Well, it is a lot more prevalent when "shooting from the hip" than when aiming down sights...

Yes, there is auto-aim in Fallout 3, and it will tend towards center of mass. And 3rd person aiming has some issues due to perspective and the effective "range" your crosshairs are set to.

Stats and weapon sway play a role but generally its not too hard to spot the difference. Especially when these things tend to be more noticeable at max level with 100 in weapons skills...

Probably didn't try any trick shots. Like shooting an exploding canister a guy is standing right next to. If your just targeting npcs, you won't likely see it. Just think your actually hitting the target all the time. Success is seldom questioned!

Further proof, is that as part of the game, they give ini files, that control how the game works, fallout 3/ fallout nv both have

-fAutoAimScreenPercentage

-fAutoAimMaxDistance

Those values are different then weapon spread that is in the editor.

edit: Going from memory here, but I do remember needing those auto aim off mods, because once I saw it, it just annoyed the heck out of me.

i have notice this with rifle, and mini guns, but never with scope weaponds, and i tent to play that way so never bother me =P. A lot of shooter use this. So i tent to end getting used to it.

Yeah, especially for scoped weapons.. It was quite apparent when trying to snipe from a distance and your sight was just all over the place. I think gun sway also had to do with strength requirements for weapons in NV as well. So even if you had a 100 in guns but only had a 1 strength, a sniper rifle would still be a bit wobbly. Pretty much it seemed to remain wobbly until you took the weapon handling perk. Then it would stop completely.

I've tried a few of the aiming mods for skyrim for fun and all I can say is they feel like modders jumped the gun and overreacted to the characters low score aiming ability rather than simply leveling up the character, filling out all the perks and seeing the difference. If you use a mod and then max out the archer you'll notice how crappy those mods are. There's hardly any difference between low skill and high skill which pretty much negates any reason to level up that skill.

Lots of confusion in this post being incorrectly piled onto the term "auto-aim".

• Guns in FO3 have an accuracy that means bullets will not always where you point the center of the aiming crosshairs.
• Player skill (in guns / energy weapons) effect both gun aiming stability (sway) AND the above accuracy of the held weapon. At low skill levels, long range accuracy will be very bad.
• Auto-aim is usually the tendency for assisting the crosshairs to track or lock onto a target and has NOTHING to do with the above 2 in game systems. If this feature exists in a game, it is usually adjustable by some game setting.

I'd like to play without each trigger pull being a dice roll based on your skill stat with the gun type. With the removal of skills from the game, it seems like my only concern may have been addressed.

They haven't done that in a Bethesda game since Morrowind...

In Fallout 3 you had some degree of "bullet sway" based on your skill, but for the most part you simply did more damage at higher degrees of skill.

Which is why with the combat mods I make I do not ONLY remove the annoying projectile magnetism but then replace it with forced miss shots for both the NPC and the player depending not only on actor stats but on many MANY combat factors including current movement, lingering momentum, stagger, stamina...

The opposite I guess of the magnetism but with far more depth to the system so that the player can control the results by game play not dice rolls (using random spread).

Not good enough actor skill to run and fire at the same time? Then until your actor is a great shot don't run.

Got to run anyway because it is a group of attackers charging your position? Then go for it because you will hit at least one of them in the group (larger target).

You know?

Fair enough. I didn't really think everyone was making it up, just saying it's not something that's ever bothered me given the way I tend to play. Typically I think auto-aim/magnetism/whatever is a necessary concession if the mechanics are otherwise imperfect, and as long as it's smart it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Never actually noticed it until I saw you could change it in Project Nevada's options. It definitely made my shootouts slightly harder.

That's exactly what i did lol.

and That my friend is a mystery nobody will ever know. Like if Aliens are real. Its all pure speculation. It could be 10 people it could be 3 million people. Just based on the fact the game has done very well for itself, i'dd say it wasn't (note i used past tense there) a big problem.

Plus your definition of "widely criticized" might be a little off. Criticized by who? the hundreds of people on the forums? I'm sorry but i cannot take one persons word for it. Especially a random on a forum.

