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| Autumn Leaves |
I am usually not a great fan of Sandbox MMOs. My main perception of them is that you spend a lot of time with creating stuff, which is usually implemented as a toolbar filling up slowly, while you can't really move or do other things. As a casual player with a very limited amount of time to play on an average evening, I feel that this is the waste of my precious time. ("Look, I crafted a wheel! It only took the whole week!")
This was my original approach towards Salem too. After receiving the beta invite, I was pondering for two days whether I should register at all. The reason why I finally decided to do it was this
video series, in which a very annoying guy explains how Salem works. So I downloaded and jumped in. Here are my observations:
As this is still an early beta, the lack of polish is very apparent, but it's not a huge issue for me. On the other hand, I've come across a surprisingly low amount of bugs, which is a compliment for the developer team.
I have seen some other players in the starting area. This is bad news in a crafting MMO where - at least, at the beginning - you get most of your stuff by wandering about and picking up this-and-that. Obviously, if a number of players are doing this, the resources will be hard to come by. Obviously, this means that if you find an area where there were no others for a while, you will be able to collect a lot of resources at once. A lot in our case is a number less than 16, as that is the maximum amount you can put in your bag. At least, in the beginning.
There are three type of items you can collect: Resources, Food and Study items. One item can be of more than one type though, for example most of the raw food items can be eaten or processed, and similarly, you can use a smooth stone for both studying and crafting.
This is pretty much the three pillars of the game: Crafting, Eating and Studying. These are all interconnected, of course: You need your Humours (fluids) to be able craft, and to replenish those you need to eat something. Studying leads you to new recipes and ways to find food, and with Crafting you can create a lot of stuff, including several food and inspirational items (which are used for studying)
I am pretty sure combat is also somewhere in the picture, but, believe it or not, I didn't (or actually couldn't) kill a single thing while I was playing yesterday.
Crafting, for some reason, is not as boring as I was expecting it. It takes a lot to collect some ingredients, but when you finally have them, it takes a really short time to put it together. I like it, as most of my time was spent with exploration instead of waiting for the green bar to finish.
While I found the Humour system interesting, the thing that hooked me up the most was the Study system. You have a lot of different spheres, for example, gathering or animal lore. Let's say you want to learn fishing, which requires you to study both of these up to 400 points. This means that you need to collect or craft study items, and after studying them - which takes some time, but you are not blocked in the meantime - you can learn the Fishing skill by simply clicking on the Buy button below it. The other possibility is to extend these bars: you have a maximum score one bar can hold, and if you fill it up, and click on it, it will advance one level up, so that you can study the given topic better. Simply put, study gives you points that you can either spend on learning new skills, or extending your study bar.
But there is a catch: When you do either of this, ALL of your bars will be empty afterwards. So, there are no situations when you fill up all your bars, and then learn six skills in one sittings.
I see a lot of possibilities in this game. Of course, I might just get bored with it very soon, but this is certainly a very special game, and I'd like to see what will it become by the time it is published.
