Marathon gives aim assist to mouse and keyboard players

Bungie has officially begun public playtests for Marathon and players are quickly digging into all aspects of the game. One thing that immediately stood out to many PC gamers was the option to switch on aim assist with a mouse, and as you might expect, this has stirred up quite the debate. 

While many shooters will offer some form of aim assist to controller users, aim assist is traditionally not offered to keyboard and mouse users due to the ease of aiming with a mouse compared to a controller's analogue sticks. While aim assist on controllers is generally accepted, spoofing your input to access aim assist on a mouse is often viewed as cheating and many games now actively ban players for using such tools.

In Marathon, aim assist is available for both controller users and mouse users. It is switched on by default in the Marathon alpha and helps your crosshair stick to moving targets. While this might not be as big of a deal in a PvE focused game like Destiny, Marathon is a competitive game that heavily leans towards PvP action. Typically in a PvP game, we would expect there to be a skill gap, whoever has the faster aim and better recoil control will win the shootout. With the aim assist feature, recoil control is neutralised, taking a significant element of skill out of the game.

The baffling part about this is that Bungie is well known for its ability to make gunplay feel good. Halo became legendary because first and foremost, it was a fantastic shooter. Destiny has survived on the back of its gameplay, rather than story elements, for a decade.

Based on the clips we're seeing from Marathon already, the aim assist function does a lot of heavy lifting, more than what we're used to seeing in games like Call of Duty. A clip from streamer, Shroud, encapsulates this with all of the participants stating that they are ‘aim botting'.

Bungie has not yet commented on the feedback but based on the pushback to aim assist for mouse users, I can't imagine this feature remains in the game at launch.

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KitGuru Says: I expect this to be removed, or at the very least, heavily nerfed. With how heavy-handed the aim assist was, it should probably be nerfed a bit on controllers too. 

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