Ultima Online: New Legacy Feedback Beta Weekend #2

loop · August 4

Figured I'd start a thread for Beta Weekend #2 in case it's helpful.

I didn't have much time to play and couldn't focus on the testing goals for this weekend. I made a new character on the Ranger path. I found this path to be much less frustrating than the Mage path, which I started on the first weekend, due to not needing mana or reagents.

My sentiments:

- I wished I could skip the Ocllo tutorial.

- I couldn't advance the "defend the crypt" quest because another player had it in progress. My chat was spammed with a message telling me this. It annoyed me that I had to wait.

- I didn't like that my template included Focus and Tracking. I presume I'm able to change this later?

- I ran around and noted that the map was weird. A line of mountains south of Skara Brae. Blank landscape. The team mentioned the map will be redone later, so not a big deal.

- I did a round of quests from the job board in Skara Brae: destroy crates, defend wagons, kill spiders. At this point, I lost interest when I was going to need to complete the same three quests again.

In general, same experience as Beta #1 with the limited time that I had. I wanted to go out and explore, but doing so wouldn't have benefited me. Arrows cost money, and my skills would not advance outside of the quests.

SkuLover · August 5

Week 2 I started a crafting character. Beginning in Occlo I thought I saw others saying that crafters still had to participate in the killing of the rats, but when I chose blacksmithy, that was not the case. I was asks to craft items and gained skill until it was time to leave Occlo. The startling part was when I left Occlo I was instantly given 50 points of Swords. Although the addition of the Adventurer's Guidebook is very nice.

Thoughts & Suggestions:

Skill Choice - I was hoping to choose magery as my crafters 'fighting' skill. Thinking I could switch my swords after GMing my blacksmithy, sadly this was not the case. I'm not sure how helpful having just Swords is without healing. Whereas Magery can I fight off small mobs while resource gathering AND heal myself or my pets. Maybe give crafters the choice of what 'fighting' skill they receive leaving Occlo
Resources - Crafting BODs is the main source of the crafters skill gain. GMing blacksmithy seemed the most tedious, it took me the longest. Although mining is improved it still takes a while to gather the resources needed to complete the BODs. Tailoring took me much less time. Providing me with some cloth along the way, helped relieve the task of resource gathering. Maybe give some more ingots to Blacksmiths during the skill gaining quests to relieve the amount of resource gathering.
Conguis - On all BOD rewards there is the Congius but no explanation as to what that is.. Is it worth the 25 points? I assume this will be explained in future releases but is just a little confusing.
Carpentry skill - I think this has been mentioned, but there is a notification about the tinkering skill check when making lockable containers.
Alchemy - I'm not sure if mages are notified of the purification of reagents but as a blacksmith I had no idea how to get my reagents into my resource pack. (Mariah kindly informed me over gen chat) Maybe I missed where I was informed? Or maybe consider adding that information to the quest to full fill your first BOD
Max Resource amount - I had a continual notification of having a resource (bone) in queue because I was already at my maximum capacity. Consider adding a higher maximum for all resources. I regularly ran through my 2000 pcs of cloth.
Farming - I didn't have much time left to look into farming but I did attempt to get my first plot but I had no idea where it was. I was given a rune, but I have no way of using the rune. Consider putting the coordinates as part of the rune name so you can run to the plot.
Player housing - My first char was one of the first in Trinsic to get a home. I was disappointed to find out that if you're first to homeownership you're rewarded with being furthest away from town. If you look at the housing in Trinsic its clear everyone is trying to creep their way closest to Trinsic. - I think the housing in Trinsic should start closest to Trinsic. Or give multiple options (neighborhoods) to where to place your home. My blacksmithy char wouldn't mind being closest to the mountains.
Legacy sash - Maybe this isn't added in yet, or i'm just a dummy and missed it, but I don't know where or how to add to my sash?

I think that's all! I had another fun weekend trying something new!

Meph · August 5

Started on the arcanist’s path. 4xGMed Magery, Eval, Meditation, Wrestling. Had 60 inscribe.

