Murder Miners' Cool Ass Crosshair

If you know me at all you know Murder Miners is my shit. I found it while looking for splitscreen FPS games on Steam and I found this shitass game called shitass Murder Miners and thought, "this looks dumb and funny and it's cheap" so I got it and now like 20 friends also have it and I have 1292 hours as of writing and I made a 2 hour soundtrack for it.

So I kinda fuck with it.

There's lots of tiny things I love about it. I've always had trouble really getting into multiplayer driven games because I never really had much of a group to play the games with. I did get my friends to play MM though, and once they didn't really play it anymore there's quite a lot MM is doing that makes the experience of going in solo actually pretty nice! It feels like a reinterpretation of Halo that's truer to what people saw within it; the social aspect, at least. With friends I like to call it like a fighter-shooter, the way the weapons and movement all interact feel very fighter-y to me. I'm not that into competitive scenes and yet MM is a game where I found myself paying attention to the frame data of guns. Its super easy to pick up, at least to me, and I'd like to talk a bit about the things about MM's design that I really like!

STARTING WITH: AIM ASSIST

Murder Miners features aim assist on keyboard and mouse, unlike most games. This is more of a remnant from the game's roots on the Xbox 360, but it also does things to the game and its combat that are really cool to me.
First I wanna talk about the crosshair itself. Circle in the middle of the screen. When there's a target within the circle, it turns red to indicate aim assist is gonna kick in on that shot. That alone isn't new, it's lifted from Halo.

The cool part is, the radius of the crosshair shows you the exact radius of aim assist! Which will also change depending on the weapon. Longer range options like the Pistol and Battle Rifle have smaller assist radii compared to the more all-rounded Machine Gun, and even that is smaller than the Shotgun. This both gives you clear feedback for when aim assist is going to kick in on your shot, but also reinforces each weapon's role! It makes sense that a longer range option would have assist more suited for further away targets. The cool part to me is how it's made so clear through the crosshair alone.
The crosshair isn't JUST for the aim assist radius, too! The shotgun has fixed spread and will fire in a star pattern that you can see if you shoot a wall. And that pattern perfectly fits within the crosshair as well. It's really multi-purpose.

You might notice the shotgun's crosshair in that second image is a lot bigger than the first one. That's because I changed my FOV settings. MM's crosshair will scale with your FOV settings so that the size of the crosshair, therefore the amount of aim assist you get, remains consistent with the scale of the world around you. That's insanely cool to me that they would have even thought of that.

Something I also really like is that if you're using a controller, target friction will also kick in when things are just outside your assist range. It gives you clear feedback as to WHERE that assist range is instead of having a bunch of invisible systems for friction and whatnot kicking in and kicking off all the time. I wanna see more aim assist in games that's communicated clearly to the player! It's really cool stuff!

There is one other game I can think of that does the whole "crosshair is the assist radius, also assist on keyboard and mouse" thing and that's BPM: Bullets Per Minute. Another game I used to play the HELL out of.

The main point of this game is RHYTHM SHOOTING. Precision isn't really the focus as much as shooting and dashing on beat with the music. It's quite a lot to get used to but it's super fun, still very highly recommend it.

The crosshair in BPM is a diamond shape. Anything within the diamond shape will have your aim snap onto it. It makes life a whole lot easier because it means you aren't both having to grapple with the weird rhythm stuff AND precision at the same time.

BPM isn't about precision. There's an item you can get that literally makes the crosshair bigger so that more things get caught in your assist range.

It's also a cool dual-purpose indicator for the rhythm! Triangle shapes will meet at the center of the crosshair and it shows when both the on and off beats happen. Game's full of little visual and audio flair to reinforce the rhythm and the crosshair gets it across right away. It's super cool.

I bring this stuff up for two reasons; for one, as someone who learned to use a mouse kinda late because I never had one, Holy shit is it a nice thing to get to have aim assist on keyboard and mouse. Every weapon in MM commands a different skillset to using a mouse, while also all having their own interactions with other weapons. It's something that really pushed me to learn to use this thing and I don't think I would've had as much fun if I had to start from absolute 0 in a game where you can spawn with Basically the Halo Sniper. like the Power Weapon.
I think it'd be nice to see more experimenting with aim assist as a game mechanic! It also does stuff to how combat works but I'm more just talking about assist alone right now.

I also bring this up because I've spent a lot of time playing games both on keyboard and mouse AND on controllers. including murder miners! and I have to say like, aim assist, for being something that's kind of expected as a standard in FPS games, is super fucked up and unstandardized and I think some games would benefit from an implementation like MM's.

One game I actually think of is Ultrakill! (Not to diss on Ultrakill this is a game I love and have been very deeply inspired by it's a fantastic game)

Ultrakill isn't a finished game yet, so if you're from the future and this gets changed then just remember this was written before Fraud came out :)

Ultrakill features an "auto-aim" setting you can turn up from 0 to 100. I have no idea what the scale on that is. It seems like there's a radius around the crosshair where assist will kick in? But there's nothing like target friction or anything. It's just, your aim will snap onto things that are close enough to the center of the screen. There's nothing on screen to indicate what the aim assist is doing.
In my experience playing the game on controllers and on the Steam Deck I've actually found it easier to just play with aim assist off and go with using a low sensitivity so that actually hitting things is possible. Which hampers your ability to turn around, but gives you far greater control over what you're actually doing. Playing with this aim assist can get super frustrating if you're trying to actually do some cool stuff since your aim will seem to fly around to whatever target is on screen.

Bonus points; there's a little mini HUD around your crosshair to show your stamina and health, and when your crosshair moves when assist kicks in, that little HUD also moves. The thing that's at the center of the screen because you're always looking there gets moved all over the place. I gotta be real. It sucks. It really sucks and I hope if they plan on console releases that something a bit better gets put in place of it. Because Ultrakill on controller doesn't have to be like that.

I notice aim assist implementations can feel like a weird afterthought. I've played some games that are trivial on KBM but are basically impossible on controllers, like HROT does not have any assist and you'll run out of ammo trying to circlestrafe and accurately track targets with the fully automatic weapons you're given ammo for.
Or POSTAL: Brain Damaged on PC just didn't have aim assist. It did on the switch but it took until a more recent update for the same thing to be given to people on PC. Which extra sucks because that game was verified on Deck and was also kind of unplayable. Gyro aim didn't work, just like. by the way.

For being such a widely accepted thing in the genre, I think aim assist deserves more thought in how it's implementation can really craft the kinda experience you're trying to make. In part because I just think MM does it really cool but, also because I've seen weird implementations of it really change or ruin experiences between KBM and controllers.

Some people say it's an accessibility thing and I would agree. Sometimes one input method kills your hands more than the other. It just depends on what you're used to and what your body can do. It'd be nice if we could do a bit more to try and level the playing field for people here.
I'd recommend trying a favorite game of yours with a different input style than you're used to! I tried DUSK on a controller on a CRT a bit ago and especially now that it's got aim assist options for playing like that, completely different experience that I'm really glad I went through. It's a good way to challenge yourself with games you already love.

Thanks for reading!