Aim acceleration was introduced in Halo 3 and has been in every halo game since. For those that don’t know, with aim acceleration on it basically meant that if you push forward on the right thumbstick all the way, you will not look up at a constant rate; instead, your aim will be slightly slower at start and then accelerate to full speed as you look up. I assume this was to create a more realistic feel by making weapons appear heavy and hard to manage; it also gives new players a little bit of help with aiming. However, aim acceleration generally made aiming clunkier; good players require their aim to be very precise, but aim acceleration made it harder to do so. Aiming in Halo 3/reach/4 feels slippery compared to in Halo CE/2; little twitches on the thumbsticks could either move your aim too little or too far from what you wanted, which makes lining up shots that much more difficult. This is why many players thought Halo CE and 2 played much smoother than in Halo 3 and on; there was none (if any, a very minuscule amount)of aim acceleration, so players were able to be precise without some clunky game mechanic hindering their aim.
My opinion is that aim acceleration needs to go completely, or at least have an option to turn it off. Having aim acceleration off would do wonders for precision aiming and would generally make aiming feel much smoother and less clunky.
Another topic for discussion is movement acceleration. With movement acceleration, whenever a player strafed in Halo 3, for example, their movement would slow down before accelerating to full speed. This was intended to make a realistic feel to player movement; however, all it does in a Halo game is make player movement feel much more clunky than it should feel. With movement acceleration, strafing is not as effective for dodging shots. Combined with hitscan and ample amounts of bullet magnetism (Halo 4), strafing was pretty much a joke because movement acceleration made strafing inefficient.
Movement acceleration needs to be minimized in order to make sure the game isn’t just a “who shot first wins” type of shooter. Players need to be able to strafe effectively to be able to outmaneuver other players in a firefight and gain the upper hand. Halo 2 was pretty spot on with this; despite having hitscan and a lot of aim assist, it was still hard to 4 shot a skilled player because he can strafe effectively.
Simply taking out aim acceleration and movement acceleration would make the game feel much, much smoother and less clunky. It is, I believe, one of the reasons why Halo CE and Halo 2 feel so good to play despite being older games; it’s because game mechanics did not feel clunky or get in the way of the player like it does in more recent Halo games.
