Ultima Online’s 110th update has officially rolled out to the live shards this week, and as promised, it includes tweaks to dynamic events and a new round of Black Market rewards and veteran rewards, including an option for three-year-plus accounts that allows the storage of up to 25 runebooks in a single storage object. Unfortunately, the changes to vendor search we saw on the test server have persisted into the live shards; they effectively nerf vendor searching for free-to-play accounts, as Endless Journey accounts can no longer use the item name search at all and must wait 60 seconds between other searches, which makes it nearly useless for those not paying a sub.
The in-game cash shop is still relatively new for this 23-year-old MMORPG, but it’s also received a new round of items that are worth some note here, as several of them are “transmogrification potions” that allow players to move stats between items (for cosmetic reasons). There’s also an “Enchanted Soulstone Vessel” that can hold up to 20 (!) large soulstones in a single item. Soulstones, for those not aware, are objects than can store skillpoints and ultimately allow you to move them between characters. While some have been granted as veteran and preorder rewards, they can also be bought from the cash shop themselves, meaning that filling a vessel with 20 would be an extremely expensive endeavor.
With this patch out the door, the developers say that they’re moving back to working on New Legacy, the new shard type coming to the game at some point in the future. In the studio’s recent livestream, Bonnie Armstrong notes that Broadsword had to pause it for the patch (specifically, the vet rewards), but it most definitely hasn’t abandoned it. The devs reiterate that New Legacy is much more like a seasonal/time-limited alternate server ruleset, not a progression server, a legacy server, some sort of “UO Classic,” or some other return to the old days. This version will focus more on exploration and adventure rather than skill grinding, with dramatically different lore, climate, mobs, buff/debuff effects, and a reset economy.
