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PC Gamers Too Good For Consoles Gamers?
thsoundman sends in a blog post from Rahul Sood, CTO of HP's gaming business, who claims there was once a project in development at Microsoft to let Xbox users compete against PC users playing the same game. According to Sood, the project was killed because the console players kept getting destroyed by their PC counterparts. He wrote, "Those of us who have been in the gaming business for over a decade know the real deal. You simply don't get the same level of detail or control as you do with a PC over a console. It's a real shame that Microsoft killed this — because had they kept it alive it might have actually increased the desire of game developers and gamers alike to continue developing and playing rich experiences on the PC, which would trickle down to the console as it has in the past."
You're right. A lot of console gamers wouldn't know what to do with themselves. In fact, a lot of console gamers would be incredibly surprised to realize that all this time, they've been using aim-assist (I say aim assist instead of auto-aim, because auto-aim can also refer to mods that are far more influential than aim assist). If you were to ask the random console Bioshock player or Left-4-Dead player if the game had aim assist, I wouldn't be surprised if most of them said "no." But they do.
Personally, I think it's kind of a testament to how well aiming assist has been implemented into console games. It's almost transparent, and still allows for a wide range of skill. PC gamers who don't play console games very often probably still think of aim-assist the way they think of auto-aim, that the cross-hairs instantly snap to a players head or that bullets that wouldn't have hit magically hit their targets. While the latter is still the case in some games (like left 4 dead), the former doesn't exist in any game that I am aware of. Instead, the aim-assist acts more like a weak magnet. Large analog movements have less impact the closer you get to your target. So in, say, Call of Duty, holding the analog stick all the way to the right when not targeting an enemy causes you to turn quickly. But when you're targeting a person, the person acts as kind of a magnet which means you can use larger analog movements to fine tune your shot. It's an amazing system that works considerably well and is the ONLY reason fps games work on consoles.
That being said, as a PC gamer and a console gamer, I have to say I think there are quite a few PC gamers out there who still think there's little-to-no skill involved in console shooters and that playing a console shooter couldn't POSSIBLY be as fun as playing it on the PC. I think this is a shame as I find console games with clever aim-assist to be quite fun, not at all frustrating, with a ride range of skill levels and very entertaining.
RTS games, on the other hand...