Still can't even think of an instance I've noticed this. Can anyone comment on if this was apparent on consoles or not?

It happens on PC and console equally - its a global setting in the .ini file of the game, they're not likely terribly different values between systems.

Like has been said it's the sort of thing where once you notice it, it's hard not to. Kind of like how you don't usually notice a background noise around your house but then once you notice it, you can't really not hear it for the rest of the day.

Its easiest to notice on high spread and automatic weapons like the Assault Rifle in Fallout 3. Shoot a whole bunch at the ground with that gun and you'll notice the tracers going everywhere, but open up on a raider and you'll see those same tracers suddenly getting 50% more accurate when hitting whatever you put your crosshair on. Its a lot less noticeable in New Vegas since they have a lot less tracers going on and many semi-auto low spread weapons, but the programming in both is the exact same.

No, you counted the few hits a search for auto aim found on the nexus. What about FWE, which incorporates those changes, and has over 1 million unique DLs? What about all the other such addons? You have no way of knowing through mod stats just how many players found the shooting to be an issue.

Then don't make ridiculous statistics, bolding, all-capsing, and underlining it as if it made it any less silly.

Criticized enough that they'd want to do something about it for FO4. That's the only real hard fact we have in all this. That and the fact that even Todd has admitted that FO3's shooting was meh.

Then why does this thread even exist, why are you complaining about it being in F4, if Todd Howard acknowledged it and they're going to do something about it in F4.

Why are we even having this discussion? complaining that something svcked about F3? Go do it in F3 forums.

Sorry, i really should stop reading these forums because i know 90% of what i read is just going to piss me off. But come on guys forrealz... We all know its not going to be a problem in F4. Complaining about speculation doesn't get us anywhere.

We know they've put in the effort, but we don't know if they're going to address this particular issue, which is just one of the many problems with recent BGS games (not just FO3). Well the auto-aim itself is not a problem, as it can be useful if you're playing with a controller; it's not being able to easily switch it off in options that svcks.

Of course, we also don't know how many of those FWE users downloaded FWE for the auto-aim fix. If they didn't (or didn't know it was there), then I wouldn't count them as "people who care about the auto aim".

(I do wonder if FOOK2 includes any changes to auto-aim, since I've been using that for my last few characters.....)

That was my point . Mod downloads aren't a reliable metric.

No idea about FOOK. Would surprise me if they hadn't included a fix though.

A few posts were removed because of flaming. Keep it civil folks.

I've always thought that a shot that didn't go where I aimed in the game was due to my character's skill and that that was a behind roll of the dice. To me, that is part of what makes it an RPG and not a FPS.

In Morrowind, we could see this when swords went straight through the person yet did no damage. That has been improved making the character skill misses less visible but on occasion you still notice it. Take that away and you take another part of it being an RPG away IMO.

I would never want to mod that out.

Exactly.

It was an element from a table top rpg integrated into shooting mechanics. To be fair FO3 and NV were terrible shooters, the combat system was very much torn between trying to be an rpg and shooter/melee.

With FO4 it looks like Bethesda clearly made the choice to focus heavily on being a shooter, as far as the combat goes. Which is why i struggle to even imagine that FO4 will still have the "magic bullets" being drawn to virtual hitboxes.

Skyrim does not have any sort of auto aim. I hope for the return of VATS. I wish Skyrim did have it.

I have not noticed it either in Skyrim. Fallout New Vegas and 3 do have VATS but one is not forced to use it. Ps3/4 here.

Oblivion it was even more amazing. The game would detect if you were about to kill with your next body shot and the arrow would "snap" up into the head.

I discovered this while working on my Archery mod while the game was set/forced (using console commands) into super slow motion. You could see the arrow moving slowly on its way to hit the body then once it was close enough suddenly disappear from that trajectory and then immediately re-appear stuck in the head.

For a while I could not see why it happen only sometimes. But then when I turn up the damage to 10 times normal on the arrows (again for testing) it would happen.

I wish the developers were more free to talk about their work, there is some incredible things going on "behind the curtain".