Overdue for adding some of my feedback here...
I've been digging New Legacy - big fan of the quest system. While it makes the game feel a little more linear than the true sand box style that I think most expect from UO, it's a bit of fresh air versus the production shards where I feel like I've done everything a hundred times over. Perhaps NL will begin to feel like that at some point too, but if they can keep the dailies fresh and have them feel meaningful by way of making the rewards worth while and have the tasks be different, than I think it will be successful. I've seen a fair bit of complaining by people saying that they like UO because it doesn't have linear quests like MMOs, but the simple answer to that is that they can stay on the production shards if the NL style doesn't work for them. In short, this is one of the areas where NL feels fresh and new and I think will be really enjoyable for a large number of players.
I like the skill advancement system (so far). Even though skilling was one of the things I've always enjoyed doing on prodo shards, it definitely does have the feeling of being stale and repetitive on regular shards. My only comment on skilling through the quest system is that people seem to be advancing super quickly - in my opinion, you shouldn't be maxing out characters in the course of a single weekend and I think some of the skill rewards might be high and need to be tinkered a bit.
OMG - the new towns were awesome. As Gov of New Mag on ATL, seeing how different that city is on NL compared to prodo shards definitely put a smile on my face. One of the things I was hoping NL would do is to add some lore back to the virtue cities and give them more of a true unique feel from town to town - which so far I think they've done. There was alot of really great nuances through out all the towns. I didn't get to many town quest lines here in my own personal play time, but I watched some streams of others who did and was impressed. Same goes for the concept of belonging to a certain town and having to do quests to maintain housing / loyalty. In the long term, I hope this will create more of a 'neighborhood' type of feel to the town you belong to - especially since you will know its all mostly active players.
I didn't get to experiment much crafting quite yet - but will be positive to see crafters have true meaning in UO once again.
Couple points of feedback... the maps in EC for the NL shard still show productive shard info. I assume it will be cleaned up prior to going live, but it did make it difficult at time to follow where I needed to go for some quests. Admittedly, this was a point where I gave up a few times and talked to others that felt the same.
The entire 'last name' - or name of your house concept - would be nice to be able to customize some of those names a bit better. Alot of the randomly generated names were kind of strange.
