Be Excellent To Each Other

Whether it 'turns you a bit to face the enemy TO HELP YOU YES', 'makes you magically auto shoot at a particular enemy a million miles away TO HELP YOU YES' or 'makes every single shot hit a single enemy that your man has focused on TO HELP YOU YES', I think aim assistance things are a bit pants.

They all warp the input I give the game, and that makes me sad.

There's a solution. It's profound and it's never wrong.

Options. GIVE OPTIONS. (And in multiplayer, allow the disabling of aim assistance to be a game option for all players (which doesn't overwrite their own preference))

Some people say 'It's the pad! It's to deal with the pad!'

I can aim with the pad just fine thank you very please. (With auto-aim off.)

I'm the cat for goodness sake, yet they must play as if they're using big squishy paws.
What's wrong with these people?

This. Yahtzee said a few videos back that console shooters are useless without auto-aim. It's the one time I've thought of him as a cackhanded oaf.

Auto aim is just annoying, I don't see the point. It's like playing a racing game with cruise control.

Or with automatic gears....

I am happy to take you on under UT3 for the PS3. We'll use mutators to turn the game up to the same speed as the PC version and all pad autoaim off. You can have the pad, I'll have mouse and keyboard. You game?

I'm against you nerds!
I reckon it's impossible to get pin point percise aiming on current joypads. Auto-aim-me-do!

Except if the game is designed and balenced with the player having auto-aim, it needs to be re-balenced and re-checked to see if it works without. Some parts might end up being ridiculously tough without. But if you balence for manual aiming and have an auto-aim option then, it'll make a lot of the game trivially easy.

I'm not a fan of all these options and difficulty tweaks, I want to play the game as designed. When it was being planned and made and tested and tweaked and balenced it was done at a given difficulty with a given control scheme - I'd rather just play with that. All these games with 8 different difficulty settings shoe-horned in, well, I have trouble believing they can all be equally fun.

You're comparing aim assistance with automatic gears? You don't find that comparison strange at all?

I'd have thought that comparing automatic gears with automatic reloading on an empty clip (or GTA>=3's ridiculously powerful belt fed submachine guns that you use in/on vehicles) would be more valid.

I'm with Pod on this one... Most joy pads analouge sticks are to sensitive for my manly thumbs.

I spend most of my time shooting at the floor and ceiling.

Nope, it's an aid to make the game easy that only spaccy handed near-cheaters would use.

But maybe TC or ABS would have been better examples.

(I am of course referring to the Forza end of the driving game tree here)

I think manual gears should be banned in driving games... stupid silly driving games. If you want ridiculously accurate simulation go fly a plane or something. Bah humbug.

An even better example would be all the smoothing of steering inputs that the game needs to do for joypads but not the wheel, but that's probably contradictory to the point you were making.

Also why is it nearly cheating to use automatic gears in a driving game? You can actually buy real cars with automatic gears you know and I thought manual gears were meant to let you go quicker?

Automatic in games is never a simulation of real auto gears but just the computer artificially helping you with manual.

Do you mean the smoothing that the game would do to map the thumbstick inputs into the physical mechanics of turning a steering wheel? (As to disallow the rapid movement of 'extreme left' to 'extreme right'?)


That sounds really mega entirely false to me.

I don't really understand the difference, not being a driver - could you elaborate?

Automatics in real cars don't automatically shift up at the redline , they shift up when they feel like it depending on all circumstances such as throttle position, they also don't change down instantly. If it was a real automatic, as soon as you let off the accelerator it'd be changing up gears for instance.

In addition, there's a power loss and a weight gain with automatics that's never mapped into games.



And why would that be?

Yes, sort of I just remembered reading that when they were setting the game up they were able to map the inputs from the steering wheel peripheral directly to the road wheels of the cars. For the joypad they had to do a lot more work so that people could use it accurately enough to make minor course corrections at speed without veering straight across the track.

I don't know anything about cars or gears, but I'd say that of the 80% of games where gears are modelled at all*, the modelling of the automatic gear change itself** is as close to reality, if not closer, then the modelling of the effects of the gears themselves on the car's drive.

You'd have to be pretty picky to yell 'This car does not have automatic gears! It has really badly modelled 'automated' manual gears, which I refuse to accept!' at a car game, instead of something like 'This car has weird automatic gears, so I may or may not get used to it.'.

It's a world apart from 'Hey, what gives, I pushed to the left at a constant amount, yet my rate of rotation is dependent on what I'm facing, therefore the fine control of my aiming is totally out of my hands! Bogus!'

