Welcome to the Campfire Checkpoint!
Hello my Fellows,
We’re back with another Campfire Checkpoint following our latest Fellowship Roundtable.
This time I was joined by Game Designer Will to talk through our latest patch, some of the reasoning behind the changes, a first look at Multi-Hero Queuing, and a huge stack of questions submitted by the community. We got through all of the ones we had selected but it definitely wasn’t a short stream. I’ve got a summary for you below for those that prefer the written word.
As we continue working towards Fellowship 1.0, a lot of the team’s attention is now focused on larger improvements to the overall player experience. That doesn’t mean we want to sit on changes that can make the game better right now, so let’s start with the latest patch! If you missed the stream, you can catch it here:
REFLECTIONS ON THE PATCH
QUALITY OF LIFE
A big focus for the team recently has been improving the overall experience of simply playing Fellowship.
Most of the team are now working on larger pieces of work for 1.0, but there are still changes we can make along the way that we don’t want to hold back unnecessarily.
That includes smaller Quality of Life improvements, changes inspired by our new Developer Discussion threads over on Discord, and some adjustments to Heroes based on the feedback Ambjörn has been collecting from all of you.
This patch certainly isn’t the end of that work. There are already other features in development that simply need more time to cook.
FASTER UI
One of the less flashy changes in the patch might also be my favourite.
We’ve made optimizations to the loading of tabbed UI screens so the game now only loads the information you’re actually looking at rather than everything associated with that screen.
You can check out this analysis that I put together over in our Dev Insights channel on Discord.
Anything that now runs at more than double the speed is a win in my book!
There’s more optimization work to be done, but improving the responsiveness of the UI is definitely something we want to continue working on.
BIGGER COMMUNITIES
The maximum Community size has been doubled from 100 to 200 players.
This was a relatively straightforward change that we’ve wanted to try for a while, so we’ll be keeping an eye on how larger Communities perform and whether any new problems appear as a result.
GOING OVERTIME WON'T REDUCE YOUR LOOT
We’ve been talking to a lot of you to find out the biggest reasons as to why you would abandon a Dungeon. Of course, we know that there are always going to be groups pushing at the very highest levels who know relatively early that a run won’t achieve what they set out to do (and they aren’t really needing the loot anyway).
But we also repeatedly heard another problem:
Once a Dungeon was going overtime, there often wasn’t enough reason to stay.
Not only had the group missed its original goal, but the quality of the loot waiting at the end was also being reduced.
That felt like we were punishing players twice.
With this update, your loot will no longer be downgraded simply because you don’t time the Dungeon.
It’s not intended to magically solve every issue around leavers, but it gives players another reason to finish what they started and, importantly, gives groups a chance to fail forward. Even if the run didn’t go according to plan, you can still walk away with the upgrade or crafting opportunity that helps you succeed next time.
We’ll be watching both feedback and player behaviour to see what effect the change has.
REFORGING AND ACCIDENTAL SCRAPPING
The long awaited Reforging has arrived!
Throughout Early Access, we’ve added several protections to the Scrapper after players accidentally destroyed items they wanted to keep. We changed colours. We moved things around. We added confirmation prompts. We basically put flashing warning signs everywhere we reasonably could. Now though, you’ll essentially be able to un-scrap items if you realise you’ve made a mistake (we’ve all done it!)
For now, the additional confirmation will remain in place while players become familiar with Reforging. Our intention is not to keep all of those additional steps forever as we work on cleaner overall UX.
If Reforging achieves what we hope and accidental scrapping becomes significantly less common, we’d like to simplify that experience again in a future update.
AUTO-TARGETING ENEMIES IN COMBAT
After a particularly effective community campaign for this one, auto-targeting enemies while in combat is now enabled for everyone.
Thanks to everyone who made their voices heard. You were right.
DEVELOPER DISCUSSIONS ON DISCORD
It’s also been a little while since we introduced our Developer Discussion threads on Discord, so we wanted to give you an update on how they’re going.
Tl;dr… They’ve been extremely useful.
Some topics have generated a lot of conversation and having a focused place for developers to ask specific questions has already influenced design discussions and balance changes internally.
Ambjörn in particular has found the Hero feedback incredibly useful and intends to continue asking more targeted questions around areas such as Talents and Legendaries.
Our goal is also to close the loop more effectively.
When a Developer Discussion wraps up and we have meaningful context to share, we want to use our Dev Insights channels to talk about what we learned, what we intend to act on and, where appropriate, why certain suggestions may not be moving forward.
Thanks to everyone who’s been contributing over there. We’ll have more things we want to start talking about soon.
FIRST LOOK: MULTI-HERO QUEUING
Unfortunately, Multi-Hero Queuing wasn’t quite ready to make it into this patch but it’s absolutely still being worked on and probably one of the features I’m most excited about.
