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.
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.
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.

Besides all the new zones, The Planes of Power of course introduces a lot of new stuff to go into them. The game's player level cap has risen from 60 to 65, and the alternate advancement system introduced in last year's expansion has been fleshed out with even more high-level skills that suitably allow EverQuest's elite to customize and differentiate their characters. Also, dozens of new types of monsters, weapons, armor pieces, spells, and trade skill items have been introduced in this expansion, and hard-core EverQuest players are no doubt busy searching for all these things and systematically cataloging them in the vast encyclopedic online resource databases about the game. Either that or they're fighting their way through all the new planes, alongside dozens of their fellow guild members.

More high-level skills and an increased level cap should keep hard-core players busy for many more months.
More high-level skills and an increased level cap should keep hard-core players busy for many more months.

Some of the other features introduced not strictly as part of The Planes of Power but in preparation for the release of this new product are a new "raid" system as well as a much more polished user interface. Large-scale player raids have been a part of EverQuest for years, but only now does the game include actual mechanics to facilitate these massive-scale brawls. Normally, up to six players can band together in EverQuest, but many of the game's tougher encounters--in fact, many of its most recently added areas--require many more players than that in order to put so much as a dent in the opposition. The raid system now lets far more than just six players band together and earn group experience while conducting huge battles, though experience points are still earned fastest by six-player groups.

As for the game's interface, The Planes of Power uses fairly intuitive semitransparent windows much like what you're using on your operating system right now. This new interface certainly looks better, and it's laid out more neatly and is fully customizable, but it can still take a while for a new player (or even a returning one) to get used to it. Even so, between this new interface and the graphical overhaul introduced in last year's Shadows of Luclin expansion, it's impressive to see how EverQuest has managed to keep with the times. It's not the most technically outstanding game anymore, but it's held up much, much better than most games from 1999.

A new interface and numerous other changes have helped keep EverQuest from getting stale.
A new interface and numerous other changes have helped keep EverQuest from getting stale.

Though the graphics in The Planes of Power are more or less in line with the recent content upgrades that the game has received, one notable improvement in this expansion is its new musical score. There are now some impressively produced orchestral (and orchestral-sounding) tunes that replace EverQuest's opening theme and combat themes, as well as new music for the game's numerous new zones. Longtime EverQuest players have probably long since stopped listening to the game's audio, but The Planes of Power gives good reason to turn the volume back up.

Some things about EverQuest have never changed. The game is still undergoing significant, frequent balance tweaks to all its countless features--something that tends to frustrate a portion of the game's player base while exciting the rest. The game still demands a significant investment of time, money, and effort on the part of all of its dedicated players. And, perhaps above all, EverQuest can still be very rewarding. The original game's designers probably never could have foreseen not just the remarkable success that EverQuest has enjoyed these past three years, but also the way in which the game has grown and kept up with the times. EverQuest's players, meanwhile, truly have helped shape the game's unique world, as evidenced by most all the ways in which the game has evolved, most recently in The Planes of Power.

The Good

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The Bad

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