Chief Rebel is ending seasonal content additions for Fellowship, its early access multiplayer dungeon runner, and redirecting the team toward fixing and refining what is already in the game ahead of a 1.0 release. The studio announced the change during a livestream, MassivelyOP reports.
The developers used the stream to review how the game's first three seasons had gone and to set out the problems they are facing. Those included falling player counts and the longer matchmaking queues that follow from them, alongside new players struggling with the MMORPG-style endgame concepts the game is built around. The team also acknowledged bugs that appeared during Season 3, which they attributed in part to the constraints of a small studio.
The onboarding problem is bound up with what Fellowship is. Chief Rebel describes the game as a MODA — a dungeon-running format that borrows its structure and its endgame vocabulary from MMORPGs rather than from the action games its combat resembles. MassivelyOP reports that newly arrived players have been bouncing off precisely that, arriving without the frame of reference the design assumes and leaving before the game's progression loop makes sense to them.
The plan to 1.0
The near-term work is bug fixing, followed by balance passes on abilities already in the game, and then quality-of-life improvements. The stated goal is to reduce the game's existing technical debt rather than add systems on top of it.
The developers also warned that updates will arrive more slowly than they have been. Chief Rebel is a small team in which many staff cover more than one role, and no firm dates were attached to any part of the plan — the studio referred only to the next several months.
MassivelyOP reports that players discussing the stream broadly agree the game needs a change of direction, but are divided on what it should be, with disagreement over how frequently updates should land and what the absence of seasonal content will do to the player base.
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