Ultima Online: Age of Shadows
Official Website (UO.com/ageofshadows/)
Notes:
- Last title officially by Origin Systems - from here on out it would be all Electronic Arts/EA logos everywhere.
- Introduced custom housing. Now you too, can build your own ill-conceived structure. Why not lay out a message on your rooftop, to be seen by people on their radar as they go by.
- Introduced Malas - a huge, new landmass, with both housing areas, and non-housing areas. Basically large floating areas connected by bridges, floating in space (theoritically - since the “seas” around the islands were stars).
- Subscription fees went up around this time.
- UO peaked in subscriptions around this time - after hitting 250,000 players, with AoS, around 100,000 players left between AoS in February of 2003 and the middle of 2006.
- Added/increased importance of item attributes/properties.
- Changed PvP and PvM as we know it, with the above mentioned attributes/properties. Now people spent Lord British knows how much time picking the right pieces of armor and weapons to target specific monsters or other players.
- Fire, energy, cold, poison - the four elemental properties.
- Sometimes referred to as the “Age of Neon” - when you had a high enough elemental property, the weapon would turn an extreme version of the color (fire = red, cold = blue, energy = green, poison = purple).
- Added the class of Paladin, along with the associated Chivalry skill. In place of reagents, gold was tithed to the shrines to allow Paladins to use the Book of Chivalry.
- Added the class of Necromancer, along with the associated Necromancy skill. In place of the normal reagents, new reagents were created, or were developed from older in-game items.
- It gave us Luna, a walled city with player housing inside the walls. It gave bank sitters a whole new place to test their skills.