*(rather than the car being incidental to the game and being a cuboid with one big gear)
**(rather than the other effects you mentioned which are ignored, as you say)

Going back to the original point, coming from keyboard/mouse pc gaming FPS as I do, the thought of auto aim would make me cringe. You need to lead your shots, and how can you do that if the computer is aiming for you? That would only work with hit scan weapons. If you have projectiles, then it's useless. Especially as you might want to knock your target into the air with the splash damage, and then swap to a hit scan weapon once they have a predictable trajectory!

Malc

What game allows you to knock your targets into the air long enough for you to switch weapons, aim and fire?

Ah that makes sense. I'm surprised GT doesn't model it more accurately, although it might be unplayable if they did...

Any of the quake series (rocket launcher to lightning gun would be the desired combo in q3a)

Malc

I don't really understand what this means.

In every game ever as far as I'm aware, automatic gears are simply pre-determined automatic shift points that the computer does exactly what would happen if you'd pressed the button at that point in manual mode.

It's automatic in the way it would be if the guy in the passenger seat did the shifting in a real manual.

So it's just a manual gearbox, not in any realistic way an automatic one. Unless I'm REALLY missing what you're saying.

Yeah, I articulated it badly, and my earlier statement was wrong for what we're talking about. Zut.

Ah

Fair enough.

All this demure and reasonable admittance of mistakes made is b-o-r-i-n-g-o. Someone call someone else a cunt.

Yes Sir Mr Corner Unit Nature Trail.

Depends whether or not you like aim assistance (in your video games) (when shooting people) (with guns).

Dudley, I agree with your fundamental point that there are no auto boxes in games, just manual ones that shift themselves. But I disagree with some details:

Depends on the box though. My auto Omega in sports mode will only shift up right at the redline if the throttle is any more than 3/4 down. Most performance cars with auto boxes do this. This is of course pretty much how you drive in computer games.

Traditional auto boxes are sluggish changing both up and down because of how the clutches work. My Omega's shift time is a good 1.5 seconds or so, way slower than I could do with a manual box. There are exceptions though, like the touch-shift "clutchless"-manual gearboxes on the later model BMW M3s, which change gears in a brutally quick quarter-second or so.

Again, although this is how the auto boxes in stuff like my Omega work that's more down to the programming of the box and the style of the car than any law of phsyics. The aforemention Tiptronic boxes in auto mode don't behave like that and my Omega in sports mode doesn't shift up for a little while, even if you come right off the throttle. Later cars have sensor maps built into the throttle, gearbox, and g-force meters. When the computer detects you are driving hard it automatically works the box harder for you, keeping it in gear longer and even doing perfect throttle-blip downshifts, something most humans struggle to do. I think it's the later Ferrari tourers that do that, I remember reading it in Evo.

What power loss? A gear is a gear, once you are engaged in it. On the other hand auto boxes often, although not always, have less gears than manual ones for cost reasons e.g. my Omega is a four speed. But again, it's not a hard rule, there are six speed auto boxes on higher end cars.

What does a mouse and keyboard have to do with anything? I didn't compare a mouse with a joypad, but said that auto-aim is wank (it has been used in some PC shooters before, yannow), and saying that consoles need it is feeble.

I am suggesting that a joypad is less precise than a mouse and that auto-aim goes some way to correcting for that imprecision in order to make the balancing of a game more consistent across platforms. I am suggesting that without autoaim, if enemy AI and placement and damage and so on are uncharged, that the PC version of (say) CoD4 will be easier than the 360 version.

And when I say CoD4 I am of course referring to the latest in the long running Call of Duty action FPS series, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, released to wide critical acclaim by Infinity Ward in 2007.

Those are all fair enough. But who cares about the balancing of the game from PC to console? Auto aim is unnecessary on consoles.

Let's imagine a scale from 1 - 10, with one being the least. The precision on the mouse/keyboard is 10.

The auto aim on console games is no substitute for more skill - it can raise the precision of a console game, but only if the person playing is a bit cackhanded. So if you imagine the console version being an 8, then auto aim can raise it to 9, as can a bit (and I mean a bit, not loads) of practice, but they don't stack together to make 10.

All auto aim does it fine-tune your aim when you're within a few pixels, and you can do that with a bit of practice yourself. If you learn to do that, auto aim is redundant. If you don't, it's a crutch. Keep it if you like, but having no option to turn it off is just irritating.

I also come from the world of PC based FPS. As such, I feel the mouse offers me pixel-precise aiming.

I'm pretty good at COD4 (on the XBOX), but I doubt I could hit anything if it didn't have it's haxomatic auto aiming. I don't think even "the pros" could do pixel-precise aiming with those things. Too much acceleromatingness.




I can list about 20 quake deriviates where this is possible...

People who bang on about using manual gears in racing games should be forced not only to use up and down shift buttons, but to have to press down a clutch button as well every time they want to do so. BECAUSE HAVING THE CONSOLE DO THE CLUTCH FOR YOU IS FOR SPACKERS AND CHEATS1111!!!11

Watch this (poor visual quality) video of some examples:



(better quality video available here)

Malc

You don't actually need the clutch to change gear in virtually any car, certainly virtually any racing car.

