Editing EverQuest (section)

===Growth and sequels===
The first four expansions were released in traditional physical boxes at roughly one-year intervals. These were highly ambitious and offered huge new landmasses, new playable races and new classes. The expansion ''[[EverQuest: The Shadows of Luclin|Shadows of Luclin]]'' (2001) gave a significant facelift to player character models, bringing the dated 1999 graphics up to modern standards. However, non-player characters which do not correspond to any playable race-gender-class combination (such as vendors) were not updated, leading to the coexistence of 1999-era and 2001-era graphics in many locations. The expansion ''[[EverQuest: The Planes of Power|Planes of Power]]'' (2002) introduced The Plane of Knowledge, a hub zone from which players could quickly teleport to many other destinations. This made the pre-existing roads and ships largely redundant, and long-distance overland travel is now virtually unheard of.

''EverQuest'' made a push to enter the European market in 2002 with the ''New Dawn'' promotional campaign, which not only established local servers in Germany, France and Great Britain but also offered localized versions of the game in German and French to accommodate players who prefer those languages to English. In the following year the game also moved beyond the PC market with a [[Mac OS X]] version.

In 2003 experiments began with digital distribution of expansions, starting with the ''[[Legacy of Ykesha]]''. From this point on expansions would be less ambitious in scope than the original four, but the production rate increased to two expansions a year instead of one.

In the same year the franchise also ventured into the console market with ''[[EverQuest Online Adventures]]'', released for Sony's internet-capable [[PlayStation 2]]. It was the second MMORPG for this console, after ''[[Final Fantasy XI]]''. Story-wise it was a prequel, with the events taking place 500 years before the original ''EverQuest''. Other spin-off projects were the PC strategy game ''[[Lords of EverQuest]]'' (2003) and the co-op ''[[Champions of Norrath]]'' (2004) for the PlayStation 2.

After these side projects, the first proper sequel was released in late [[2004 in video gaming|2004]], titled simply ''[[EverQuest II]]''.<ref name="lore">{{cite web|title=Stratics Official Game Lore|url=http://eq2.stratics.com/content/lore/lore_toc.php|quote=Five hundred years have passed since the Sleeper was awakened|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080820001713/http://eq2.stratics.com/content/lore/lore_toc.php|archive-date=2008-08-20}}</ref> The game is set 500 years after the original. ''EverQuest II'' faced severe competition from Blizzard's ''[[World of Warcraft]]'', which was released at virtually the same time and quickly grew to dominate the MMORPG genre.