Purchased taming and lore from the advanced skill trainer for 10k each for 50 skill points.

Trained taming and lore to GM.

Accepted tamer-mage quest. (there was a vague warning)

- Taming and Lore reset to 0.

This doesn’t make sense.

- Inscribe and Wrestling reset to 0.

This somewhat makes sense.

Retrain taming and lore to 100 (through the tamer mage quest that reset them to 0)

Unable to turn in tamer-mage quests since my skills are GM.

Unable to progress, unable to tame drakes, stuck.

Paged GM immediately. (Saturday evening EST) Emailed 2 advertised email addresses. Used new legacy bug contact form. Made a forum post.

No response so far.

In the meantime I made another character but there is not enough time to do anything, certainly not to test the features listed in the New Legacy Beta Testing Guide.

Sure, bugs are expected in a beta. I would have hoped there would be staff available to help resolve those bugs.

Kel · August 5

Thoughts from this past weekend:

Visit quest triggers improved. Still having some issues where it will not trigger and I'll have to log out and back in for it to trigger.
Unclickable quest NPCs. Ran into a few situations where I needed to talk to a NPC and was unable to interact with them. Sometimes logging in/out fixed this. Sometimes it completed it for me upon login. Seemed pretty jank and confusing.
Tracker automatically following current quest line is a great addition. Tracking arrow would still be a good, modern addition.
Quests, ultimately, still feel the same as week 1. Boring and samey, but much, much more boring and samey than week 1 due to the lack of "shiny and new" syndrome.
Bard and Taming quest lines are pretty cool. I think I may have wanted more out of both of them, but can't pinpoint any specifics. It just goes by quickly.
Soft lock issue where advanced skill on taming skills combined with taming quest line can offset one or more aspects of the taming skill set maxing them out before the rest. This results in taming quests that cannot be turned in and advanced skill trainers that cannot be used. @Kyronix was able to assist me with this issue, but players like @Meph are still suffering from this issue and cannot progress.
Taming knowledge. Currently we have Drakes available, are there any others currently available that we just haven't found yet?
Housing is interesting. I don't know if I, personally, like the current housing rules. I'd like to place a bit more freely versus the zoned out urban sprawl concept.
Guild changes are pretty cool but I'm not totally sure how I'm supposed to reasonably advance my guild to level 2. Maybe I'm missing something, but 112k seems like A LOT when I get rewards of 5 and 10 for guild quests. Hoping this is more of a temporary number.
Farming: I have no idea how this works. I was sent to a field and then the quests stopped.
Character slots! We need more. I've maxed out two characters and as we progress with new builds coming in I'd like the ability to be able to go between the characters to properly AB test the feel of those characters as opposed to deleting one and starting that new character.
After completing a champ spawn there was a leaderboard that popped up. What purpose does or will this serve and how would I go about interacting with it after it's closed?
Quest gear for warriors (weapons) is much improved! Possibly too good now. 12 HCI and 50 DI is untouchable. At least based on the current lootset.

Mariah · August 5

I highly recommend that all testers read, or re-read, the faq that was published. Many of the questions I'm seeing asked are answered in there.

Read the quest instructions (click on the blue button on your quest journal for more detail) while it's fine to skim through the story, many are missing important information and instruction in them.

Watch your journal, there are system messages to help you which many are missing.

Arnold7 · August 5

Seems like an excessive amount of NPC text to read with most of it being just casual conversation on the part of the NPC. In EC find the white font on black background really hard to read. For the most part relying now on the quest log text that I can see. It has an easier font to read and better background. Not into text driven games am hoping this one improves. Graphics kind of below standards too. Not all that impressed with this game after about 5 hours play. Seems more like what I would expect from a game developed 20 years ago. Maybe, gameplay just reflects the games age. Don’t know if others have the problem reading the text, but for me it’s just too small for the font used with the white text.

Moresley · August 5

I think at some point people get tired of having to read through dialogues they're not interested in, I'm having a reaction to them and the quests to the point where right after I subscribed I stopped playing and won't play again until hopefully I don't have to interact with them anymore.

