Preview: Watch Your Back in Salem

[standokan]

It sounds interesting but it's nothing for me.

 

[Therumancer]

[
You need to be careful about what is and isn't historically accurate, since the old rule 'history is written by the victors' is in effect.

I personally won't go any further into the inquisition, since I don't know all that much about it, but the early history of modern medicine is very dubious indeed, and there were definitely massive conflicts between traditional healers, who were often from poor backgrounds, and surgeons, who quite often were not.

The medical journal known as 'the lancet' came into existence because a lot of surgeons did not attain their position through being skilled, but primarily from being family of the right person.

This has little to do with drugs vs herbalism, but the older conflict between surgical cures VS more traditional ones.

If you're going to argue about revisionist history by certain groups, make sure you also understand the history of what is now the mainstream.

As for the Christian church... (Well, that's a bit misleading, since there's more than one), there is a lot of conflicting evidence about it's history.

It doesn't help that most historians wanting to study religious history have usually been required to be religious themselves, which introduces some interesting biases.

Amongst conflicting reports is one which suggests Jesus never existed at all, and was an allegorical construct. (Yet mainstream historians often go looking for Jesus with the pre-concieved notion that it was an actual person. - IF you assume a particular starting point, you're much more likely to 'find' evidence.)

Other stories suggest the Roman Catholic church violently suppressed and destroyed the traditional Roman religions when it became the official state religion.

There's plenty more.

The problem is, history isn't an all or nothing affair in regards to truth. History is pieced together from clues, like a big puzzle.
And if those clues include such things as old books and parchments (which they frequently do), you run into the bias of who wrote them.

Consider the Surgeons VS traditional healers?

Who do you think wrote the history here?

Surgeons were from wealthy backgrounds, and quite likely to be literate, and what's more, the current medical community is descended from their traditions.

Traditional healers have all but dissapeared, taking their knowledge with them. - People practicing these things today probably don't even have any real connection to what these people knew, and are just doing their own reconstruction from what little they can find.
Of course they're not going to acknowledge the horrors of what the people they are imitating were doing.
They probably didn't even know about them.

But... The mainstream groups are no less trustworthy, and no less likely to have been covering up what they considered horrible.
(Were you aware how many churches had phallic and sexual imagery in their architecture? Did you know how much of this was intentionally destroyed by the Victorians because it conflicted with their views on the morality of sex? - It might seem like a minor thing, but it shows a group trying to deny the past history of their own religion, and doing things which erase a lot of evidence in the process - Leading future generations to having a different view of such groups)

Anyway... History is never more than an approximation of what really went on.
And be wary of who is giving you your 'facts'.

Well, very few people even in the church deny that Christianity took over the western world with a lot of violence, warfare, and cultural eradication. In fact it's a good example of what it takes to win a war and overcome a culture more or less permanantly. Ugly and nasty, as I argue in other threads. Typically the problems with Christian motives come about when discussing the Crusades due to people forgetting what actually started it and got people that worked up, that's an entirely differant discussion though.

When it comes to medicine, again it's one of those situations where what's dominant right now is demonized because people aren't happy with it. The battles over medical care, health insurance, socialized medicine and other things all come down to people hating the medical esablishment, and wanting to lionize alternative sources.

There is some truth that medicine DID have a tendency to be practiced by the rich and kept within the family, but at the same time that was common at the time for most professions given the apprenticeship system, and the way how most things were run by large guilds and cartels. Medicine was simply run like anything else.

It's also noteworthy that our modern morality can't deal with medical progression, because in general experimenting medically is ugly. Learning things pretty much involved taking people apart while they were still alive to see how things worked. That's how progress was made, and today when we look back at that we tend to freak out. It's also why more "current" doctors who did the same thing, like the Nazi Doctor Mengele, are viewed as virtual demons although we take advantage of their discoveries (which has raised all kinds of moral questions). There is no denying that modern medicine has a rather dark past, but at the
same time, it does work, and work well.

As things stand now we're not dealing with medicine as it was hundreds of years ago, and simply put it's far more effective than the homebrew stuff.

As far as Salem goes, the medicine is going to be considerably more primitive, but I also don't think it's going to be an either/or thing, as I think at that time period things like herbalism were mixed with the developing medical science of the time. As to whether someone is a quack or effective, it's probably going to depend on their skills and attributes.

 

[theultimateend]

in before "churches increase civilization" enrages an atheist and starts spouting bullshit like the Religion & politics forum.

These always jump out at me as grabs for attention.

"Waaaah! Look at me everybody I'm important and clever!"

"We were trying to have a normal conversation."

"In b4 you respond to me!"

As for the OP, I'd play it then the moment someone killed me offline I'd never play it again . Pretty solid system for keeping my addiction level low I think.

 

[alrekr]

If they ditch the whole offline players can be excuted thing the game will do better. Instead they should have it so that the "scent" timer dosen't decrease while your offline and also say make it so logging off makes you sit still for a minute so you can;t log off as someone chases.

This could also be benefited by say higer ups in society issuing warrants for players who have commited crimes. So say the town mayor puts a bounty on some guy as he killed someone. It is now fair game to killl him for everyone who accepts said bounty. Also could have a system of jailing. So instead of killing players who commit crimes you could take them alive and put them in the town jail.

