Salem is one of those games that you’re not going to hear about unless someone plays it and tells you about it. Born from a tiny little office and a few guys with a vision, we’re talking witches and witch hunts, much like the town of the game’s name.
But in their demo for us today, we’re talking witchcraft. Eye of newts, boiling cauldrons and all that jazz are involved in the crafting of one legendary item – the Witch’s Broom.

The Cauldron

Witchcraft initially works like a craft in most MMORPGs. You grab a handful of ingredients, throw them into a pot, and voila, you have a curse, a hat, a broom, or whatever else you feel is mandatory for a witch. The process was not gone into detail much at all, but the end result was obvious.

A broom mount. Finally, this is what we’ve been lacking in all of these Salem demos!

The Resource

Much more interesting though, was the actual practice and how it is being implemented into the game. Using any form of witchcraft costs a witch specific resource, which is gained by more or less using witchcraft on other players. Of course, this sounds like a prime time to fire up some alts and bot the hell out of this to generate infinite witchcrafting.

No such luck. Not only is the art subject to diminishing returns on the same player, but you actually gain more the further away the target lives. So if you curse someone across the lake, you get a hell of a lot more satisfaction than turning your neighbor into a frog for the 15th time—fairly accurate if you ask me.

While the game is still looking rather primitive, the concepts that they’re playing with such as this and the oft-mentioned permadeath that the hardcore audience seeks are really cool and unique. God bless you, indie MMORPG developers. We’ll be waiting to make our cauldrons bubble!


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Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

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