With Fellowship, a new co-op game has launched on Steam that aimed to provide dungeons like those in an MMORPG, but without the downsides that the genre entails. However, the launch went quite poorly in typical MMO fashion.
What kind of game is this? Fellowship is a co-op dungeon crawler and refers to itself as a Multiplayer Online Dungeon Adventure (MODA for short). With up to 4 players per group, you can fight bosses and monsters in dungeons just like in an MMORPG.
They function just as one is used to from the genre and also provide loot and experience points with which to improve your character. However, what the MODA skips is the typical leveling phase, as well as daily tasks or prolonged introductions.
The developers’ goal is to let players fight through dungeons without detours and to always provide a challenge through increasing difficulty levels. However, Fellowship does not forgo a typical start like in an MMO.
Here you can watch the trailer for the game:
Release issues despite beta testing
How did the release go? On October 16, 2025, Fellowship started its Early Access on Steam. Currently priced at €22.05 instead of €24.50, you can buy and play the MODA, and there are also cosmetic DLCs available if you want to support the developers.
However, the release went really poorly. Shortly after the launch, the servers were overloaded and players could only stare at the loading screen (via Reddit). For hours, the developers tried to fix the problems, but it was only in the early morning hours, when player load had significantly decreased, that they managed to stabilize the situation.
However, with every hour of waiting, players became more impatient and vented their frustration on various platforms. The developers stated that they needed extensive moderation tools on Discord to keep the angry mob in check.
Also on Steam, many players temporarily rated the MODA negatively and advised against purchasing it. Currently, Fellowship has only a rating of “Mixed” with 64% positive reviews. However, this is not the first time that such issues have arisen. This topic had already come up in the beta.
How did the beta go? Already at the start of the beta, the developers faced very similar problems. The surge of players on the servers caused them to crash, leading to long wait times. This resulted in the community manager of the game having to go live on Twitch to calm the fans.
He also explained that the beta test was meant precisely for that, to test the servers and the infrastructure in general before the release begins. However, despite their experiences from the test, the developers could not prevent the way the release went.
While on Reddit newer posts speak of good gameplay after the long wait, many players are disappointed with the situation after the release.
It remains to be seen whether Fellowship can fight its way back to a better rating on Steam with good content. With over 20,000 players at launch (via SteamDB), there are plenty who are interested in the MODA. Even MeinMMO author Cedric Holmeier found the co-op game good in testing with the developers: If you love endgame in MMORPGs, a game on Steam offers you plenty of it, but there is a catch
