Fellowship Interview: Discussing Player Feedback And Early Access Plans

We’re putting a lot of work into exactly this as we get ready for Early Access. It’s a tricky balance because we won’t know for sure how player behaviour will change between the Open Beta and when we open the doors for people to be able to play 24/7. In most games, players will tend towards picking DPS Heroes, and we’ve been really surprised that in Fellowship, that hasn’t been the case so far.

One of the big focuses for us is communicating more to players through our UI/UX additions that we’ve been adding recently, so they can understand what to expect when queueing in Fellowship.

Of course, we’ll need to look at the reality of player behaviour once Early Access starts and see if we need to implement changes or additional features to get people into Dungeons faster. We don’t want people to be waiting around!

To be honest, it’ll vary. There are some players that love a sharp, linear challenge and others that want to “go with the flow” when it comes to pathing. As we create new content, the team wants to add variations of both types and we’ll be keeping a really close eye on how players choose to take on our Dungeons that we’re offering from October 16th.

In most of our 3 boss Dungeons, there are different orders in which you can choose to take out the bosses and I can’t wait to see how players choose to take on those challenges. As with everything we do, if we notice that players prefer something, we’ll be adapting and taking on all of their feedback as we keep making new Dungeons for future content drops.

A Ranger like Elarion has been the most requested Hero from our Community, so there hasn’t been much concern that his role will overlap with anything we’ve offered so far. Generally, we’re focused on making the individual hero feel really tight in terms of their individual gameplay as a priority; if it’s fun to play, then we’ve succeeded.

The same goes for Talents. Our Designers are putting a lot of effort into offering interesting interactions rather than just flat damage increases where they can. The intent is that these Talent decisions should encourage different rotations, so if you like a particular ability, you can double down on specific builds that change the way you play.

When people try Elarion for the first time, I think they’ll agree that it feels very different, mostly in terms of mobility and how you output your damage. For example, compared to Rime or any Hero that has to stand still to finish a specific spellcast, Elarion doesn’t get interrupted by moving and can even roll around while using all of his ranged DPS abilities. I’m personally interested to see if, in our most difficult content, there are specific fights where this mobility is incredibly useful. We’ll see, but I think the Leaderboard race is going to be illuminating.

Fellowship is going into Early Access on Steam, which means we’re PC only for the time being. It would be incredible to be able to bring the game to console in the future, but we’re not focused on that right now.

The last test was crucial for us. If you were there, you likely experienced some issues in the first few days that we resolved relatively quickly. About halfway through the test, the team had managed to fix almost all of the issues that we picked up on the first few days and queue times were lightning fast after that.

I was actually streaming during that weekend, and it made me so happy to show our community that I managed to queue into our Challenge mode, and the queue time was only 1 second. The team is determined to keep these queue times down, and we’re going to be doing some private testing with our community all the way up until Early Access launches, so we can be as ready as we possibly can.

With Fellowship, we’re a live game first, so it’s impossible for us to consider anything final. That being said, we got a lot of incredible data from the test that we’ve been using to continue to balance these fights. There were outliers with boss abilities that were not working as intended, and we actually managed to hotfix those during the test, and because our team is really small and agile, that’s something that we’ll continue to do after Early Access.

As you get higher up in the Leagues, we want the fights to be challenging and something that players will need to invest some time into learning strategies, collecting gear and eventually completing. There’s a real difference when we’re talking about balance when we look at a completely different timescale.

The Open Beta only lasted for 6 days, and we’re now going into a true live phase where it’s a completely different beast. This is why Early Access is so important for us, because it will really be the first time we can balance around real, longer-term player behaviour that is more representative of how people will play Fellowship in the long run.

Like I mentioned, we’ll need to look at player behaviour with the dynamics that happen in Early Access, but what I think we’ll see is that most people (not all of course!) won’t be in such a rush to complete absolutely everything they can before the servers go down.

Already in the game, players are able to choose or vote for content that suits their intended difficulty, and they can spend account-wide tokens to purchase gear that will help them in Challenge mode. The risk of allowing people to solo-queue for absolutely any content would potentially create smurfing dynamics that trivialise the content for others, and we definitely want to avoid that. If players want to create a group, queue up together and take on lower-level content, they’ll be free to do so and can earn resources and gear that might help them take on more difficult content too.

There was one I actually saw recently that players asked for in the Open Beta! We now have a tab where players will be able to see their ratings for each individual dungeon, so they can see what challenges they might want to focus on next.

Also, it may seem small, but I know a lot of people asked for it. It’ll now be very easy to find yourself on the Leaderboard with some recent changes we’ve made.

We couldn’t agree more. Our team has been testing Fellowship on a wide range of PC hardware for years, including a rig in the office that I like to call the “potato,” which actually has worse specs than our minimum requirements listed on Steam! Aside from some edge-case DirectX bugs we saw reported in the Open Beta, the performance of the game has been great for all of our players. We also don’t subscribe to the notion that 30fps is good enough, so that’s why we’re constantly optimising our game to hit 60fps on some very modest hardware. If you have a PC with a GPU similar to or better than an Nvidia GTX 1660 Super (which came out in 2019) and 8GB of RAM paired with a modest Intel Core i5-2500K or AMD FX-8300 CPU, then you’ll have no issues running Fellowship.

There’s obviously a big road ahead, and we really want to push how visually impressive Fellowship will be in the future, and we can’t wait to show new Dungeons with incredible new art. As we work on these things though, we’ll be making sure we meet and exceed that 60fps target every time.

We’ve always said that Fellowship is a game that we want to make with and for our community, so while 6 months is a target for us, it’s very possible that this date could be adjusted depending on the feedback we get. In terms of priorities during Early Access, at the top of the list is game health. If our game isn’t running perfectly for our players, we will be getting that fixed before we prioritise anything else, always. Beyond that, I’d say there are two main priorities: UX (making sure the in-game experience and how we communicate information to players is frictionless) and then creating as many new Heroes and Dungeons as we can. Fellowship is really just at the start of its journey, and I’m personally excited about what a big roster of Heroes would do for our game. It’ll change the whole thing completely, and I can’t wait.