EverQuest New Dawn: The Planes of Power UK/US Edition.

The Planes start off with the biggest feature of all, free teleporting to most of the old world cities. No longer do you have to wait for the boat at Freeport to take you to the Butcher Block Mountains, now you simply find the pedestal in the relevant city, click on it and you are transported to the Plane of Knowledge, where you can travel to the rest of the world and indeed other planes.

It adds new challenges so that you can take your character further. No longer do you have to stop advancing when you reach level 60, now you can take your character on to 65.

Although its not aimed at the lowbie characters, for the travelling reason its useful, and the new lower level spells too, though the high level ones are truly awesome.

So go get your platinum together and buy this wonderous expansion to the world of Norrath!

In many ways Everquest is not a user friendly game. I remember when I first started with my Shadowknight character, my starting scroll said to follow a trail of bones to my non-player character guild master and give him the scroll. It took me hours to find this most unimpressive trail of bones, even though I had been walking passed it for ages. I just didn’t recognise it. It looked like general debris. I still had trouble finding my guild master because I didn’t realise that I had to walk through walls to do it. It’s a trial and error job at first. When I tried to talk to my guild master, I intuitively left clicked on him and nothing happened because he was waiting for me to type ‘h’ for hail. Great! The manual does cover a lot of this and there are countless guides to the game on the Internet but no one studies the manual when they start a game like this. Missions can also seem very vague and can tell you to visit places you have no hope of reaching at a low experience level. It’s hardly intuitive and newer games spoon feed you by comparison.

Once you get familiar with the system, however, things begin to take off. In no time you are killing things and racking up the coins to buy armour and better weaponry. Once you reach level 5-10 you link up with other players in groups and go stalk the quickly spawning orc camps and the like, sharing xp and credits. Some newer players seem to struggle with the group concept, often rushing to attack that dangerous group of Dervishes when the rest of his (and it’s usually a ‘he’ from what I can make out) group are still recovering from the last battle. They get expelled quickly. Other players can be very generous, often giving away quite valuable stuff, as far as newbies are concerned. Using magic is also great fun. There is a vast amount of spells and magical abilities in the game and all classes can use at least some. There’s nothing better than that life saving heal in the heat of battle. It’s not all about fighting though. Players craft, trade, do bodyguard duty and all sorts.

You can pick the server you want. Some specialise in player versus player combat whereas others cater for the newbies. Some questers play the game intensively with their player guilds, whilst others use it for a bit of play and chat. The game is also very international. There are UK servers but don’t be surprised to find a lot of other Europeans and Americans on them. Servers get busy and people will log on anywhere.

I don’t play as much now as I’ve moved on to newer games like Star Wars Galaxies - groan! - could be better. The new games do make Everquest look a bit old and unsophisticated but it is obviously fun for those hundreds of thousands who’ve made it their online home. Anyone new though should look at some of the newer offerings as well, as they can offer just as much fun and a more varied, slicker game play. And don’t forget the spectacular looking Everquest II is just around the corner.

2 months ago i decided to take on the game of everquest, im still playing now. With all the playing time ive put into the game i could never get to the places that i wanted to be , there either too far away or too dangerous to get too.
This the 5th (i think) addition to the game ( along with the constant updating and support) makes the game enjoyable beyond the basic pack, you can go around the world and discover the shear size of it all, you meet new characters like yourself, and without ever meeting them before, form a ragedy band too take on the most varied bestiary i know.
If you like a challange ( and dont mind addictive games ) this is a must addition.