YouTuber DM Wyvern has a fun multi-person podcast interview with two members of Broadsword out this week, specifically focused on Ultima Online’s New Legacy. Readers will recall that New Legacy is a new-ruleset shard type that Broadsword launched last fall; the ruleset revolves around a year-long arc and is meant to onboard new players and provide a fresh experience for veterans before the shard ends and pushes players to the production servers. New Broadsword producer Greg “Kyronix” Havlusch and content designer Nick aka Parallax both joined the chat to provide more info about New Legacy. Here are some of the highlights!
- Kyronix says that New Legacy was a solution to a multitude of problems Broadsword saw: the desire for new player onboarding as well as a new specialty shard that could address demographic changes in the playerbase, which now has kids that play and certain expectations for accessibility.
- Parallax says that the narrative experiences in New Legacy do take a lot of work and time to flesh out, but they’re meant as newbie onboarding and are considered important for the future of the game, so expect more.
- Broadsword has been aiming to build content to work on both NL and the original production servers so as not to neglect production, but that doesn’t do much for players who play on both, so this year they’re staggering releases and working on both parts of the game without neglecting either one.
- Yes, the team actually does play the game and has a long history with it. Some of these folks have played decades.
- New Legacy publish 2 is on the way as the quarterly spring update. It includes a new system that is repeatable and features “collectible factors” and a “competitive nature” that is not PvP, as well as new world bosses and new dungeon kill quests. There’s also an update to treasure maps (sounds like tmap rewards that pair with the collection system). Parallax even teases some sort of new pet, though he doesn’t say what type.
- In a response to a comment about exploration in New Legacy, Kyronix says it took him three months to recreate the Eodon map tile by tile – that’s the Age of Legends expansion facet. So the devs would love to have new tools for map creation to feed into supporting exploration properly, but it sounds insanely time-consuming as it is. Even so, Parallax says there are still some New Legacy Easter eggs he doesn’t think anyone has found yet. Get exploring.
- Broadsword will do a final audit before deciding what you can move between servers before “the shattering” happens and players are dispatched back to production shards. Gear probably isn’t coming, though. The devs are not sure about all of the pets yet. They know players want a clear checklist, but they aren’t ready, and no matter what they don’t want to break production.
- Parallax knows players want crafters to matter more in NL and not just be “repairbots,” but there’s no clear news on what the team is changing yet.
- Broadsword is considering adding more aesthetic 7×7 houses for NL, but no promises.
- Kyronix said the devs had to scale back some of their original goals for PvP to actually get NL launched, but they are hoping to look at PvP in S2. They’re also considering a reward vendor for PvP, and further down the line, they’re thinking about a revamp of thieving that doesn’t suck quite so badly for the victim.
- Finally, the devs are promising a test phase before season 2 launches, so it won’t arrive out of the blue.
The whole podcast is below!
Source: YouTube
