Items can be had in a couple different ways as well. You can either buy them from the Hudson Bay Co (virtual currency), crafted or, well, stolen. Since the game is going to be free-to-play, they have to make money somewhere and that’s going to be in time savers, consumables, inspirationals, etc. Clothing will have combat relevant stats on it as well and there will be buffs on that to give you an edge. The Hudson Bay Co will be present in the starting area, Boston, and handles trade with Europe, etc. That allows players to sell things for silver as well as buy other items like food. The company also taxes land and such so you have to pay some upkeep as well. There will be no selling of direct power in the game in order to maintain game balance.
In fact, there might even be Wanted posters and perhaps even some disguise ability etc. Since there are no names in the game you can give everyone arbitrary names like tool, griefer, loser. You can also color code them to your taste so that you can identify them immediately.
Don’t you want to totally play this game now? Well you’ll have to wait for a bit yet as the expected release is just sometime in 2012. They say they’ve managed 1500 players on a single server and the largest village thus far is about 100. But villages can also form alliances between them and that makes more of a clan-like structure. There’s no formal diplomacy, alliance or guild system in the game and since players can just do it, there’s no real need. The same thing goes for bounties. You could just post a message on the forums offering a bounty on another player and when someone kills them, you can hand over the bounty. Then again, you could also not pay the bounty. But if you hired someone to kill another player, and they did, would you really want to not pay them? They’d obviously be ready to do you ill as well.
Witchcraft! I told you there would be a whole other paragraph about it. So in this system you create curses and then apply them to items. The curses are, of course, made up of historicaly components like wing of bat and eye of newt, etc. That item is then cursed and things will go awry when used, which then lets you gain dark energy from it. Through that system you can then cast other spells and fly brooms etc. Of course, it’s a crime to be a witch and so whenever you do some of this it will leave a clue which can be found and witch hunters can come after you and burn you as a witch. I hope they force you to actually build a pyre piece by piece to burn one. Also, if you do burn a witch, you’ll be guilty of murder. So perhaps they need to put into place a court of public opinion or something to determine if one is a witch. Does she float? Then she’s made of wood (or a duck)! She must be a witch!
The exhiliration of trying to survive as a criminal in the game appeals to me. It’s not really the goal of the game. In fact, there’s little in way of goals actually as it’s more like Harvest Moon than an MMO with an end game. Everything is persistent including furniture in houses and such as well as the world itself. It sounds entirely possible that someone could enter your house and then steal some smaller items. You’ll need an indoors area so that you can do certain crafts and so that the items won’t decay quickly. The same goes for food, it will decay slower in a cellar than out in the open.
This might sound silly, but Salem is one of the games that I’m looking forward to the most because it has the most possibilities due of its open-endedness. That’s not to say I’m not looking forward to other games published by Paradox, I think that this is by far the quirkiest and I sure hope I get into the beta when they’re ready... because I want to murder the other players MUAHAHAHA!
Genre: Massive Multiplayer Online Crafting RPG
Platform: Online
Developer: Seatribe
Publisher: Paradox Interactive
US SRP: NA
US Release date: 2011
System Requirements: TBC
