Weekly Recall: Thanks For The (Aim) Assist

Hi, everyone! Our newest Heroes or flashiest rewards often get the big headlines, but more goes into the day-to-day improvement of Overwatch than you might think. Entire teams are dedicated to upgrading your in-game experience, whether that's through user interface (UI) improvements, quality assurance, or engineering advancements.

In Season 20, console players get to be the belle of the ball thanks to a few of those engineers. Overall aim assist improvements and more customization options will be headed your way next week, so our system developers and gameplay engineers are here to explain what to look out for. They're also sharing some pro tips on how to maximize your console game with advanced settings, so grab that controller and get into it.

Aim Assist and You

Before we get into the advancements Season 20 will bring, let's take a closer look at how aim assist works, and some settings to help level up your experience. Every Hero in Overwatch has an assigned "window" (shown in yellow in our diagram below) that interacts with your aim window, shown in blue. This area, often called the "aim assist bubble," can be scaled up to trigger aim assist earlier when interacting with a target's window. Lots of functions within this area can be tuned to your exact specifications as well.

The average console gamer likely won't need to change anything, especially if you're just playing for fun with your friends. If you're looking to climb the ranked ladder, though, it might be worth it to tune your settings to your play style.

All of these settings-as well as the new settings coming with Season 20-can be found under the "Advanced" menu in the controller options.

• Aim Assist Strength: Changes the strength at which the game assists your aim towards the target, adding friction to the amount of slow when hovering over a target's window. This also includes rotational aim assist.
• Aim Assist Window Size: Scales the size of the player window, which is used to track a target's windows. Larger windows equal a higher assist. In Season 20, this will default at 60% instead of 100%.
• Aim Assist Ease In: Adjusts the amount of ease-in when the edges of the player window and the enemy window first intersect. At 100, you'd get the least amount of aim assist strength and with 0, you'd get full aim assist strength.
  • This setting will be split into three individual Hero style sliders (Projectile, Hitscan, and Melee) in Season 20 so you can further customize aim assist strength to your liking. For example, melee tanks might want lower aim assist but a projectile hero may want to bump it all the way up.
  • If you want to tune a specific Hero's aim assist ease-in value separately from these options, you can still do so on that Hero's options page.
• Aim Smoothing: Takes raw input from the controller and smooths it out. This tends to be better for higher sensitivities and longer distances to track targets, but can cause delay when going after closer targets.
• Aim Ease In: This one is for the true controller aficionados who want to change the shape of the sensitivity curve. If you don't know what that is, don't worry about this setting.

Season of the Sticks

Changes both big and small will be heading to your controllers when Season 20 kicks off. The largest overall update is a bump to Overwatch's base aim assist, which will increase anywhere from 6% to 8% depending on the target's distance. Our engineers noted that Overwatch has historically used a lower aim assist percentage when compared to other FPS titles. This change should make things easier for beginners (or those of you just out to have a good time) while offering increased customization potential for more experienced players. Higher aim assist strength also better suits Overwatch 2, which tends to have more fast-paced fights than the first iteration.

Supports will be getting the biggest boost next season when it comes to aim assist upgrades. The new Aim Assist Health Threshold offers a way for healers to avoid focusing on full-health allies that don't need support. When set at the default of 99% (or lower if you'd like), the aim assist system will only target allies at that amount of health or below. Friendly aim assist will also be set to a full 100% by default on Juno and Illari, making healing easier for our aim-based supports.

If you're someone that really wants to get into the nitty gritty, our engineers have a gift for you. Four extra sensitivity sliders that affect turning speed will launch with Season 20, allowing you to specify exactly how quickly the system responds to your movement inputs. This is especially important for Heroes who have historically struggled on console due to their need for quick turns and target changes, like Cassidy, Hazard, or Winston.

Supporting the Console Community

Those of you that play Overwatch on a more casual level may wonder what any of this has to do with your experience. That was an easy answer for our engineers: they happily did the hard math for you. Thanks to feedback from extensive internal testing, new defaults for aim assist will launch with Season 20. That should help folks who aren't keen on messing with sliders have a much better overall experience as soon as they log in.

In fact, all of this comes back to supporting the console community. Every change coming next season was inspired by a mix of internal feedback as well as community requests and concerns.

You said it sometimes felt difficult to consistently track enemies in previous seasons; changes to default settings and new tweaks under the hood should make things more tractable. Aim assist should feel more intentional in Season 20, working with your movement instead of pulling your aim or attention in other directions. The power is being put back into your hands, whether you decide to stick with the new defaults or personalize your experience to Winston-level specifications.

Test out every new setting when Season 20 launches on Dec. 9.