Once upon a time
The consoles waged wars on each other by partnering with game studios and making exclusive games for them.
These games were mainly shooter games such as Gears of War, Halo, Killzone, Uncharted, and many more.
Regardless of the platform, all these games are not readily available for the PC market.
and because of this, these games were built purely with 🎮 in mind.
Joystick and Sticky aiming
Around the 3rd generation of consoles, game studios mapped the camera control to the right joystick.
This would allow players to walk and turn around with their thumbs and aim and shoot with the trigger buttons and their index fingers.
3 actions to perform at once with no draw back whatsoever.
Well, expect bunny 🐇 hopping, which wasn’t as good as on PC since the jump button was on the ❎️/🅰️ face-button, which meant moving the right thumb back and forth.
But this is for another subject I’ll link to later in this post 😅
Aiming with the right stick did the job to allow players to aim where they want…
But it is a whole other level to keep the sights on the target, and game studios realized that.
Thus
Aim-assist was born
Aim-assisted was implemented, more or less, by sticking the player’s sites on the first enemy they targeted. For a brief second or so, the camera is locked from players’ control to allow them to spray bullets. This is called “sticky-aiming”
Some studios implemented better, some less, and didn’t implement to encourage competitiveness.
Other types of aim-assists
Game studios implemented less common assistants like snap-aim.
Snap-aim is when a player holds the “aim” button, and the game “snaps” the crosshair on the target.
This mechanic was less accepted in the competitive scene, so it was usually implemented in non-competitive modes like campaigns.
P.S
I am out of touch with what’s currently happening in Battlefield since I stopped playing after BF4, but apparently, there’s a soft snap-aiming assist in modern Battlefield games, which is crazy, but at least it’s not as snappy as it is in campaign mode.
There’s also another assist mechanic called bullet magnet, which was implemented around Halo Reach, from what I remember.
But from what I found on YouTube, there’s a chance this mechanic was implemented way back, as in the first game had this mechanic.
I don’t know if any other game has this machinc besides Halo, but since Halo games don’t have an “aim-button” like Cod games, it most likely had to compensate in others ways.
Which is weird, now that I think about it, because Halo became MLG’s #1 competitive game. Ahh, the good memories of 2008
So what happens when you take all these mechanics along with weapon balance that was specifically tailored for controllers 🎮 and put it in a Keyboard-mouse ⌨-🖱 environment?
My experience playing MCC Halo 3 online on PC
This is my old salty review on Halo MCC 😂.
You can check my full review here
This review is full of rage because I couldn’t stand just how different it felt to play Halo on PC, where every player pulls out a Battle Rifle (BE) to snipe you from across the map.
The BR55HB battle rifle, or just the BR, was a powerful weapon on consoles as well.
However, since aiming with the controller 🎮 was not as precise as a mouse 🖱, it meant that the Time To Kill (aka TTK) was, on average, long enough for non-BR players to use other weapons to counter them.
Some players, like myself, would use cover & bunny 🐇 hoping to counter these players and quickly dish out some bullets with a side of a melee attack, which would kill them faster.
But on PC, this is useless since the bullet magnet would allow BR players to hit me regardless of whether their crosshair is on me or not because of the bullet magnet 🧲.
Which was honestly 🐂sh!t
The game also features power weapons around the map, which were powerful in the 360 era, but on PC, they pose no threat to the average mouse and Keyboard player.
In the end, the simple fact that players could now use a mouse instead of a controller’s right joystick completely changed the game’s overall balance and metagame.
And while Halo on PC can have its own eSports environment, it’s a shame that 343 did not attempt to balance the weapons for PC so that power weapons like the Plasma rifle and Rocket launcher could have their moment to shine.
But no, instead, you get bombarded with BRs. sign…
Different patches for the same game – Overwatch’s case
When Overwatch was released back in 2016, it quickly became the #1 shooter game on the market.
Millions and millions of players played that game endlessly.
Back then, crossplay was not common, but luckily, Overwatch’s playerbase had enough players for each individual platform to keep the game alive.
Players became familiar with each Hero’s pros and cons and quickly learned which heroes were better than the others.
Unsurprisingly enough, each platform had it’s own separate balance patches, which were widely different from each other.
PC – The Widowmaker’s case
Widowmaker is a sniper class hero who focuses on dishing out damage but shooting opponents from far away.
To get the best damage, a player must aim down the sights and wait for about 1-2 seconds to get the damage meter to hit 100%.
Once it’s fully charged, a single headshot and 1-shot most heroes down.
So pro players with pinpoint 🖱 accuracy practiced quick scope with Widowmaker while using the Grappling Hook to become a harder target to kill.
She was OP in earlier versions of Overwatch, and the first balance patch the developers pushed for was for her.
Here’s a video that was released when it was first announced.
While Widowmaker dominated the PC metagame, players on console couldn’t utilize her as effectively with controllers 🎮.
However, there was one character, on consoles, that had to be addressed.
Consoles – Torbjörn’s case ⁉
Excuse my French, but this DWARF, this Gnome wannabe, single-handedly owned the metagame of Overwatch.
Fun fact: Believe it or not, but the engineer class was also good in Killzone 2, another class-based shooter game that I played a lot of before Overwatch.
Torbjörn was super good on consoles because many players were casuals, and in general, the TTK was longer because of the aiming issue.
Before the patch, Torbjörn’s turrents were probably balanced for Mouse & Keyboard users, and it wasn’t taken for a fact that controller users might have harder time aiming shots, especially when a lot of heroes don’t have the standard automatic rifles like Soldier 76 that allows players to easily destroy Torbjörn’s turrents
A case where the 🖱 doesn’t affect the balance? 🤔
Yes, in fact, but it’s very rare.
I personally know a specific game that I mentioned in my earlier post about movement,
which is a sub-post to my grandious mini project about “The importance of control“
Anyways, this game is Gears of War, which has a very unique metagame that allows both Keyboard ⌨ and Controller players to dominate the field.
Gears of War’s metagame does not persist of point laser accuresy, but rather stylish and aggressive play style with the shotgun while using the cover mechanics for advance movement that is called “wall bounce”.
The wall bounce technique allows players to become a harder target to hit with standard automatic rifle weapons.
This is why the only efficient technique to kill them is by using either power weapons or the starting secondary weapon, the Gnasher shotgun.
Do Battle-Arena shooters (like Quake) count? 🤔
Not really, since the movement is way faster than Gear’s of War’s wall-bounce technique, not to mention that Gears of War is actually a 2D shooter (since you can’t jump in that game).
Battle-Arena shooters are blazengly fast and have full 3D battles where players often bunny-hop around the map.
The average controller player can’t play those games without increasing the movement of the right joystick to just barely even catching the target in the crosshair.
Developers might need to implement a much stronger sticky aiming just for players to be able to kill one another, which would probably be a nightmare to implement
Outro
Today, Cross-platform is a must for any game studio that wants to release a successful multiplayer-based shooter on the market.
Combining this with the fact that the developers need to balance the game around 2 separate controls sounds like a nightmare.
I salute the developers who committed their lives to balance the games for any type of player.
For those that don’t implement, I hope they at least gave the option for console players to play with a Keyboard & Mouse as an alternative.
And as for the rest of the casual gamers? Try not to suck when you pick a DPS character please 😜
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