The Vesper Antiquity Hunt should be on the main shards
I'm looking over the New Legacy publish 2 notes, and it occurs to me that the Vesper Antiquity Hunt should be on the main shards. That's the kind of thing that could bring life to currently unused locations like the Vesper Museum. Looking for lost artifacts or hidden knowledge is a critical part of fantasy and we don't have enough of it.
We've lost the sand sifting content (we should have it) and searching for pieces of the past type quests seem limited to Ter Mur (I use "seem" because I could always be missing something). But Britannia has perfectly competent institutions which could have such quests.
I could make a case for all of it but I'll hold off on that and focus on the most-generic-seeming piece.
Comments
not everyone has the time or has any interest in NL but pays full price only to get half the games content....
With that said, skill gains are accelerated on the NL shard, and we have 6 months or so to do the content in this latest update. This content was designed for the narrative of the NL.
I get what you are saying, and I want to do this as well, but I'm going to be running it with two kids who are still new to UO, so it may not happen for me - I can imagine we will be killed a lot.
I'm long past opposing the existence of NL. I lost that debate before it began. I'm just pointing out when something from it should most-definitely be on the main shards.
The UO I played in early 1998 is not the UO I played in the summer of 2000, and for that I'm grateful, as my friends and acquaintances stopped quitting and I finally had my own house thanks to the land rush, and it was such a wonderful house I got to place it again because Lag Superior couldn't stay up (or at least the individual server(s) that hosted my portion of Tram). But the creation of that same area where I achieved home ownership was a sign by some that UO as an MMO was dying, it just didn't know it.
When Age of Shadows and Mondain's Legacy began the 20+ years of turning UO into an item collection game for some people, some of whom, sadly, turned away from exploring and adventuring, did that define what an MMO should be? Is an MMO a game where we spend hour upon hour online reading up on UOGuide or Stratics about stats and mobs and that leads us to hoard hundreds of weapons and pieces of armor and odd trinkets and jewelry, stashed away for dungeons that we rarely visit?
When you walk the streets of Malas on pretty much any shard, do you feel like "this is what an MMO based in the world of Ultima is supposed to be"?
When Samurai Empire was released with what felt like little connection to Lord British's earlier games, it was still technically an MMO based on Ultima, and we even swung back the other way with Stygian Abyss really bringing us back to an MMO based on Ultima. Those are two sides of the same coin, but plenty will heap scorn on SE (or at least did when it launched).
And we can move beyond that and look at all of the other MMOs out there that vary wildly in how they play and what players can do. WOW was the most popular MMO for many years, but the lack of player housing and in-game communities that spontaneously grew like they did in the first 3-4 years of UO, and the way WOW was really made WOW feel (to me) more like an elaborate, persistent, game that happened to be online, and could host large groups of people, but still came across as feeling sterile/isolated most of the time unless you were raiding. Ironically, WOW is adding player housing here in 2025, but it'll be instanced with just a few dozen players per instance, so you'll be lucky to plop down a house next to somebody you want to play with. And Star Wars Galaxies, for a while, felt like what MMOs should be (which is because it was driven by people who helped define mainstream MMOs with UO), but it died well over a decade ago.
I'm not trying to be a jerk or criticize you, mind you, I'm just pointing out that what defines an MMO varies wildly between people.
The person who sits in their Atlantic castle in UO and organizes their hundreds or thousands of rare items and gets on to an online forum to argue or discuss the availability of dozens of hues for what should be a throw-away item in the game probably enjoys UO as much as some blacksmith or tailor on Napa Valley who has chosen to live in a small- or medium-sized house in the woods with nothing but trees and mobs for many screens around them (even as there are 18x18 houses available in New Magincia, near Luna, near Zento, etc.), and who creates weapons and armor for vendors who might see a visitor once every week or two (and only because vendor search steered them there). And both of them may enjoy it as much as I'm now enjoying it with my kids, even though the UO I play in 2025 is vastly different than the UO I played in 1998. And I enjoyed it as much in 1998 as I do now, just...differently.
With NL, they seem to be really creating something interesting (even if I can't currently play most of it due to my guild mates being my kids who are new to UO), and they need to be doing something different if they want to set something up for the 30th anniversary (or even reach the 30th) in case we get an influx of returning players who will be horrified by vendors full of 175 million gp items. It's still really, really weird to me to see those vendors, but that's the nature of a persistent MMO that's been around since 1997 (and I have items that are from my characters way back in 1998).
https://www.uoguide.com/Catskills:_Gentle_Rest_Inn
To add to this conversation.
Thank you Devs for all the fun in NL (since beta)!
I have been having a blast!
From starting a toon, to exploring the new landmass, and the best part, making new friends.
Thank you for listening to the NL folk, and giving us this feeling that we're all on the same ship.
Regarding the "stories" of our toons on the prodo shards.
It seems NL takes place in the future, so dear folk that have ongoing rping stories, we will all be dust and bones when NL takes place.
... and back to finding my heirloom items!
a few like nl while most don’t seem to
So I guess the choice for those that don’t won’t or have any time for NL is apparent
None of us know how many people are playing it and how many people like it or hate it, because the vast majority of players, both paying and otherwise, are not posting on UO.com or Stratics or reddit, and there are a lot of timezones covered by the first NL shard. I can look at UO.com or Stratics and see less than a dozen new posts in a day, with most of those being buy/sell/trade or whatever. We know that enough people are paying, otherwise the servers would have been shut down long ago.
And we know that they have a goal with this and have communicated it to their bosses. Kyronix can't just put dev resources into a new shard with new rules or stories on a whim. I feel like the whole thing is probably meant to tie into (or lead into) the 30th anniversary. We know there will be a "shattering" about 6 months or so from now, and then something new happens after that. Now is the time to be planning for the 30th anniversary when you have a very small group of live team members.
If they added this to the production shards, does it move the needle on getting new players (or returning players) to those shards? Probably not, at the end of the day it would get lost in the shuffle on those shards.
People who have played for decades, with characters rocking gear worth a billion gold would burn through this content on the production shards in a matter of days, if not hours.
But setting up a shard tied to a year-long storyline is new for the current era (either since SA/KR or ToL), and we haven't had a major storyline that affects a shard in many years, and it's something that is meant to stand out a bit for those who feel like UO has gotten stale and is just the realm of item collectors and hoarders with billions of gold to burn. Somebody who is new or returning to UO might give it a chance (and I'd prefer they try it first before being overwhelmed with sticker shock in Malas).