If you’re booting up Red Dead Redemption 2 this morning, congratulations, and good luck. You’re about to embark on a beautiful, epic, gruelling and heartbreaking experience: if you’ve got the emotional fortitude and the time you’ll see this grand story carried out to its grand conclusion. If you’re looking for some tips to help you out on your way, I’ve got a bunch of them here. But there’s one setting, in particular, that I wanted to call out here, and that’s auto-aim, called here aim assist.

Red Dead Redemption 2 has a couple different auto-aim settings, and you can tinker in the settings menu. You can choose normal, wide, narrow or free aim, as well as adjust the strength of the lock-on mechanic in for both on foot and mounted. Normal, wide and narrow are more or less a matter of preference, though I went with the middle-of-the-road “normal” setting.

What you’ll want to avoid, however, is free aim. In my opinion, you’re also going to want to turn the power all the way up, because that just feels like what the game wants you to do.

Auto-Aim can be a tricky thing, from a pride perspective. I bristle at it, sometimes, even though I know that it’s baked into basically every game I play on console. But it implies that you can’t aim yourself, or something like that. But that’s not really the case, particularly here. You’ll want to get over that impulse if you want to succeed in Red Dead Redemption 2. I tried to play without it a few times, and I can just say that the game isn’t really tuned for it.

On horseback, playing without auto-aim is near-impossible, and I’d recommend keeping the meter at full strength here no matter what. The game will throw teams of three and four riders at you on a continual basis at many moments in the story, and the process of taking out even one without auto-aim can be brutal.

But it’s important on foot here, too. Again, it comes down to the pacing and intensity of the combat the game is throwing at you, as well as the responsiveness of the controls. Simply put, the game wants a lot of these shootouts to be loud, fast and chaotic, throwing the requisite numbers of enemies at you to do so. The controls, however, are a little too sluggish to handle that without the game doing some of the driving on its own. Hence Aim Assist.

You might be tempted to turn it down if you think you can handle it, but again, I just don’t think that’s the right move here. Red Dead Redemption 2 isn’t really a game designed to be challenging, at least not in a traditional sense. The challenge of combat is more a matter of narrative pacing than it is actually meant to be any sort of player roadblock, and slowing things down feels like it compromises that pacing to some degree. Not to mention that the main story really does not want to take any longer than it has too.

So don’t set yourself up for failure, commit, and let the game play itself to some degree.

I'm a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New Republic, IGN.com, Wired and more. I cover social games, video games,… MORE

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