Before I get started with this I want to give my background as a player. I feel like it’s important when talking about these things that you guys know this isn’t just coming from some random person and you have context.
I am a former competitive console player who played a lot of CoD and Halo. I transitioned to PC in 2011, where I went on to play both Overwatch and Quake professionally. I have a love for AFPS, and Halo is one of my favorite games on console, as it takes quite a bit from Quake. While trying to be modest, I would describe myself as having above average aim on both inputs.
This is not your standard post bashing aim assist. As I said prior, I played/competed on console for quite some time. I understand that aim assist is needed. But I also think if Halo wants a future, that aim assist needs to be balanced. There’s actually a lot of things people don’t know about controllers, even the pros (I went into multiple halo pros streams and ask what they thought of auto-rotation and not a single one knew what it was). So before continuing, I want to go over some terms. Aim assist is a very broad term that’s used to describe multiple mechanics at once. I want to break that down, as we will be discussing some individually.
Aim Assist: Aim assist is the slow down that happens when you move your crosshair over an enemy. How slow varies game to game and sometimes is even affected by what sight you’re using or how far the enemy is.
Auto-Rotation: This is a form of “correction” that happens whenever you move on a controller while being on target. When you strafe, your crosshair is moved off target.The auto-rotation happens instantly to correct for your movement. This is why it’s effective in any game to strafe (even if the target appears to be still), as it activates the auto-rotation.
Bullet Magnetism: The area around the player model where if you’re “close enough”, it will register as a hit. In some games, this is affected by sight, zoom, etc. In Halo, mouse and keyboard also has this. But how much you have is dependent on which input you’re using. I’m not sure if this also applies to Halo.
Okay, now that we got down let’s talk about a PC mechanic:
Tracking: Tracking is the players ability to stay on target while a player is moving. While tracking, you’re having to compensate for multiple factors. The enemy player’s movement, your own movement, and any kind of external thing such as knockback from a grenade etc. One of the bigger things here is your own movement. Anytime you strafe a direction, you have to compensate with your mouse for your own movement. You can mitigate this by just matching the enemies strafe, but this makes you also easier to hit. The skill in tracking is mostly in how well you’re able to keep up with enemy movement changes.
Now let’s talk about why there is an imbalance between the two…
When tracking on mouse and key, you are having to compensate with the mouse for your own movement. Every time you move right, you have to move your mouse left equally to correct for the amount your movement offset you. Obviously this is if the target is standing still. Once the target is moving, you then have to compensate for your own and enemy movement. On a controller as long as your moving, the auto-rotation is activated. This is the reason why you only have to move your thumb stick in the correct direction as the enemy player movement, you don’t have to be accurate. Once a controller gets on target, you will hardly miss. The reason closeup BR fights are so hard for MKB vs controller is that the auto-rotation on the controller does this INSTANTLY (0ms). To put this into perspective, the average human reaction time is 250ms. My reaction time hovers between 120-130. You can test this with a site called human benchmark. This is the biggest problem in aim assist. A player on mouse and keyboard cannot react to something instantly. This is the largest reason I think BR fights are heavily weighted towards controllers. The slowdown plays a very small factor in the grand scheme of things.
I’m not 100% sure what the solution for this is without testing. I think the best place to start would be with the auto-rotation. The instant activation and the fact that you can continually activate just by moving would be good places to start. Obviously, something has to be done regarding it. I’m not going to go into my opinion on the skill gap/ceiling between mouse vs mouse and controller vs controller, but I do believe there is a world where both can co-exist. I also feel it’s very important that Halo retains their PC player base. Halo (like it or not) is a dying game. It shares a lot of similarities with Quake in terms of why it is. But there are a lot of people on PC interested in Halo, even from a competitive standpoint. But I think a lot of players will not play if they feel that it is imbalanced. So I feel it’s in 343’s best interest to balance the game for both inputs being in the same lobby, not separating them as this will just split the community up more. I want to see Halo succeed. Halo in a lot of ways revolutionized controller FPS and I feel like it could easily be the first fair cross-input esport.
EDIT : Updated explanations and closing.