I'd have no problem with people using auto, if auto acted like auto.

Again, why do you have a problem anyway? Manual gears should make you go faster.

Also a lot of modern "automatics" i.e. the type which are electrically operated manual gearboxes can work a lot more like the auto in Forza does than your description of an automatic with its power sapping torque converter.

I use manual gears and turn off the assists in Forza only because it feels better and more fun. Having a problem with someone who doesn't is frankly bizarre.

They should.

And in games they don't.

If you turn off manual in Forza you're half a step from turning on brake and steering assists and then claiming you played it just as much as the guy who didn't.

And that's 1 more step from just watching someone play frankly.

It's certainly no less "Cheaty" than using auto-aim, which would be the point of this thread.

Well the Forza time trial scoreboards would seem to disagree about manual not being quicker, I can think of lots of places where I know it's quicker, where you can stay in one gear for a whole section where the auto would have made five or six gear changes.

Manual IS DEFINITELY an advantage over using auto gears on Forza 2. I am crap atr Forza, but get overtaken on the grid in every single race against people with manual gears, if they time their changes just right.

Using auto gears or stability control or whatever is not one step away from watching someone play. It just makes it more 'arcadey' and less of a simulator. It's still a game with sufficient depth for someone to pay a lot and extract enjoyment from... or is their enjoyment not considered to be good enough if they're using auto gears?

I've completed a race with everything off and manual, to get an achievement, and although I managed it it really wasn't fun and it made me feel a bit like a Mr. Spackyhands. I now play with auto gears, but no driving aids like traction control or ABS.

Does this make me a bad person?

SAY IT AIN'T SO!

There have been games that have a clutch button.

What would worry me is if they made one where the clutch is on one of the triggers so you had to ease it past a virtual biting point for the best 'shift'.

The Logitech G25 racing wheel comes with a six speed shifter and a clutch pedal and is apparantly completely supported by Gran Turismo 5.

Gran Turismo just annoys me now with all it's claims of realism...the lack of damage is just gamebreaking as you can just power on all the time with no real worries.

Perhaps because the good people are more likely to use manual.

Torque converters, man. Also, it's interesting that you mention the number of gears they have, I always thought it's the other way around, but maybe that's just 4x4s. My RRC has 5 forward gears, my fathers VW Touareg has 7 and his old Discovery 2 had 9 (all auto's - double that number if you count the low range box).

mmm, not sure where I stand in this debate..

1. I donm;t think most race games have their automatic gear boxes installed at the ideal point (it feels like that.although i admit never really having tested that), and would think this would giving an advange to the manual driver
2. i do agree it feels like the comuter presses the shift action instead of you
3. but i often don't like manual switching in games... it is often an unnatural movement you have to make,and at times detracts fromthe fun..you don't have to set your mirrors or turn the key in computers games as well.
4. modern real gear boxes switch quite seamless and barely noticalo which feels weird at first, but quite comfortable afterwards, like in the Toyota Yaris of my parents
5. i still wouldn't buy an car with automatic gears thoygh.. i kinda like switching gears in real life, and it gives you more control at times..

But lots of modern cars have gearboxes that will operate fully automatically but don't use power-sapping torque converters, they have what are essentially manual gearboxes where the clutch and gear change are operated electrically.

At the top of the scoreboards people are using whatever is fastest, if that was auto then that's what they'd be using.

I thought these were old skankiness but as google suggests my Omega has one, I stand corrected.

Yeah, I think is, and in fact I'm surprised by that. Dunno why 4x4s are different. Certainly my Omega has only four, and quite a few 60s American muscle cars have just three gears (or even two!). I think it's a question of weight and cost of the gearbox, missing a cog out compensates somewhat.

I agree with this. I find whichever bit of my brain copes with gear shifting isn't switched on when I play driving games. I've only ever enjoyed manual shift in a game once, which was Daytona USA 2001 on the Dreamcast, because I had a wheel for it that had a sequential shifter attached. That seemed logical to me, somehow.

I said this too, until I bought the Omega. I was kinda forced into an auto because I wanted the V6 and the manuals are quite rare compared to the autos. I must say though, now I wonder if I want to go back to an auto -- it's so much more effortless to waft around town in (the previous owner nicknamed my car The Admiral's Barge as it's an estate) and it's very suited to the cars heavy nature and lazy revving V6. I do miss it when I'm hammering it around lanes, but then I don't do much of that any more.

I agree with this. There are too many people using live; any tiny advantage in any aspect of the game is rapidly discovered and leveraged by thousands and thousands of deeply obsessed gamers. When the top of the leaderboards are full of manuals, that tells you the manual is faster.