Randomly Mine: How Does Halo Balance for PC? (Patreon)

Recently, I had an argument with friends. One without malice, I promise, and it was about something simple. Halo's Sniper Rifle. Two of these friends found themselves in an unfortunate scenario of battling someone on Mouse & Keyboard who was good with the Sniper Rifle. Really good. I.E, rarely missed a headshot regardless of incoming fire, positioning, or health.

Naturally, this is infuriating. Instakills are almost never fun because of the lack of counterplay involved, so enduring this on a 20-40 second basis for eight minutes is taxing on one's enjoyment.

Thing is, Halo's never had this problem...

On controller.

Halo's credited as the game which popularized modern FPS controls for consoles. It uses notable but smooth aim-assist to maintain a balance of skill and accessibility that separates it from most titles on the market, even to this day, though not nearly to the same degree as 2001.

In the 6th & 7th generation, the idea of crossplay seemed impossible. MIcrosoft's attempts at bridging the gap between Windows & Xbox 360 with GFWL and Shadowrun failed, and developers like Infinity Ward fearing for the balancing of their games. Ironically enough, IW's latest Modern Warfare is one of the world's biggest Crossplay enabled titles.

The efforts Microsoft attempted to initialize in 2007 are becoming mainstream.

Which brings us back to the Master Chief Collection. A title that isn't Crossplay (yet), but does pit controller against mouse & keyboard frequently, and it's brought to light an interesting conundrum.

Mouse & Keyboard users are frustrated by the potent aim-assist controllers have access to, forcing Mouse users to put in a lot more effort to achieve the accuracy that's essentially handed to gamepads. The frustration is understandable, especially as normally, mouse and keyboard wipes the floor with gamepad.

Thing is, mouse and keyboard has a couple of specific advantages that facilitate gameplay which previously didn't exist in Halo. Assassinations are far less preventable when you're able to 180 instantly, and the Sniper Rifle's a power-weapon at all ranges.

If it's true that gamepad's have the advantage in basic moment to moment gameplay, then mouse and keyboard has the advantage in a match's most significant peaks. Because of this, I honestly don't know how you perfectly balance this. You can't dampen the effect of one control method in isolation.

Jokingly I said that solving the Sniper Rifle on PC is easy, just add mouse acceleration when zoomed out, to match the gamepad's lack of aim-assist when zoomed out. The only thing that's easy about this, is how quickly it'll piss people off. Mainly because nowhere else in the game would this sudden inability to aim be present.

But then again, maybe it just speaks to how much design is influenced by the method of control. Perhaps Crossplay will reveal that some games just don't lend themselves to the concept, as much as others.