by Stow on Nov 02, 2011
Salem is one of those games that youre 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, were talking witches and witch hunts, much like the town of the games name.
But in their demo for us today, were talking witchcraft. Eye of newts, boiling cauldrons and all that jazz are involved in the crafting of one legendary item the Witchs 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 weve 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 timefairly accurate if you ask me.
While the game is still looking rather primitive, the concepts that theyre 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. Well be waiting to make our cauldrons bubble!