If this is a mechanical advantage in every fucking game, and it can be faked by trivial tweaks, despite decades of counter-engineering - just solve the problem. Stop making bullets go exactly where the crosshair is.
Oh, does that make shooting people harder? Does it introduce randomness to the game? Tough shit, plan better. Get the drop on people. Get closer. Use your alleged l33t skillz to adapt to the tiniest goddamn mote of uncertainty, versus treating every game from the last twenty-five years like it’s instagib Unreal Tournament plus distractions.
This hyper-focus on one twitchy action, across an entire genre, is like we never moved past “mash the A button as fast as possible.” Yes, that’s a skill check. You can be good at it and teach others to get better at it. There’s even bizarre scenarios in speedrunning where superhuman pace becomes mandatory. But it’s trivial to fake. Autofire has been around since the 80s. The PC Engine made it a feature on the standard controller. Metal Gear Solid had a character call it out by name, saying the game could catch you using it! And yet if MGS4’s flashback reached that far, Otacon would have to explain to the audience what the hell they were talking about, because the entire industry decided it was a pain and moved on.
And look, compare fighting games. The genre blew up, went through several radical changes, enjoyed an indie golden age, and made a huge commercial comeback. Did any of them ask for more than eight joystick directions? Overhead 3D titles like Power Stone, sure, but in terms of inputting special moves - input methods have only become more refined, and so has the typical player. Nobody’s learning what “quarter-circle forward” means from a drawing printed on the arcade bezel. Speedrunning, pushing games to their limits, has tricks that work in the range of a few degrees. But those games didn’t start asking for sixteenth-circles. Or expecting you to manually arc your fireballs. Or tie your fists to the left and right sticks, directly, even though that sounds hilarious. The push has been toward simplifying inputs, because the actual meat of the game is making decisions. The only reason not to have one button for each attack is the value of reading your opponent to predict what they’re doing. Even in a game that’s two characters flat onscreen - the real skill is figuring out what to do next.
“I wanna shoot that guy” is not much of a decision. Some of the backlash against console autoaim was from how little there was, beyond that, in early shooters. Not a one of them let you move like in PC shooters, so the skill ceiling was drastically lower, and the controls for what little you could master were so clunky and ill-fitting that we still haven’t really fixed them. Joysticks and other relative-position controls are just not appropriate for point-to-point inputs. No more than a mouse is appropriate for moving your guy. We tried that, it sucked, we stopped.
But instead of fixing games so that this precision-gap does not matter, we’ve watched the whole industry agonize over who plays who, and spy on their customers, and demand everybody buy first-party controllers.
If you click while your crosshairs are over a guy’s head, you win, the end. Even if you were spinning in circles like an idiot. And all this bullshit does is ask: were you, a human player, really the one spinning like an idiot? Are you sure it wasn’t a robot picking the right millisecond between victory and defeat? No we do not care that guy had you dead-to-rights for five straight seconds, and was unloading a machinegun into your midsection for one of them. His crosshair got real big and a lot of those shots missed because that’s just good design… in exactly one context. You can take seven bullets to various limbs and still get instant flawless accuracy, because you were standing in place and wielding an expensive rifle. Y’know. For realism.
Fixing all of this can be as simple as reducing accuracy every time you move the crosshair.
Holding an angle? You’re golden, just get the timing right. Flick shot? Yeah right, good luck. Install whatever aimbot you want, it won’t do better than situational awareness. Pretend it’s the same as the third bullet out of an automatic, or firing while strafing, if that keeps you from pointing fingers about how hard I must suck, to dare suggest this generational and genre-wide issue should diminish your godlike ability to click on heads.
Aim in shooters needs to matter less.
If this is a mechanical advantage in every fucking game, and it can be faked by trivial tweaks, despite decades of counter-engineering - just solve the problem. Stop making bullets go exactly where the crosshair is.
Oh, does that make shooting people harder? Does it introduce randomness to the game? Tough shit, plan better. Get the drop on people. Get closer. Use your alleged l33t skillz to adapt to the tiniest goddamn mote of uncertainty, versus treating every game from the last twenty-five years like it’s instagib Unreal Tournament plus distractions.
This hyper-focus on one twitchy action, across an entire genre, is like we never moved past “mash the A button as fast as possible.” Yes, that’s a skill check. You can be good at it and teach others to get better at it. There’s even bizarre scenarios in speedrunning where superhuman pace becomes mandatory. But it’s trivial to fake. Autofire has been around since the 80s. The PC Engine made it a feature on the standard controller. Metal Gear Solid had a character call it out by name, saying the game could catch you using it! And yet if MGS4’s flashback reached that far, Otacon would have to explain to the audience what the hell they were talking about, because the entire industry decided it was a pain and moved on.
And look, compare fighting games. The genre blew up, went through several radical changes, enjoyed an indie golden age, and made a huge commercial comeback. Did any of them ask for more than eight joystick directions? Overhead 3D titles like Power Stone, sure, but in terms of inputting special moves - input methods have only become more refined, and so has the typical player. Nobody’s learning what “quarter-circle forward” means from a drawing printed on the arcade bezel. Speedrunning, pushing games to their limits, has tricks that work in the range of a few degrees. But those games didn’t start asking for sixteenth-circles. Or expecting you to manually arc your fireballs. Or tie your fists to the left and right sticks, directly, even though that sounds hilarious. The push has been toward simplifying inputs, because the actual meat of the game is making decisions. The only reason not to have one button for each attack is the value of reading your opponent to predict what they’re doing. Even in a game that’s two characters flat onscreen - the real skill is figuring out what to do next.
“I wanna shoot that guy” is not much of a decision. Some of the backlash against console autoaim was from how little there was, beyond that, in early shooters. Not a one of them let you move like in PC shooters, so the skill ceiling was drastically lower, and the controls for what little you could master were so clunky and ill-fitting that we still haven’t really fixed them. Joysticks and other relative-position controls are just not appropriate for point-to-point inputs. No more than a mouse is appropriate for moving your guy. We tried that, it sucked, we stopped.
But instead of fixing games so that this precision-gap does not matter, we’ve watched the whole industry agonize over who plays who, and spy on their customers, and demand everybody buy first-party controllers.
If you click while your crosshairs are over a guy’s head, you win, the end. Even if you were spinning in circles like an idiot. And all this bullshit does is ask: were you, a human player, really the one spinning like an idiot? Are you sure it wasn’t a robot picking the right millisecond between victory and defeat? No we do not care that guy had you dead-to-rights for five straight seconds, and was unloading a machinegun into your midsection for one of them. His crosshair got real big and a lot of those shots missed because that’s just good design… in exactly one context. You can take seven bullets to various limbs and still get instant flawless accuracy, because you were standing in place and wielding an expensive rifle. Y’know. For realism.
Fixing all of this can be as simple as reducing accuracy every time you move the crosshair.
Holding an angle? You’re golden, just get the timing right. Flick shot? Yeah right, good luck. Install whatever aimbot you want, it won’t do better than situational awareness. Pretend it’s the same as the third bullet out of an automatic, or firing while strafing, if that keeps you from pointing fingers about how hard I must suck, to dare suggest this generational and genre-wide issue should diminish your godlike ability to click on heads.