Everquest planes of power is for the hardcore Everquest players only
Planes of power works a bit differently than previous Everquest entries. You now have a somewhat cheap zone called Plane of Knowledge that takes you to every single city based zone you need to go. This makes the game pretty easy to run around in and you don't have to find a druid or a wizard to gate you around. This zone also serves as a place where you can go to the library of the city and buy pretty much every spell you need for your class up to about level 50. Some spells though you have to really work for to find and you can't find it in the library, but still you can find pretty much what you need without having to go snooping around for it. You can also upgrade your skill points for every single class in this zone, so basically there's no reason to go back to your hometown like in previous versions.
Lets talk about the Planes themselves though, which is surprisingly difficult to unlock, but there are about a dozen planes and all and in order to even reach Plane of tranquility, the zone that is connected to each of these planes, you need to be level 46. Basically though right when you enter, you immediately unlock the first tier of planes, which is the easiest ones, but trust me they have quite a few challenges. As you progress, you have to kill certain gods to unlock later tiers and in doing this, you can then keep fighting harder and harder monsters until your fighting level 70 monsters. Each plane has a specific purpose, such as one that is covered by nothing but water, codenamed: Plane of water. It's very difficutly to figure out what you've unlocked and what you haven't, but some NPC's (non player characters) will help you in Plane of knowledge. Even then it's pretty tough to figure out what's going on.
You can also go up to level 65 now, so you can get those last 5 levels if you want. Lastly, you can level up your AA points, which stands for Alternate advancement, once you get level 51, you can start doing these which gives you special powers such as runnig faster, getting better stats, or just having lots and lots of special abilities. Depending on your class they work like this: General is for every single class and is mainly used for getting better stats, Archtype is for that type of class, such as the healing type, druids, shamans, and clerics, all get abilities like faster heals, and then the specific class, which is just for your class. The cleric for instance, can get a resurrection spell that does 100% where you don't lose any experience when you die. You also have an add on with Planes of power, that gives you more stuff to have. So even after you get level 65, you are far from finishing this game.
Planes of power gear is so high up that it is downright pointless to even want to go to any other continent. Once you get level 46, just hop onto Plane of Tranquility and just forget about every other zone, except maybe going to the bazaar to sell or buy items.
The graphics in the game have been updated and once again, they have cleaned up the bland looking environments and character models even more. The sound is still nothing to look at though and it's very disappointing that they don't do something about this.
Overall, I can't say that Planes of power is the perfect step for Everquest. Granted, it's for the hardcore players only, but being able to go into the Planes that the gods are in is just bizarre and I think the developers have finially strayed to far from Everquest's old school roots that made it such a fun and enjoyable game to start out with.