The basic idea is simple: “I just want to run a Dungeon. Here are the Heroes and Leagues I’m happy to play.”
The complexity comes from everything happening underneath that request, especially when you go beyond just solving it for solo queue players.
Each of your Heroes can have completely different progression and once you factor in other group members that you have in your party, each player might also have access to different Leagues on different Heroes. You can see how that skyrockets the complexity compared to just our solo queue example.
Because of this conundrum, we’re taking the opportunity to rethink some of the underlying matchmaking logic rather than continuing to bolt additional exceptions onto the existing system.
Our prototype currently allows you to:
Select multiple Heroes you’re willing to play
Select eligible Leagues for those Heroes
Set preferences such as Odd Comp
Quickly toggle between your normal queue settings and your Multi-Hero settings
See more information about how far each Hero has progressed
We also want to start treating your collection of Heroes more like exactly that: a collection.
Being able to quickly see which Heroes you’ve progressed furthest or which are your fledgeling alts should make switching between them a much more natural part of Fellowship.
There’s still UI, matchmaking and QA work remaining before we can get this out to our players, but we’re very excited about the direction. If you want to see the work-in-progress footage from our stream, you can check it here.
GLORY TO THE FELLOWSHIP
An incredible initiative run by PoufHGaming Our community is lucky to have people like Pouf running incredible community initiatives like this. Now in it's second incarnation, Glory to the Fellowship gets players to try out unique achievements that go well beyond the type of challenges you'd usually expect. Hilarious, challenging gameplay ensues and you can be a part of it too by signing up over here. This is the kind of stuff you can expect from this awesome initiative:
COMMUNITY Q&A
We had a lot of questions this time, so let’s get into them.
Are you moving away from the current “EHP Season” for Tanks and Healers?
That’s the goal.
Ambjörn is actively looking at this area and we’re aware of the effect the current balance has on both Tanks and Healers.
It isn’t something that can be completely reworked overnight, but this is an area we intend to move away from.
Why aren’t you releasing a new Hero with Fellowship 1.0?
We agree that a new Hero is, for a lot of people, one of the most exciting pieces of content we can release. Adding a new Hero to the roster doesn’t just mean a new character. It changes rotations, group compositions, encounter interactions and gives experienced players another reason to approach existing content differently.
It also requires significant work across Design, Art, Animation and much of the rest of the development team.
For 1.0, we made the decision to put those resources into broader improvements to the game instead.
That means Quality of Life, existing systems, the new-player experience and refreshing the content that Fellowship already has. We’d rather do that than rush a Hero that isn’t ready simply because we feel like 1.0 needs one.
We absolutely still have ideas for Heroes we’d love to make in the future, including some considerably weirder ones.
Will mentioned Two Orcs in a trench coat and I think we should hold him to it.
Could the lower Leagues become Free-to-Play?
Technically, there are ways something like this could work.
For example, Fellowship could hypothetically offer part of the progression for free before unlocking additional content through a purchase and treat the paid content as DLC.
But that would represent a significant change to the entire business model of the game.
Once part of Fellowship becomes permanently Free-to-Play, that’s not a decision we can easily reverse and we would need to consider what experience we’re building for those players, how monetisation works and whether that portion of the game starts feeling more like a demo than a complete experience.
So while the idea is interesting, there are currently no plans to move Fellowship to this model.
Are you considering squishing the number of Leagues or Eternal difficulties?
There are actually two related experiments happening here.
The first is around scaling.
We’re testing ways for players at very different progression levels to play together while each experiences numbers and difficulty appropriate to their own character.
For example, a veteran player might see themselves dealing thousands of damage while a newer player sees values appropriate to their level but both players would ultimately be contributing a similar percentage of damage to the same enemy.
If we can make that work well, it opens the door to a much more accessible part of Fellowship where players can simply play together without progression separating them into increasingly small matchmaking pools.
That ties into a larger direction we’re exploring for 1.0 where we aim to separate learning and horizontal progression from the competitive climb.
We want the early Fellowship experience to be about things like:
Learning your Hero
Unlocking abilities
Trying different Dungeons
Learning encounters
Playing with friends
Experimenting with gear
Then Eternal can become a clearer destination for players who actively want to push difficulty and compete.
We’re also asking whether Eternal itself really needs massive amounts of granular difficulty levels it currently contains. We think you’ll agree, it doesn’t. Fewer, more meaningful difficulty steps is something we’re discussing. None of this is final yet, but it’s an area receiving a lot of attention.
Are you planning a physical Collector’s Edition for 1.0?
Unfortunately, no.
We’d love things like physical art books and other Fellowship merchandise, but producing and distributing those products has a significant overhead for a team our size.