Ill still stay subscribed, I want a new server to be successful but as it plays now, its not for me. I can't be the only one, the effort on the whole server is appreciated though, its just that people coming for a UO experience, as much as this is "New Legacy" not "UO", aren't joining to read quest dialogues. That was never part of the traditional UO experience, and I think many people joining are looking for that in some manner.

There are plenty of games that do the quest thing, there aren't many that do the sandbox thing. Unfortunately, even though this is a beta, many people will take this as indicative of the final play experience and may never circle back around to check out the server once its live.

Pawain · August 5

Made a mage this weekend. All the quests worked. I noticed reagents were on more mobs this week. Mummy has a good amount. Need more mobs with other types like black pearl and mandrake root.

I only died once skilling the mage to GM. So instead of new horses I'm buying reagents.

Went the mage tamer route. Worked that up to 85.

Love gaining skills this way!

Other posters need to realize that we are just seeing the live tutorial, info on what UO is, and the skill process. Some have advanced to champ spawns.

This was not intended to be UO. Testers need to test this game not compare to UO. When this goes live, guides will be written immediately. You won't have to read those Lore pages.

Kel · August 5

As an open beta, this is actually the perfect time to expose playability weaknesses and try to figure out what about the experience left people confused, frustrated, etc.

Well designed games and experiences within them are designed to be as intuitive as possible, and where they are not there are contingencies that are created to guide them back. Let's focus on that as opposed to questioning why users didn't take the time to read. That's not a habit that's easy to break. It's pretty simple, most people don't read flavor text anymore and the devs have stated they're trying to attract a modern audience. Those two don't necessarily coincide.

Let's say you do read the quest text, but you moved on too quickly to the next quest. What do you do about the text that resided in that previous quest that you didn't intentionally miss? What if the follow-up quest leaves you confused? What about the Obtain quests or the Deliver quests that have been confusing tons of players that involve non-standard actions?

Do you check your Journal? Do you check the FAQ? There are edge cases here that are worth discussing inherent to the in-game experience itself.

The quest system is extremely clunky compared to modern standards. But it's better than the old UO (current) quest system. Two additions that would improve/modernize the new questing experience: quick glance quest objectives (versus buried in flavor text), and a tracked objective arrow.

These are modern staples that were added because those respective devs have researched player quest completion and retention and determined that they were necessary additions. Even if it means players skip hundreds of thousands of lines of their painstakingly written quest test. All in favor of the user experience.

I guess the ultimate question here, what the goal? Do the devs actually want to attract a new generation of (modern) gamers or do they just want to attract player that have left and retain players that still remain?

@Pawain stated it well: This was not intended to be UO.

We'll all probably get a better NL experience if we approach it from that viewpoint and make suggestions based off of that viewpoint. Even if those suggestions aren't inherent to UO but would make this experience better.

Moresley · August 5

I guess everything I read about it that made me want to come play it, led me to believe it was UO, I mean I even download it from the UO website, launch the game from the UO shortcut, log in with a UO account, other servers in the list are all UO.. I don't think its nuts that people joining are expecting more UO than not UO.

Garret · August 5

I think main point about New Legacy it's not about that is a new AAAA game with modern tech, no bugs and clear and modern design for zoomer players, i think it about restart UO and trying to rebuild it in the future. At beginning of old Ultima Online we start with poor design and naked and trying to learn the game and find things to loved it for, looks like we have it again. NL has a lot of disappointments at this moment, but that is no matter, I'm just trying to learn the game again and have that feeling that i had when i first start UO 25 years ago, and looks like it's work for me.

Pawain · August 5

@Kel yes I do use the internet as a resource while playing. UO has extensive presence for a game. Specifically I get lost in a large game world. I use city maps to find specific buildings. I used my cloth map while lost outside trinsic.

For the quests. If you click a quest giver that gives you a dialog box. You can keep that box open and as you progress, it changes to the new dialog. Just scroll to the bottom, it tells you where to go.

