EverQuest: The Scars of Velious Review

Those that are experienced enough to explore the new lands Velious has to offer will certainly find these areas to be extremely challenging and rewarding.

Beginners need not consider The Scars of Velious, the second retail expansion to Verant's extremely popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game, EverQuest. Velious is designed for EverQuest's more seasoned player population - the players who've already devoted hundreds of hours to the game. Statistically, this actually includes the vast majority of the game's more than 300,000 active subscribers. These players will find that the new expansion offers far greater challenges than any they've previously experienced in the world of Norrath, just as they'll find that the continent of Velious itself is filled with some of the most interesting and fully developed EverQuest zones to date.

The Scars of Velious is designed for players with characters at around the 35th level of experience up through the 60th-level limit. Unlike the previous expansion, The Ruins of Kunark, Velious doesn't add any new player races to the roster, nor does it cater to players just starting out. The cold, frozen continent of Velious isn't the least bit hospitable. In fact, even the weaker creatures inhabiting the continent are very aggressive, hard-hitting, and fast. Because of all the danger, the 16 new zones in the expansion definitely aren't well suited to casual exploration, nor to casual players. You'll want to travel to and in Velious with a contingent of powerful allies closeby, who can readily assist you with magical defenses, brute force, or diversions as necessary.

You arrive in Velious by means of a gigantic gnomish ship, the Icebreaker, whose bizarre front-mounted oar-paddle apparently makes it the only vessel capable of navigating the previously uncharted waters around the island. The Icebreaker will drop you off on the coast near the Iceclad Ocean, leaving you to venture forth toward such locations as the haunted Tower of Frozen Shadow, the frost giant haven called the Great Divide, the lost dwarven city of Thurgadin, and more. The most advanced players will also be eager to set foot in the two new ethereal planes in Velious: the lush plane of growth and the bizarre plane of mischief. There's also the Skyshrine, a city of dragons. Each of these zones is rather large and filled with new places to explore, creatures to fight, and treasures to loot.

Velious is a snow-covered continent, but fortunately the new zones tend to be at least as distinctive as they are snowy. The Scars of Velious was designed to be a cohesive addition to the world of Norrath, rather than a loosely connected set of new zones; specifically, you'll find that Velious is actually the site of an ancient feud between giants and dragons. Meanwhile, a race of battle-hardened dwarves has also somehow managed to survive on the sidelines. You can choose to side with any of these, at the possible risk of angering the others. Faction standings have always been a key feature in EverQuest - fighting certain types of creatures makes those creatures gradually hate you more, while their enemies grow fonder of you. So inherently evil races such as trolls, ogres, and dark elves can still eventually gain the favor of good races. Velious takes this concept a step further by making you have to choose your alliances more carefully. Certainly, it doesn't seem favorable to be at the top of either a giant's or a dragon's hate list.

The expansion introduces some new play elements that will make EverQuest more rewarding for some players but will also make the land of Velious a lot more treacherous for most everyone else. For instance, traps have been added to certain areas, so unless a war party has a rogue or a bard capable of detecting and disarming them, the entire party might fall victim. Death has never been easy to deal with in Norrath, as having to retrieve the possessions from your own corpse, let alone having to spend hours regaining the experience you've lost, can be extremely frustrating, but Velious adds a further possible complication. It's no longer safe for a player with good faction standing to drag another player's corpse to a convenient location for the revived player, as the creatures of Velious won't let someone assist their enemies. This makes death an even greater risk in Velious, so again, unless you're traveling in a large group or with high-level clerics ready to resurrect their fallen comrades, then you'd best be extremely careful.

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EverQuest: The Scars of Velious

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