Ultima Online Renaissance
As previous history notes have shown, housing is a major issue in the UO world right now. In
addition to that, new challenges and opportunities are hard to find once a game has been
out as long as this one has.
To address that challenge, OSI released, in early April 2000 an expansion to its UO world called
the UO Renaissance. It was a semi-mirror copy of the existing worlds doubling the amount of
space for houses. But in order to prevent players who already had tons of houses from
gobbling up that space too, a restriction of 1 house per account (that was not retroactive
to hurt current multi-house owners) went into effect.
The new lands were what they called PvP Consent only. This means No Reds are allowed and
no stealing, killing or looting allowed. The only form of pvp that can take place in those lands
is the pvp that results from guildwars.
The old lands stay exactly as they were with the exception of some additional pvp options added.
Now, to more or less replace order/chaos wars, a system called Faction wars was added. There
were 4 factions: Minax (the evil sorceress), the ShadowLords, Lord British and The Mage Council.
Players can join those factions either by quitting their guild OR by their entire guild
joining them. The catch is that if your guild has any declared wars, it cannot join.
In addition to those changes, monster AI was reworked making them smarter in terms of pathing,
healing and things like that. Moongates were added to move between worlds. PvP skills
were completely overhauled allowing for more different styles to emerge but also ruffling
many veteran pvp players causing some to flat out quit.