Ultima Online just pushed through its fifth weekend of testing for the New Legacy mode that is still on deck for launch next month after four years of effort.
As we noted a few weeks ago, Broadsword has been heavily updating each leg of the open beta with new content, including the “divergent path” mechanics that essentially takes the leveling experience off rails. The last two weekends have seen even more updating, however.
According to the ongoing dev diaries, Broadsword has added town objectives for crafters, tweaked mining, boosted gold rewards from guild objectives, and continued adjusting skill gains. The fourth entry nerfed drop durability, added durability loss on death, removed the loot timer on corpses in PvP, balanced bosses, and continued efforts on crafter content.
“The overall design goal of the crafting loop is to allow crafters to ‘get into the meat’ of crafting without having a punishing grind for resources. As such, we have updated the Ore-to-Ingot ratio so that miners will now collect 10 ingots instead of 2. Also, pickaxes and shovels will no longer have charges associated with them. Metal for all!”
Oh, and if you’re worried about tamer pets? Don’t be. “Tamable creatures will go through a balance pass before the shard goes live,” Broadsword says. “Right now we recognize there is a deficiency in the ability for rangers to compete against some higher density spawn areas. In a future update we plan to address this. Catapults anyone? Trebuchets? (Just kidding…).”