 

[Stormwaltz]

(leaving)

 

[DenSomKastade]

This seems like minecraft but with better gameplay and some descent multiplayer. I hope it turns out well and isn't filled with trolls the instand it launches.

 

[Greg Tito]

However, I wonder what kind of release schedule to expect. It's a part of history that's very much exclusive to America (not necessarily witch-burnings, but the time-period, location, what it actually means to contemporary culture, etc) and it's likely it won't see much of an international release. Even if it were to be available in some form in somewhere like Australia, I'm thinking Oceanic servers aren't an immediate concern for the devs. Shame, becuase it sounds genuinely interesting.

As far as I can tell from the devs, Salem will run on one server/shard. Even if the game is super popular and they have to open up new shards, they said that they'll have some way to navigate between them for a huge open world.

 

[VondeVon]

Sounds like a potentially great time.

I hope they add something about falsely accusing people to be witches, though.

So you have to learn Murder in order to engage in PvP... does that mean if you avoid it you can never be killed without picking a fight with the wildlife?

I hope they cap the servers at a reasonably low level. My main problem with MMORPGs is that nobody I know in real life plays them, so the experience is both lonely and boring for me. I quite like the idea of necessary co-operation between strangers in individual villagers - enough to find people you get on well with and people you don't, but not so many that you loose the sense of 'us vs them' community.

Enforced random server allocation for each new character would be cool. Reduces the chances of starting in a new village only to find it full of fifty people from a single WoW guild who exclude non-guilders by habit.

I'll be keeping an eye on this!

 

[Retardinator]

Oooooh... An actually interesting MMO? One not focusing around orcs, humans and varieties of elves, but instead with a different setting?
Count me in. I was sold when they mentioned paranoia.

Hopefully they won't make it too grindy.

 

[FredTheUndead]

# If someone wants revenge and tracks you, they can summon you even while you're offline and kill you. (See line item #1)

I predict this will last about a week before getting removed, or else this will just be GRIEFING: THE GAME.

 

[Zeetchmen]

Interesting concept, far too much room for greifing though

 

[McNinja]

This is... strange. The death system is extremely hardcore, surpassing even Demon's Souls.

It looks innovative, but it isn't the game for me. The Salem witch trials have always been extremely off-putting to me, and so i will not be caring about this game any more.

 

[v3n0mat3]

That sucks. Hard. Sorry, not gonna work with me. I can handle that with pen and paper RPGs such as D&D, but a game I paid (or pay subscription) for? Screw that.

*EDIT* Just so we're clear, I know it's a free to play. Still.

 

[Darkhill]

The truth is that primitive people have some very nasty rituals, this includes primitive white people. For all of the "one with nature" celtic stuff, the bottom like is that you had tons of torture and murder being committed by pre-christian religions. Some of the sites are pretty disturbing, and once in a while they do shows on this kind of thing but few people put all the pieces together. As time went on, these beliefs never really disappeared, and you had people doing nasty things in secret because it was tradition. To a Christian anything not frm god is from Satan, so these people were Satanists even if they did not specifically worship the devil. Given that Christianity wrecked these cultures and drove them underground, these people trying to invoke their own religion against it probably didn't help matters (and the darker the magic, the nastier the requirements as well). This is of course to say nothing of actual, bona-fide Satanists, which of course themselves developed as a knee-jerk opposition to Christian domination. I think it was one of those "strange but true" real-life supernatural shows when I was a kid, but apparently there have been Satanic lairs uncovered in places like Paris. One of them had like hundreds of baby skulls set into the walls around the alter, and is probably the inspiration for tales that Satanists are still abducting and killing babies today. You look at some of that stuff and it's pretty easy to see where the whole school of "The Witch Hunters were right" dark-fantasy fiction comes from, especially when it's set decades, or centuries before things like what happened in Salem.

You're mostly right, and it wouldn't suprise me if the witchhunts were the same old politicized religon bullshit to push worldly agendas, much like the Glenn Becks and Rush Limbaughs of today. The only thing I take issue to is the baby killing Satanist thing. They never existed. They're a convenient boogeyman for all the conspiracy loving, "Real, True Christian" slacktivists that like pretending they're holy warriors fighting the armies of darkness from their sofas while never having to lift a finger to feed the hungry, shelter the poor, heal the sick, etc. Basically claiming to be #1 Jesus follower, without hearing or doing anything Jesus taught us to do.

About Paris, I believe you're referring to the catacombs beneath the city. They are indeed full of human bones set into the walls, but those are adult bones. Monks, infact- countless monks gave their remains to be used in the "decoration" of their undergound cathedrals. It's kinda weird.

 

[carpathic]

This does not sound as thought it would be even slightly fun.

Balancing my humours etc? Yikes!

 

[theultimateend]

That would be true if what i said wasn't true, which it is on this forum.

Confirmation bias is a *****. I wish you the best. That's quite a cognitive error to overcome.

 

[jovack22]

Just a quick thought from reading that brief synopsis:

Permanent deaths, and being vulnerable even while you're OFFLINE

are two things that probably shouldn't mix if they want people to keep playing their game.