Do PC Games Have Aim Assist?

Aim assist has become an integral part of modern First Person Shooters. In my experience, this statement is true – but only for consoles. I’ll mostly be talking about FPS games because those are predominantly the ones where aim assist is included.

Playing with a controller can be an arduous or phenomenal experience depending on what you play. A controller is vital to have a good experience in a story game, but it can be absolute hell in FPS games. To counter this, developers include aim assist in console versions of video games by default.

This feature, however, is mostly absent from PC versions of games. Although this isn’t always the case, it’s true a majority of the time. The general consensus is that playing FPS games, and consequently aiming/shooting, is a relatively straightforward task on PCs compared to consoles.

Console players have to account for playing on joysticks which can often limit movement in aim. This can usually be countered by adjusting the aim sensitivity of your game. However, there’s still an apparent disparity between aiming for PC and Console players.

In general terms, PC players are always at an advantage. This disparity often is the reason why PC and Console players often have separate matchmaking pools in games. Nevertheless, the primary measure taken by developers to counteract this is disabling the aim assist function on PC versions of games entirely.

Why Don’t PC Games Have Aim Assist?

Now that I’ve established that most PC games don’t have aim assist, let’s discuss why this is. 

Firstly, from a community perspective, PC players heavily feel there’s no need to have aim assist on pc (or use a controller on the PC version of the game to manually enable the feature).

It’s possible that developers understand this fact and don’t add it since there’s little demand for it in the first place. In fact, games such as Overwatch 2 are actually disabling aim assist features from the PC version that they initially included. 

Secondly, PC gamers might actually be at a more significant advantage if they have the aim assist feature. It’s commonly believed that FPS games are easier to play on PCs due to the ease of access a mouse provides in aiming. If PC players were offered aim assist on top of that, console players would be at a clear disadvantage in all games. This would make both. Matchmaking and the overall balance/fairness between different platforms of the game are difficult.

This argument is as straightforward as that. I think there’s absolutely no need for PC games to have aim assist. A mouse gives you all the freedom you’ll ever need to aim accurately. The feature is much more appropriate on controllers where aiming can be restricted to the movement of your joystick.