I'm wondering how many playing the beta have been doing the peerless quests in UO. There are many quests in UO. Some act like a quest is not part of game play in UO. How did you do the quests to enter Twisted Weild, Bedlam, etc? NL has a better quest system IMO.

Jepeth · August 5

I haven’t written too much about my NL beta experience yet, but something I observed playing last night really hit me.

Playing together with a ton of people all discovering this new game together: that is a classic UO experience.

That is the classic shard I think everyone can agree is fun; not some silly nostalgia for a rule set tied to the past.

People say they miss this era or that era of the game, but I bet if they really think about it they actually miss being that age again. Or discovering the game with someone who is long gone but they still remember fondly.

But everyone here, now, exploring this together without guides and decades of knowledge built up: that’s fun. That made me smile.

Moresley · August 5

When I played UO, as far as I remember, there were no such thing as quests, no idea what Twisted or Bedlam is and I played for years and years.

Pawain · August 5

Well said. @Jepeth.
Ian, Farimar, Violet, Freedom, and others have been very helpful to myself and others.

Stop and smell the roses because this part of NL only happens once for us.

Pawain · August 5

Moresley said:

I guess everything I read about it that made me want to come play it, led me to believe it was UO, I mean I even download it from the UO website, launch the game from the UO shortcut, log in with a UO account, other servers in the list are all UO.. I don't think its nuts that people joining are expecting more UO than not UO.

The difference is

When we first logged into UO, we had no idea of what to do.
When we logged into NL, we knew what to do. We have to figure out how to do it. (which sounds like most of the complaints)

Notice the big colorful rectangle where we begin. My lore is; I was brought to NL from UO. I start terminator style with nothing. I have to figure out the physics of this new place, so I can get my skills back and aid in the battles threatening the NL world. Then at the end, I can possibly go back to UO.

For me, tiny houses is not UO.

Lord_Frodo · August 5

UO AutoMap work great with NL. Yes some of the name have changed so I just mark them in red with the new name.

Moresley · August 5

I suppose I experienced the opposite as regards to what to do.. I never felt like I had no idea what to do in UO, there was a whole magical world to explore, I wasn't on rails, I could go anywhere. It was perilous.. but super exciting, every time I logged out I did so wanting to come back. There was figuring out to do certainly, but it felt more organic that what we have here. I suppose being told to run here and there, doing exacting tasks feels more like something I have to get through than experience for fun.

As a for instance, I had no idea skills were even a thing for a LONG time when firstplaying UO...

The lore/world/adventure/immersion breaks when I can't just be able to pick up a weapon and use it and get better with it because I learned how to make that weapon first... among other things I can't recall right now..

Pawain · August 5

They are planning to make the 3 year plan for skilling along with the weekend method. Yall can do your slow skilling all you want.

Moresley · August 6

Its not about speed, but yeah lets hope the result is something that lets us play something like old UO.

Yadd_of_Legends · August 6

Ah, the feeling of power when the new mage finally has blade spirits - that brought back old memories

RonFellows · August 6

I feel you Moresley. Pay no attention to Pawain. He treats all criticism as a personal attack.

As a side note, I have been trying to post this on SIX different browsers. Edge, firefox, chrome, brave, safari (ios) and brave (ios) for about an hour. Not good if this is the only place to share feedback with developers.

Here’s my feedback from week 2. Couldn’t play as much this weekend but I finished off my mage main quest and finished alchemy and resisting spells. After that I made a new tailor and got it to GM before logging.

Quests:

The new CC quest directions were useful, but ONLY if you have one quest. There is no way to switch which one you want it to direct you to. I still think an arrow like the one provided in EC is where it should go if possible.

Quest triggering points seemed vastly improved. I only encountered maybe one place I had to run over a couple times before it triggered.

Mage:

While finishing up the mage, the town objectives seemed to be much easier. Was able to do the defend quests. A nice improvement all around.

Inscription:
NOT excited to grind BOD’s so my mage can have a reagent belt. Seems like a quest line or boss drop to acquire this item might be better.

