I wanted to make one single post on this, in a constructive manner, so any 343 people who happen to cruise through this forum can have a more detailed and non-toxic feedback post about controller aiming.
Aim assist is fine, it’s all gravy. Some players have their own issues with it, but I don’t have any issues at all with aim assist.
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Look sensitivity. Simply put, it’s not fast enough. The highest setting available is 10, and that’s not enough to perform basic aiming and movement functions any flick aimer or flick shooter would normally perform. I have been a flick style controller aimer for the better part of this past decade, and I am having a helluva time trying to flick aim and turn in Halo Infinite because the sensitivity isn’t fast enough to accommodate my standard play style. I should be able to perform a 180 degree turn by flicking the stick about halfway or more to the end of the stick’s range of motion. I should be able to take my thumb, and just flick the stick momentarily and do a 180 turn with that flick. It should not take a prolonged period of time of holding the stick at max input to do that 180 turn. The solution here in my mind would be to increase the maximum controller look sensitivity (both the horizontal and vertical) from the current 10, up to 20. And up to 50 for good measure. That will give us players a whole lot more freedom to pick and choose and customize how we prefer our aim to respond to our stick inputs from our thumbs. A broader sensitivity range like this would also make other settings more meaningful, such as the acceleration and stick deadzone settings, since there’s just more sensitivity options past 10 to work with.
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The Center Deadzone setting of 0 doesn’t actually give me a 0% deadzone size. This is very obvious to me, because I use the Legacy Thumbstick Layout. With Legacy, aiming controls are mixed between the sticks, rotate left/right is on one stick, with look up/down on the other stick. Movement/strafing is also mixed between the sticks. I bring this up because with this stick layout (I’ve used it for more than 20 years), I am always acutely aware of where the deadzones end and crosshair movement begins. With a 0 center deadzone size, when I strafe left or right or look up or down, I should get a little unintended aiming and movement with that, when at a 0% deadzone size. I don’t get that accidental aiming or strafing which means there are still deadzones preventing me from getting full control of my aim and movement. Please make the center deadzone and axial deadzone settings actually give 0% deadzone when I set those deadzones to 0.
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Look Acceleration. This setting goes from 1 to 5. My issues with this setting are #1, it does not go down to 0. Meaning there is no way to completely disable aim acceleration, it’s always on and noticeable. #2, this has low granularity, meaning instead of a 1 to 100 scale, it’s a 1 to 5 scale, which makes choosing a setting fairly imprecise.
And finally just to sum up what I would ideally desire from the controller settings in Halo Infinite, would be as follows:
Look sensitivity set to 20. Aim Acceleration set to 0. Center and Axial Deadzones set to 0 (the REAL 0%, not the fake 0 we have now).
Having access to faster-than-10 sensitivity will make all of the other aiming related settings more meaningful and impactful, more usable. Look Acceleration and deadzone settings applied to a higher base sensitivity setting can really improve the overall feel of aiming and turning for flick aiming players like me. I worked at mastering faster and faster sensitivities over the last decade or so, and I’m not about to give up all those years of muscle memory and intuition, and basically erase everything I learned about faster sensitivity just to play one game. I think Halo should be an inclusive game where the most amount of players can have fun playing it, but anyone like me who plays on a bit faster sensitivity in shooting games is having a hard time with Infinite. I’ve spent way more time in the training area shooting at bots and tweaking my settings, enough time that I’ve exhausted all combinations of settings in the quest to make aiming feel natural and comfortable to me. Halo Infinite feels slow, unresponsive, clunky, unnatural, it’s a chore to turn around and pick up a gun from the wall or check a hallway for enemies as I pass by it. This is all really draining and taxing. I am quickly losing interest, I’ve only played 3 public games in the last several days. It takes a lot of effort to bring myself to start up Halo Infinite.
If you made it this far through this wall of text, thank you for taking the time out to read this. I know it can be strange hearing people’s different perspectives, and sometimes difficult to place yourself in their shoes, but that’s mine for what it’s worth.