We’ve experimented with external merchandise partners before (including the ill-fated Sylvie plushie campaign) so never say never, but there’s nothing currently planned for 1.0.
Will there be more advertising and creator partnerships for 1.0?
We’ve worked with creators and streamers previously and we absolutely see the value in doing more of that.
Marketing plans are something we develop together with our publisher, so we don’t have a campaign to announce today, but creator partnerships are certainly something we’re interested in continuing.
Will Fellowship ever get more lore?
Maybe!
From the beginning, Fellowship was deliberately designed without requiring a large traditional narrative. We don’t currently have dedicated Narrative Designers creating lore bibles, quests and an overarching story.
There have been ideas around telling smaller stories through item descriptions, locations, gods, Legendary names and other pieces of flavour text. We like the Dark Souls approach for that one. The challenge is less a lack of interest and more finding the development resources to maintain a coherent world rather than adding disconnected snippets of lore.
We agree it could be cool, though.
Could Fellowship have rotating weekly challenges?
We’re very interested in the idea of rotating challenges that keep the game feeling fresh.
One thing we need to be extremely careful about is creating additional matchmaking buckets that fragment players even further. That’s a no-go for us.
However, seeing how players responded to the Pinnacle showed us that there’s value in having optional side challenges outside of the normal progression structure.
Something smaller that changes regularly could be an interesting direction and we’re definitely talking about that in the office.
Will you publish a roadmap from Early Access to 1.0?
I can totally understand why people would want one. But, at the same time, we’ve seen roadmaps across the industry become lists of marketing promises that development teams later struggle to meet. There are also still decisions being made internally about exactly what will and won’t be part of Fellowship 1.0.
Rather than publishing a roadmap that’s either vague or forces the development team into commitments before we’re ready, we’d rather continue the approach we’ve been taking with these Roundtables.
We want to tell you what we’re working on, explain our thinking and show things when they’re far enough along for us to have a meaningful conversation about them. There may be a stronger argument for a more traditional content roadmap once 1.0 itself is established.
As for the release date for 1.0? We still don’t have a date to announce but when we have something concrete enough to share, we’ll be very loud about it.
What does Chief Rebel see as the biggest causes of players leaving Fellowship?
Based on the feedback and data we’ve been looking at, there are two major areas we need to address.
Queue Times
This is absolutely the biggest one. At a base level, players just want to play Fellowship but far too often they enter matchmaking and discover that there simply isn’t another group of players looking for exactly the same thing at the same time.
That’s why so much of our current work with Multi-League Queuing, Multi-Hero Queuing and some of our 1.0 experiments are focused on the same goal of just “letting people play”.
Friction Between Players with Different Goals
A lot of the time one player wants to run a particular Dungeon, another needs a particular piece of gear, another is pushing rating and the other is happy just to play anything.
Putting all of those players into the same group can create friction when the game doesn’t give them enough control over finding people who want the same thing.
That can manifest as leaving, dodging and rerolling Dungeons or behaviour other players perceive as toxic. There probably isn’t one magic feature that solves both of these problems. It may take a combination of matchmaking improvements, better ways to target content and other tools but these are two of the biggest structural issues we believe need to improve.
What is your stance on community tools and add-ons?
Our intention remains that players should have the information and tools they need inside Fellowship.
We don’t want external add-ons to become necessary to compete or for players who use third-party tools to gain a meaningful advantage over those who don’t.
Community tools that repeatedly request information directly from our servers also create another technical concern. We currently don’t provide a structured public API with things like authentication and rate limits, so tools pulling information from our backend, as awesome as they might be, could potentially impact the game itself.
Why can’t I reconnect to a Pinnacle Dungeon?
You absolutely should be able to. Thanks to this question, we actually managed to identify a bug. There was no intentional design preventing players from reconnecting to Pinnacle and it turns out the issue was on the backend.
It has now been fixed.
Are you improving the Dungeon Codex?
Yes.
We want the Dungeon Codex to provide more useful information about encounters and mechanics so players have somewhere in-game to prepare before entering a Dungeon.
There’s more work to do here, but improving the Codex is definitely the goal.
Are you going to improve Odd Comp?
Yes.
We know some Odd Comp combinations can currently run into mechanics that they simply don’t have the right tools to reasonably deal with. No healers but you need to dispel Heartstopper? We know how that goes.
We want to improve both the experience of playing Odd Comp and the way it interacts with progression.
Ambjörn also intends to open a dedicated Developer Discussion around the topic so we can get more focused feedback from players who regularly engage with the system.
Could lower Leagues use AI teammates when matchmaking is difficult?
We’d love competent AI companions. The problem is that creating bots capable of playing Fellowship properly is an enormous project.
A Fellowship bot doesn’t just need to attack enemies. It needs to understand different roles, how to heal, tank, dps, how to interrupt, positioning, mechanics, routes, coordination… it’s wildly complex. At that point, you’re building an enormous system that could fundamentally change how the entire game is designed.
