Life is Feudal: MMO vs Salem
Life is Feudal: MMO
Life is Feudal: MMO is a medieval-themed sandbox MMORPG that offers you a pretty hardcore survival gameplay where death and bad behavior are both severely penalized. You can also craft a wide variety of tools and items, build amazing forts and other structures, and explore a huge world and see other people’s creations.All of these sound great and all, but what truly makes this game stand out is its iconic, karma-like system called the Alignment system. Players who break common sense norms, like not stealing other people’s harvest, destroying people’s homes, or even killing another player unprovoked, will get marked with a negative alignment. The punishment from this system isn’t instant or swift, but if the bad-behaving player dies with negative alignment, he may risk losing all that he has worked hard for. He may potentially lose all of the skill points he had painstakingly grinded for.
On the downside, the combat in this game still feels a tad bit clunky and many players have mentioned that the cosmetics in-game shop are sold at ridiculous prices. The game is still currently in early access as well and thus, the game does have its fair share of bugs.
Although many have drawn a comparison with Wurm Online, those very same players would probably unanimously agree that Life is Feudal simply looks much better and plays out a whole lot better as well. The dynamicity of its world is astounding and the alignment system serves as a great deterrent to bad and toxic players. Life is Feudal may not be the ultimate medieval-themed sandbox MMORPG, but it’s pretty close.
Salem
Salem is an old-school and somewhat obscure (but fun) sandbox MMORPG that unlike Wurm Online has a stronger emphasis on its in-depth crafting system and survival aspect rather than building.Similar to Wurm Online though, Salem is not a voxel-based game, but you are still able to mold the game environment through resource gathering, mining and digging in a way that reminds me of the currently-shelved MMORPG, EverQuest Next: Landmark. Of course, although not exactly the focus of the game, you can still build your homestead and the process is quite similar to Wurm Online except that it occurs at a much higher speed.
Not to mention, the game world in Salem is simply humongous to the point where it feels like an actual world. Salem also borrowed some features from ArcheAge where open-world PvP is the norm, so you'll need to be vigilant at all times, but players who kill and steal for no reason will be labelled as criminals and can be punished.
However, as good as it is despite being an indie MMO and all, Salem does have its fair share of flaws due to its low development budget. So, we'd recommend you to take a look at Salem without carrying along any high expectations. It's a pretty good MMORPG like Minecraft, but if you're expecting a Minecraft clone, you may end up disappointing yourself.