Game Development: Salem & Haven

[Sevenless]

The main problem with Salem is the complete and utter reliance on FOOD to do ANYTHING in the game. It really hamstrings you in the early game and just spirals into a ridiculous situation when you're trying to do actual construction and keep having to go and forage for food every 10 minutes to continue paving the ground.

The fact that stamina is directly tied to food consumption and not inactivity/rest/water makes the game painful to enjoy.

Cooked deer meat is where it's at for bulk stat regen. That being said, I don't see why they can't have a slow regeneration of stats on their own. Mostly to prevent noobs from getting stuck up on cliffs.

Edit: That being said, even with a P3 node sitting just over the hill it was something to worry about. For beginners without node access that must really suck. At least nodes aren't as exclusive as they are in haven.

[hazzor]

ugh, so far i've done a lot in salem and now... well... it's boring, it's no where near deep enough as it stands, i await more content but i'll stick to haven for now... (qq lag)

[Dallane]

ugh, so far i've done a lot in salem and now... well... it's boring, it's no where near deep enough as it stands, i await more content but i'll stick to haven for now... (qq lag)

sure do love the new hearth vault system in salem on only the 2nd tier of walls lol.

[dullah]

ugh, so far i've done a lot in salem and now... well... it's boring, it's no where near deep enough as it stands, i await more content but i'll stick to haven for now... (qq lag)

i have the same feeling, im pretty sure j&l are working hard to bring us new updates like combat revamp, new industries and stuff.

[Potjeh]

ugh, so far i've done a lot in salem and now... well... it's boring, it's no where near deep enough as it stands, i await more content but i'll stick to haven for now... (qq lag)

sure do love the new hearth vault system in salem on only the 2nd tier of walls lol.

Oh noes I have to actually invest some effort to clean out a town while the owners are offline QQ

[dra6o0n]

That's better than the case in HnH, where food is produced in utterly ridiculous quantities shortly after developing a farm, and is never ever a bottleneck.

The point of the farm is to have you able to raise huge quantities of food in the first place...
What didn't made sense theoretically is that you can increase the quality with each plot...

If they made it harder to obtain harder quality crops, it would seem like the usual 'hunger filling' mechanic than a 'stat rising' one.

In any case, HnH can still be improved vastly and it'll be much better than Salem (I personally think so) as it follows it's own style.

Salem is basically a HnH 2.0 and hastily done at that.

Salem would have a much better chance if they fix up the interface so that it made sense when you do things, and that there are instructions on how to do specific things at the start... The only 'tutorial' that is ingame is 'creating a character'.

Salem also tries to implement a 'currency' system, and Paradox Interactive plans to have it offer microtransaction (of which I think will become a pay to win game... That nobody would buy lol).

IF SW:TOR lost 400,000 players easily (EA dumped so much money on it), what makes Paradox Interactive think that people would buy cash items from Salem?

The industry is changing rapidly and it's kinda unpredictable atm.

[Tonkyhonk]

what i dont understand is, why people actually apply for the closed beta testing when they clearly do not understand what "beta-testing" means and give a judgement as if they could easily predict the completed game in the future.

[bmjclark]

ugh, so far i've done a lot in salem and now... well... it's boring, it's no where near deep enough as it stands, i await more content but i'll stick to haven for now... (qq lag)

sure do love the new hearth vault system in salem on only the 2nd tier of walls lol.

Oh noes I have to actually invest some effort to clean out a town while the owners are offline QQ

In fairness, a 15 minute crime debuff where u cant regen, teleport or logout is a little..excessive. All the other mechanics are nice imo for it tho. I really like the braziers, and actually being able to break walls without setting a frail ram that'll just be spotted by a bot anyways is pretty sweet

[Potjeh]

Debuff duration should scale with the number and severity of crimes committed, of course, but as I understand there's some technical issues with that currently.

And I was more referring to the need to pump humours a bit. Raiders are basically QQing about hearth vaults while there's no better walls than palisade, because OMG it's so unfair that they have to push their str a bit.

[dra6o0n]

Debuff duration should scale with the number and severity of crimes committed, of course, but as I understand there's some technical issues with that currently.

And I was more referring to the need to pump humours a bit. Raiders are basically QQing about hearth vaults while there's no better walls than palisade, because OMG it's so unfair that they have to push their str a bit.

Would be great if there are more survival mmorpgs out there that are f2p or b2p, with proper game designs that is...

Generally survival games are single player because they can't be bothered to add in risky 'unexpected' multiplayer elements in them, that and it's not immersive for 'island survival' games if there's 100 players around...

Oh and Spirean can actually start development soon as Stephan is close to finishing his library for my friend's team to use, Andrew was half-joking about the 'company name'. Lol.

I don't see any survival mmorpg with a emphasis on fantasy elements where survival is second to fantasy gameplay (permadeath is still there but the fantasy element adds features to delay the dying process a bit).