More involved PvE
Posted: Fri Mar 22, 2013 9:33 pmBeen playing since the start of the open beta, and I am now hitting the real-time wall of more advanced industries. When you first start playing Salem, things move along at a brisk pace, as you forage around, quickly pick up low-cost low-level skills, and build and craft low-level stuff. This is great, as it makes for addicting, interesting gameplay of "just one more skill". However, once you get to mid to late stages of the progression tree, things really slow down. Skills, proficiencies and crafting/building stuff costs a LOT more, requiring you to spend much more time for every single thing, but even more, real-time waiting kicks in for pretty much everything. You plant a farm, it takes 4 real days to grow (less with fertilizers, but still), you want to smelt iron, you need coal, which takes 3 real days to make, you want to be a carpenter, wood takes 4 real days to dry, and so on. Now, I am not arguing against it, as I am sure there are reasons for it (e.g. without it, everything would just be too easy to make and too common, ruining the economy), but what it does is create a lot of downtime for the player. Even if you are managing several advanced industries, you will still have days of waiting, which is boring. Of course you can use that time to get into PvP but practically speaking, I think that's not feasible for most players. With permadeath, and so much to lose, most players will wait a long time before they even dare to fight with others (to build up their humors, etc), thus pushing off PvP for a long while, making it irrelevant to this discussion, and also, many players just are not into randomly attacking others for the heck of it, so unless Salem later on has some kind of PvP structure where your side is constantly fighting another side, this is again not very relevant to the average player looking for something to do.
So I really believe that Salem needs more involving PvE elements (ala combat, exploration vs NPC mobs). Most of us playing Salem are probably tired of the endless pointless combat against mobs prevalent in other MMORPGs, such as World of Warcraft, Everquest, etc, but that's one extreme side of the spectrum. Salem doesn't need to be on the other extreme side. I am not suggesting adding pointless kill 20 of this quests or anything, but rather following the sandbox dynamic theme of Salem and adding more PvE content to it. More animals would certainly help, especially if some of them would be aggressive and actively hunt the player, such as packs of wolves, cougars. This would give the player more to do, such as defend themselves from these threats, as well as more interesting, exciting hunting options. But to really create interesting gameplay, I think you need a much more serious, dynamic, threatening challenge. What I was thinking of, in the theme of the game's pilgrim setting, is something like the presence of various Native American tribes in Salem, controlled by the computer/server. Maybe the devs already have some plan for these in the future, but since there doesn't seem to be much information available, I'll just lay out the general idea of what I am talking about.
Some of these tribes could be friendly, some neutral and some hostile. Exploring the world and finding the friendly tribes could yield some benefits via trade. Neutral tribes perhaps could be persuaded to become friendly to all Pilgrims via friendly actions, while hostile actions would turn them against not just the perpetrators, but Pilgrims in general. This would also probably be better off being dynamic (e.g. tribes moving in or dying off) to keep things interesting over time. Hostile tribes would carry out raids against Pilgrims based within a certain radius of the tribe's village, or attack Pilgrims on sight when out hunting or whatever. Occasionally, due to Pilgrim actions or maybe randomly, various hostile tribes would unite into a massive host and go on the warpath over a large territory, destroying and killing on a more massive scale. All of this would encourage players to band together during those times to fight back the enemy and defend their homesteads, but then there would be periods of quiet (just smaller raids, that a well armed player or settlement could fight off on their own) when players could go back to PvP.
I've seen the developers mention somewhere that they want to keep Salem completely player driven, and that's a commendable goal, but the problem is that 1) there is somewhat of a paradox in that to have an interesting and dynamic PvP, you need a certain level of server population, and to get that, you need interesting PvE and 2) as mentioned before, with the downtime in crafting/building, players will really need something else to do to keep them here.
So I really believe that Salem needs more involving PvE elements (ala combat, exploration vs NPC mobs). Most of us playing Salem are probably tired of the endless pointless combat against mobs prevalent in other MMORPGs, such as World of Warcraft, Everquest, etc, but that's one extreme side of the spectrum. Salem doesn't need to be on the other extreme side. I am not suggesting adding pointless kill 20 of this quests or anything, but rather following the sandbox dynamic theme of Salem and adding more PvE content to it. More animals would certainly help, especially if some of them would be aggressive and actively hunt the player, such as packs of wolves, cougars. This would give the player more to do, such as defend themselves from these threats, as well as more interesting, exciting hunting options. But to really create interesting gameplay, I think you need a much more serious, dynamic, threatening challenge. What I was thinking of, in the theme of the game's pilgrim setting, is something like the presence of various Native American tribes in Salem, controlled by the computer/server. Maybe the devs already have some plan for these in the future, but since there doesn't seem to be much information available, I'll just lay out the general idea of what I am talking about.
Some of these tribes could be friendly, some neutral and some hostile. Exploring the world and finding the friendly tribes could yield some benefits via trade. Neutral tribes perhaps could be persuaded to become friendly to all Pilgrims via friendly actions, while hostile actions would turn them against not just the perpetrators, but Pilgrims in general. This would also probably be better off being dynamic (e.g. tribes moving in or dying off) to keep things interesting over time. Hostile tribes would carry out raids against Pilgrims based within a certain radius of the tribe's village, or attack Pilgrims on sight when out hunting or whatever. Occasionally, due to Pilgrim actions or maybe randomly, various hostile tribes would unite into a massive host and go on the warpath over a large territory, destroying and killing on a more massive scale. All of this would encourage players to band together during those times to fight back the enemy and defend their homesteads, but then there would be periods of quiet (just smaller raids, that a well armed player or settlement could fight off on their own) when players could go back to PvP.
I've seen the developers mention somewhere that they want to keep Salem completely player driven, and that's a commendable goal, but the problem is that 1) there is somewhat of a paradox in that to have an interesting and dynamic PvP, you need a certain level of server population, and to get that, you need interesting PvE and 2) as mentioned before, with the downtime in crafting/building, players will really need something else to do to keep them here.
make the game more like a RPG may be interesting, image a group made up of frenchs, english, italians... etc etc...