For 1.0, we believe improving scaling and allowing players at different progression levels to meaningfully play together is a much more achievable way of tackling the same underlying problem.
Could players return to previous difficulties later in a Season?
Giving players more control over the difficulty they want to play is something we’re looking at. Right now, Fellowship tends to continually push you upward, even if you reach a point where you’d actually prefer to play something lower.
That becomes particularly problematic later in a Season when players are spread across Contender, Adept, Champion, Paragon and every Eternal difficulty.
Combined with features like Multi-Hero/League Queuing, we want to put more choice into players’ hands and make Fellowship considerably friendlier to alts.
Does Fellowship have too many item modifiers?
We don’t necessarily think the amount is the core problem. The problem is how and when we present them to you.
Loot 2.0 was deliberately designed to increase the number of potentially interesting items rather than having a single obvious BiS piece that makes everything else instant scrap.
But that also means players can suddenly be confronted with stats, gems, blessings, traits, set bonuses etc. all at the same time. We’re looking at whether those concepts should instead appear gradually as you progress through Fellowship.
Crafting is another important part of this conversation. The variety can be interesting, but players need better, more deterministic ways to interact with that variety and turn an “ok item” into the item they actually want.
What are you doing to improve the new-player experience?
This is an extremely important part of our work as we head towards 1.0. Getting someone interested enough to buy and launch your game is already difficult and then immediately presenting them with an indecipherable wall of systems afterwards doesn’t help anyone.
Through Early Access, Fellowship has assumed a reasonable amount of familiarity with games in this genre but we need to do better for players who don’t already have that knowledge.
One of our focuses is onboarding through complexity rather than just number-based progression. The Leagues should strategically onboard players so they’re ready for the type of coordinated play expected in Eternal.
The same applies to systems like crafting and itemisation: introduce concepts when players are ready for them rather than requiring them to understand everything immediately.
Just as importantly, experienced players shouldn’t be forced through that onboarding every time they start another Hero. That’s something we’ve heard a lot in your feedback.
What surprised you most from the Hero feedback threads?
For Ambjörn, some of the most interesting feedback has been around Talents and Legendaries. We’ve seen through our Dev Discussion threads that there have been opinions and playstyles that didn’t necessarily appear when reading the usual Hero channels.
In particular, there have been some interesting differences in what individual players consider boring, ineffective or not worth using.
What about Sir Bombastic?
While looking at existing content that could be refreshed or brought back for 1.0, Sir Bombastic has naturally come up. We haven’t nailed down a plan yet but it would be criminal to not include Sir Bombastic soon. Will has placed a completely hypothetical pile of Rupees on Sir Bombastic finding his way back into Fellowship for 1.0.
Please interpret responsibly.
Could Seasons become shorter?
This is something we’re talking about. One of the patterns we see is that after the initial weeks of a Season, many players reach the point they personally wanted to achieve. For some players, Eternal is a race and a race needs a finish line. They want to know when the leaderboard is being recorded and when they’ve “won” that particular competition.
Other players don’t care about that at all. They simply want to continue pushing their personal best, collecting loot or having fun with their friends. For these players, full gear wipes are problematic.
That means a reset doesn’t necessarily need to wipe everyone’s progression.
We’re discussing ideas such as shorter competitive windows, fresh Leaderboards, soft resets or even potentially opt-in systems (think Prestige-type things) where competitive players can restart a particular climb without forcing everyone else to do the same.
We need to settle some of the broader 1.0 progression structure first, but more frequent ways to refresh Eternal are absolutely something we’d love to do.
Are more UI and party-frame improvements coming?
For sure. Things like better focus targeting, control over buff tracking, party-frame scaling and other UI improvements are all areas where there’s more work we can do.
We’ve already started using Developer Discussions to collect more targeted feedback around some of these topics.
Can Eternal progression have more meaningful rewards?
The original trim rewards were created when Fellowship had far fewer ways to express progression and status. Since then we’ve added things like, Titles, Profile Icons, Banners etc.
That gives us a much bigger toolbox to work with.
The tricky part is finding rewards that feel genuinely prestigious while they’re active without making players feel like something valuable has been stolen from them when the next competitive period begins.
WHAT COMES NEXT?
There’s a lot happening at Chief Rebel right now. The latest patch is only one part of a much larger push towards Fellowship 1.0, and we hope today’s summary gives you a better idea of some of the problems we’re trying to solve along the way if you didn’t manage to sit through the mammoth stream this week.
Thanks again to everyone who joined the Roundtable, submitted questions, contributed to the Developer Discussions or simply continues to play Fellowship and tell us what you think.
There’s plenty more to come.
Until next time! /The Chief Rebel Devs
