A Celebration of Auto-Aim

A Celebration of Auto-Aim

Thinking about the joy of not thinking about where to shoot.

Games like Vampire Survivors, Beatdown City Survivors and Blood Dungeon have changed the way people think about how much, and how little, a game should do for you. In all three, you can pick a weapon to roll out with and make choices about what drops to grab as you go,  but you never have to choose exactly where to apply them. On the surface, this may sound like it's taking an opportunity for control from the player. But it’s actually more true-to-life that way. Most of us don’t actually think super hard about where we aim things, weapons or otherwise. A lot of where we put our fingers where we’re typing, the words we choose when we form a sentence, and yes, even where we throw pillows/snowballs/rocks at people, is done without a ton of conscious thought. In short, unless you’re a professional archer or a trained sniper, you’re probably auto-aiming through most of the shots you take in life anyway. 

You could say, then, that auto-aim-enabled games simulate how many of our second-to-second actions are completed through muscle memory. Like the way a baseball batter has just a second to track a ball in flight before taking a swing, most everything in life happens too fast to rely on conscious thought. As such, when a game aims for you, it makes room in your brain for more enemies on screen, sometimes coming at you at blistering speeds, making things even more exciting. It also gives players the opportunity to focus entirely on character movement, turning what might have otherwise devolved into a tedious exercise in multi-tasking into a much breezier time. Just as Pac-Man automatically eats the dots he runs into without the player needing to hit a dedicated “masticate” button every time he encounters one, getting rid of the “shoot” button in games can make for a much more fluid, flow state-friendly experience. 

And this doesn’t hold true for Survivors-likes alone. Other 2D action games, like the Azure Striker Gunvolt series, not to mention 3D games like the early Resident Evil titles and even some of the more recent Pokemon games, allow for free movement in a space while some (or all) of the specific decisions about where to hit the other guy are done with minimal direct input from the player. There are also games like the classic indie action adventure Iconoclasts, which have a tiny, secret aim-assist functions. They never come right out and tell you that they are helping you to connect your shots, but still, they feel so much better to play as a result. 

That said, Survivors-likes tend to automate even more than those other auto-aim enabled games, and not everyone enjoys that. They also have the tendency to suck you in with starting areas packed with easy enemies and a massive amount of rewards, only to have things get much rougher (and stingier) later. But that’s video games for you. As a rule, they give and they take, challenge and reward, in order to form a relationship with the player. And in some relationships, one party (in this case, the game) does more of the chores while the other (in this case, the player) can step back and consider the bigger picture. 

That’s much better than the alternative, right? Like, did you know that some games force you to do things you don’t feel like doing, over and over again, while the bigger picture is largely kept out of your sight? They’re much more of a drag than those that err on the side of enabling you to have too little to worry about. But more importantly, using auto-aim is sometimes the best way for a developer to take you to the experience they’re “aiming” for, auto or otherwise. It’s just another tool in the game design toolbox, and frankly, it deserves a little more credit.