Resisting Spells

I went to the resist trainer immediately after completing the main mage quests and didn’t realize that the advanced trainer would take me up to 50 if I went to it first. So I ended up grinding the first 50 points through the resisting spells quests.

I like the Resisting Spells quest, leaves it open to kill any magical creature. However not all magical creatures were giving credit. I noticed Ghouls and Wraiths were not giving credit which would have been the easiest option. Spectral spellbinders and lich/lich lord’s were what I ended up working.

Alchemy:

Very fast skill gain which is MUCH appreciated after grinding the main mage quest. I don’t know if the solen hive is the same as normal shards, but man I got lost in there. I guess that’s more of a personal note than feedback.

Tailoring:

The timer for accepting the tailor quest was bugged. At least the text that is displayed when you attempt to accept it too soon was. The first attempt it would say 60 seconds, I’d wait 80, click again and the timer would increase to 3 or 4 mins. On the same note, the 5 min timer between tailor questing is painful. My strategy was to fill my resource container completely before filling BOD’s that leaves a lot of time to wait between 2 points of skill gain. This is the sort of thing that would make me WANT to automate the process if possible.

Really really really really dislike gathering my own resources for crafting. Maybe consider an account bound or guild resource container? On the same note, @Kyronix mentioned last week that you could sell hides to vendors. How do you skin a hide without it going directly to the resource container?

Couldn’t figure out how to mark my GM crafted items with my characters name. The context menu’s didn’t seem to change anything.

Excited to see what I can actually craft when its implemented. As it stands my GM armor is worse than the armor handed out in the skill gain main quests.

Housing:

Placed a house right after finishing the Magery quest line. House upkeep by doing town quests is not what I wanted to see after grinding them to death to level the mage in the first place. There needs to be a reason other than keeping your house up for a month for me to get excited about it.

Guilds:
VvV all in from the get go is a little counterintuitive. Does my guild want to go VvV when we are all in fighting shape? Absolutely. When leveling? Not so much. I guess we can run 2 guilds? One for finished characters and one for people still building / crafters?

Classic Client:

Just have to say CC is still seriously dissatisfying as others have pointed out. The video released on the UO YouTube is seriously missing the point. We all know how to enlarge the game play window. I shouldn’t have to change my whole windows scaling at least 150% just to play UO. It might help if devs could comment on if the QOL things people are asking for are even possible given their current ability.
Over all week 2 seemed much improved. Looking forward to further testing.

AtomicBetty · August 6

RonFellows said:

Resisting Spells

I went to the resist trainer immediately after completing the main mage quests and didn’t realize that the advanced trainer would take me up to 50 if I went to it first. So I ended up grinding the first 50 points through the resisting spells quests.

I like the Resisting Spells quest, leaves it open to kill any magical creature. However not all magical creatures were giving credit. I noticed Ghouls and Wraiths were not giving credit which would have been the easiest option. Spectral spellbinders and lich/lich lord’s were what I ended up working.

Are you sure the Advance Trainer would have started you at 50? I talked to him first and was directed to the questline east of Moonglow.

I was unable to start at 50 and was under the impression that if you dropped GM resist in the future then you could talk to him to relearn the skill and start at 50.

I could be wrong though but I don't think you did anything wrong. And would be nice if the graveyards had some spellcasters to kill that give credit going to deceit and competing with everyone for kills repeatedly sucks.

Victim_Of_Siege · August 6

I am finding it even harder to play regular UO after this weekends open Beta. They need to launch this shard so I quit going through withdrawals.

Lord_Frodo · August 6

Victim_Of_Siege · August 7

Pawain · August 7

LilyGrace · August 25

SkuLover said:

Conguis - On all BOD rewards there is the Congius but no explanation as to what that is.. Is it worth the 25 points? I assume this will be explained in future releases but is just a little confusing.

I came looking for conguis. That somehow sounds like a naughty double entendre.

Am I missing anything that explains more on this?

Victim_Of_Siege said:

LOL!

Howdy, Stranger!

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Ultima Online: New Legacy Feedback Beta Weekend #2

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