamwork. I didn’t think it was possible to recreate the authentic MMO dungeon experience without the rest of the MMO until I played Fellowship. The developers at Chief Rebel smashed MOBA characters and MMO dungeon mechanics together and created an experience that is as close to a World of Warcraft dungeon as you can get — without all the fiddly systems stuff.

After playing it and coming away extremely impressed last year, I was invited by developer Chief Rebel to try it once again ahead of its first open beta, which kicks off on Feb. 24. Everything I liked about it before has only gotten better, and a few of its newest features are going to be essential for getting newcomers over some of the remaining roadblocks. One of those is a matchmaking system that will find you a group for a specific dungeon way faster than the previous invite-based system. Chief Rebel wants players jumping in and out of dungeons like you would queue for a match in a MOBA.

And that’s because Fellowship borrows almost as much from MOBAs as it does MMOs. You don’t create a character and level them up; you pick a hero and learn how they play. I chose Rime, an icy damage dealer with spells that build up a resource to spend on more powerful spells — your bread-and-butter caster setup. Other characters specialize in more specific but familiar loops, like burning enemies with fire attacks or performing triage with healing spells. Each hero has a distinct playstyle, and you can swap to different ones in between dungeons.

It didn’t take me long to familiarize myself with Rime’s spells on a training dummy in the stronghold, the game’s hub area. Other players can show up there as you’re going through items and practicing your hero, which should help emulate what it’s like to show off your gear in a crowded MMO city.

A few of the developers and I jumped into Wraithtide Isles, a coastal dungeon filled with undead pirates and hungry sharks. There are several routes through the dungeon to leave room for experienced players to find shortcuts for their particular group of heroes. The goal is to clear out packs of enemies and make your way to the boss for a chance at loot.

New to this beta is the ability to tag an enemy as your interrupt target. WoW raiders know the pain of trying to coordinate who is responsible for making sure certain enemies don’t cast dangerous spells. You usually have to use add-ons or voice chat to pull it off, but Fellowship solves that problem by letting you hit a button to mark an enemy with your hero icon. It’ll even show how long you have left before you can use your interrupt ability again, so hopefully nobody blames you when things go awry.

Fellowship wants all your focus on controlling your hero and adapting to what the dungeon throws at you. I had to dodge pools of poison while trying to wear down all the tigers and evil plants we fought on the way to the first boss. As we battled our way forward, we found campfire checkpoints and eventually a bridge that led into the hull of a derelict pirate ship. Up on the deck, we fought a boss who would launch one of us to the back of the ship. As everyone else tried to stay out of her spinning blades, one player had to play Frogger with the ghosts of the crew as they ran back to the fight. 

The next boss was a treasure chest with arms sitting on a pile of gold. The developers referred to it as “the Katamari boss” because it spits out a ball of coins that grows as you roll it over piles of gold in the arena. The boss heals itself if the coins aren’t picked up, which means the tank player has to stay on top of it. It wasn’t a particularly hard mechanic to handle, but it was a fun example of how the Chief Rebel team is designing encounters to bend what each role is traditionally supposed to do. Tanks in MMOs are often stuck staring at a boss’ health bar while everyone else gets to run around.

We were running out of time and decided to skip to the final boss, but the developers showed me how the lead-up to him gives you a clue on how to avoid his most dangerous attack. If you happen to step into the water on the way, a shark will gnaw on your head until your teammates rip it off of you. And sure enough, halfway through the fight with First Mate Marrow, he raises the tide above the arena and sharks start swimming toward your group. All of us had to quickly tie ourselves to the anchor before the water rushed in, after which we all dodged the sharks together.

We ran Wraithtide Isles on the lowest difficulty, but the best items and upgrades come from pushing into harder versions of the dungeon that can change how the boss mechanics work. Fellowship is what happens when you turn WoW’s brutal Mythic dungeons into a whole game — which is sort of how the developers at Blizzard treat them already. As someone who would probably love the challenge of Mythics, but doesn’t really want to dedicate their life to an MMO, Fellowship might give me what I want without the hassle.

Chief Rebel has proven it has the chops to make a dungeon that is charming to learn with a strong foundation for more complexity on top. And compressing everything into 30-minute chunks makes it feel more like queueing for a match in a MOBA than logging into an MMO. I already want to try more heroes and see how they change the pace of a run, including the newly announced Tariq, a melee damage dealer who kind of plays like a rhythm game.

Fellowship’s open beta starts on Feb. 24 and Chief Rebel plans on launching the game in early access on Steam later this year.