Daily Radar has a short preview of Planetside, the persistent online multiplayer FPS being developed by Verant (the Everquest folks). It looks like they’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the problems that might make a persistent FPS frustrating, but I wonder what they’re going to do about the biggest problem with playing FPS online: the drastically different skill levels of players.
This is, of course, a problem with all games, but is especially so with an FPS since so much of the game depends on reflexes. Anytime I go online to play an FPS one of two things happens. Either I run around fragging neophyte players repeatedly until it gets boring or else some 14 year old completely owns me and I can barely aim my weapon before going down in a hail of rockets.
This is an even bigger problem when it comes to team-oriented games, where typically a server is often dominated by a group of people who probably play together frequently and simply own the other team (and it’s boring to be on either end).