EverQuest: The Planes of Power Review

EverQuest: The Planes of Power serves as a reasonably good starting point for the game's continuous influx of new players but is mostly geared toward EverQuest's dedicated, hard-core following.

When EverQuest first appeared on store shelves in early 1999, it quickly garnered a lot of attention for being the first graphically impressive, fully 3D online role-playing game. The game's ambitious design and huge scope also earned it considerable acclaim, including GameSpot's Game of the Year award for that year. Now the game is up to its fourth official expansion pack in EverQuest: The Planes of Power, which will serve as a reasonably good starting point for the game's continuous influx of new players but is mostly geared toward EverQuest's dedicated, hard-core following. At any rate, the release of The Planes of Power is a chance to take another close look at EverQuest and consider how it's come along since last year's expansion, The Shadows of Luclin. In short, The Planes of Power demonstrates once again that EverQuest is aging gracefully, despite the presence of competition from newer, similar games and despite the threat of numerous, more technically advanced online RPGs on the horizon.

Serious EverQuest players will find numerous new challenges in The Planes of Power.

Fundamentally, EverQuest is still a highly time-consuming game in which players spend most of their time fighting monsters, preferably with groups of other players. Exploring the game's massive world of Norrath, increasing in power, finding new and better equipment, and interacting with all the thousands of other people playing the game are the reasons why EverQuest is so famously--or perhaps infamously--addictive. The game's numerous character classes are designed to complement each other in battle and have undergone so many balance tweaks and adjustments over the years that they're certainly all viable and interesting in their own right by now. And the game's tactical combat, especially at high levels, has some real depth to it, which is part of why so many people have stuck with EverQuest for so long. However, in many ways the game has changed a lot in the past couple of years. Simply put, EverQuest has lightened up a little--over time, the designers have tried to make the entire experience more user-friendly and less punishing, and to some extent, they've succeeded. Recognizing that the game is most intriguing for high-level players, the designers have effectively changed the game so that getting up into high-level territory is now easier than it used to be.

The retail version of The Planes of Power includes not just the new expansion, but also the core version of EverQuest, so that this new release is all you need to start playing EverQuest if you've never bought another product in the series. The game's box actually does a fairly thorough job of rattling off the expansion's most important points. Most notably, there are 20 new zones to explore in The Planes of Power, the majority of which are intended for groups of high-level players. One of these zones, the plane of knowledge, not only serves as a gateway into the other new zones, but is also a central hub for the entire world of Norrath, allowing all players to readily teleport between Norrath's major cities and some other key areas. The idea of all players being able to quickly and easily travel between all of EverQuest's main regions used to be unthinkable, since physically traveling across the countryside was actually part of the game's appeal. But as the size of Norrath has increased, the developers have aptly recognized that players' time with the game can be spent in much better ways than in transit from one point to another. Hence, to facilitate travel and the meeting of minds, there's the plane of knowledge.

The plane of knowledge lets all EverQuest players easily teleport across all of Norrath's key locations.

Most of the other zones are actually part of a central quest that challenges players to tackle the new areas one after another; clearly a change of pace for a game that's always been extremely open-ended and never really story-driven. At any rate, these zones, plus the ones added in each of the game's previous three expansions, plus all the ones from the original EverQuest, plus all the ones that have been provided as free downloads over the years, make for what has to be the single biggest gameworld ever. The fact that all the new areas in The Planes of Power are bizarre locations like the plane of war and the plane of justice--places where Norrath's gods dwell--just goes to prove that the designers have long since exploited most every conventional idea for use in the game and are now just trying to imagine entirely new things. Though most of the new zones are highly dangerous, even these are friendlier in some respects than how EverQuest used to be, in that they have designated areas where the corpses of fallen player characters reappear, out of harm's way.

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