With Age 53 almost upon us, we wanted to let you all know about a couple of changes we'll be making.

The most striking change is going to be a bit of an update to the look and feel of the Utopia. Our goal is to make the game more visually appealing, especially to new players.This is purely CSS work, meaning that no game mechanics or text have changed. It's mainly an update to the colors, the layout and typography. We've added a theme chooser to the account settings page, which defaults to the new theme (which has a leather, steel and gold motif), but also allows you to revert to the "neoclassic"  theme (which is mostly identical to the current look and feel). We know that visual updates to the game are always contentious, but we hope the extra effort we made to allow people to revert to the old style will appease people who prefer the old style.

You can take a look at a sample of the new look and feel here.

We would also like to encourage anyone with CSS skills to inspect how we've organised the CSS, and create new themes that we can make available to everyone. For example, if someone wants to create a work-appropriate theme, I'm sure the community would appreciate it.

The second new feature is a re-organisation of how you pay for premium features. At the moment, premium features such as sitting, ad blocking, taunts, kingdom invites and so on are scattered around the game, and are charged for in different ways. This is confusing, and makes it hard for us to create new premium features without making it even worse. So we have re-organised all of these features into a "Shop", which is linked at the top of each page. In here you can buy premium items (such as sitting, taunts etc.). These remain in your inventory until you use them or gift them to another player.

As part of this re-organisation, we've straightened out how you pay for sitting. Previously, you were charged for sitting once per night, regardless of whether you activated it in the morning or the evening. This was getting confusing for lots of people. Now you activate sitting in advance for a specified number of days. For example, if you activate sitting for 3 days, sitting will start immediately and elapse 72 hours later. 

These changes will be made available on Wednesday when we deploy the new age. We hope that they make Utopia a better game to play.

Please add your comments in the forums here.