indybaggins

In this co-op ARPG, you and three friends battle your way through timed dungeon runs, collecting gear and gaining new abilities. As your power grows, you unlock higher difficulties that put new twists on what you've seen before. Enemies learn new attacks, bosses hit like trucks, and new mechanics like falling meteors and exploding ice will require you to adapt your strategies. The game doesn't end, it just keeps scaling up forever until you either reach the limit of your skills, get bored, or the game season resets and everyone goes back to square one.

In other words, this is the Mythic+ game mode from World of Warcraft, without the rest of the MMO. I think for people to whom that means something, the reaction tends to be pretty polarized, either "That sounds terrible" or "This is the game I've been wanting for ten years, TAKE MY MONEY!!" I definitely fall into the latter camp, and having now played the first season of early access, I am pleased to say that I'm having a great time.

( If the look and feel of the game were any closer to WoW, Blizzard would sue. )

Fellowship is on Steam for $24.99 USD. The second season of early access starts on February 19th, so that would be a convenient time to jump in since we'll all be starting from scratch again.

In the 32nd century, Captain Lorq Von Ray assembles a ragtag crew for a dangerous—some would say crazy—mission to harvest the superheavy element illyrion from a dying star. If they succeed, it would threaten tech megacorp Red-Shift's economic stranglehold on interstellar travel, inaugurating a new era of opportunity for struggling outer colonies. But Captain Von Ray's motives aren't just political, they're also personal, as flashbacks reveal his long history with the psychologically twisted brother-and-sister heirs to the Red-Shift fortune.

I really enjoyed this. The space opera plot is an effective backdrop for some nicely nuanced character work and social commentary. Money and class are still driving forces in this future, and people are shaped by that as much as they are by advancing technology and the cultural changes that have come with it. Besides the Captain and the Reds, the other focal characters are two crew members from Earth, one an emotionally guarded Romani kid who's gone against his people's prohibition on cybernetic implants to access job opportunities in space, and the other a socially awkward Harvard grad who has tens of thousands of notes for a novel (an ancient, dead art form) but hasn't yet written a single page. I love the development of their tentative friendship; it feels very honest about how hard it is to relate across cultural divides, and also very affectionate towards both characters. It's like the author is rooting for them even though he can't truthfully make it easy.

The worldbuilding really worked for me. There are enough surprising details and curious asides to make the galaxy feel lived-in and realistically messy, but not so many that it feels scattered. Delany has a very visual prose style and can convey exactly what he sees in his mind's eye, whether it's the unfurling sail of a glittering space yacht or the uneasy twitch of a character's cheek, and that adds to the vivid atmosphere.

I also appreciated the subtle exploration of disability in the context of a society where many things can be medically "fixed" that can't be in our own world. The author knows that this in itself would not "fix" people's attitudes about their own embodiment and others', and that elimination of bodily differences is not a utopian impulse. Characters are allowed to have complex feelings about their physical abilities—the ones they're born with, the ones they've lost, and the ones they've gained through technology—and aren't required to fully explain themselves just because other people want to know.

Criticisms? I think the book has too many characters; some of the less foregrounded crew members don't get much attention and it might have been better to drop a couple so we could spend more time with the rest. The role of female characters is particularly limited, and when they do appear, sometimes their boobs are mentioned for no reason. (I am of course aware that Delany is gay. Perhaps he was subconsciously influenced by what he was reading from other writers at the time.) Other than that, this was a good read.

Content note: A character's pet is harmed, but recovers.