Steam Game Promises It’ll Make You Better In All Other Shooters – How’s That Possible?

The small Steam game Oblivity is making the rounds in circles of shooter fans. This aim trainer wants to go a step further than Kovaak’s or Aim Lab: it promises that it will find the perfect mouse settings for you. How is that supposed to work, and can the game deliver what it promises? MeinMMO’s shooter expert Marko Jevtic classifies it for you.

Perhaps the most important aspect of good shooter gameplay is the speed at which you move your crosshairs across the screen – the so-called mouse sensitivity for PC shooters.

Because if you find a setting that fits your aiming habits almost perfectly, you’ll automatically be better able to land the headshots in your favorite shooters.

The new Steam game Oblivity is a shooter with an extra promise that sounds very interesting: it wants to find the perfect mouse sensitivity for you so that you can get better at all other shooters.

But does that work at all? And is the price of €7.99 for Oblivity (via Steam)? I would like to explain that to you here.

Watch the trailer for Oblivity – Find Your Perfect Sensitivity here:

Oblivity is a shooter that you only play for other shooters

Anyone who plays shooters at a high level knows how important good settings and peripherals can be. After years of searching for the perfect mouse pad, I ended up with a glass pad, and I also want to perfectly equip my expensive Xbox controllers.

The question of the right mouse sensitivity for each gamer has also occupied me for years. What’s the best way to find out something so important – especially when every player has different habits and plays different games? Oblivity wants to answer this question in a playful way.

Oblivity is also an aim trainer, like the free one Aim Labs or the established Kovaak’s. Here, players can work on their shooter skills in a virtual shooting gallery and be immortalized with high scores.

However, Oblivity has a completely different focus, which the full title of the game already reveals: “Oblivity – Find your Perfect Sensitivity”.

Instead of simply offering different shooting ranges, the game wants to find out the perfect mouse settings for you using mathematical algorithms and regulated training scenarios. Ideally, you only play Oblivity to be able to play other shooters better.

When you start the game, you must first create a player profile. But this is not about the appearance of an avatar, but about your own aiming habits in shooters. In order to find out correctly, you have to answer a few questions in the game.

Here are some of those questions:

• Which shooters do you play?
• What settings do you use in these shooters?
• How do you move your mouse – just with your wrist, with your whole arm, or a mixture of both?
• How much space do you have on the mouse pad?
• How good do you rate yourself in shooters?
• How long do you want to play before Oblivity tells you the “perfect setting”?

Once you’ve answered these questions, you’ll choose a playlist of different shooting gallery scenarios that match your favorite game. Sometimes you have to track back and forth moving targets precisely, other times you have to jump quickly between multiple targets.

So far that sounds like the usual aim trainers, but Oblivity uses a trick: it changes your mouse speed over and over again and lets you try the same scenarios with the new settings.

With a fixed number of repetitions each day, you should try out so many different mouse sensitivities. The game then calculates in the background for you which one you hit best. In the end, it spits you out as the “perfect” setting.

Depending on how you answered the question “How much time do you have?”, you have to repeat this for different times and for different lengths of time. These are your options:

• 1 day with 120 exercises.
• 3 days with a total of 225 exercises, 50 a day.
• 4 days with a total of 325 exercises, 50 a day.
• 7 days with a total of 630 exercises, 75 a day.

The more often and longer you do these exercises, the better the result should be, says Oblivity.

That sounds like a lot of work and the nerd equivalent of a hard workout routine in the gym. But does that do anything at all?

“Find your perfect sensitivity” – is that even possible?

As important as I think it is that you think about the settings you use if you want to get better – the idea of ​​”perfect settings” is nonsense in my opinion. It’s snake oil for people looking for a quick fix to basic, complex problems.

Because precise shooting in shooters does not happen if you find the right number or if you train and stimulate the “muscle memory” sufficiently. Aiming is nothing more than good hand-eye coordination and quick reactions – and there are no “perfect settings” for that. Instead, it is simply a matter of practice, habit, and adaptability.

I use a completely different setting for almost every shooter, and change something every day – if I’m feeling sluggish, I set the mouse speed a few percentage points higher than the day before. It doesn’t hurt me, quite the opposite.

If I can handle several, sometimes drastically different mouse speeds, I improve my overall mouse movement skills. This directly means that I can shoot more precisely – regardless of all settings and game situations. So, in my opinion, trying out a lot of different settings is the fastest and best way to improve in shooters.

That’s what experts like Kovaak say about Oblivity

I still don’t want to describe Oblivity as a ‘quack product’. Because the basic approach of this program is completely fine.

The game automates what I recommend to all interested newcomers: try many different settings and see which one feels best.

I also asked KovaaK his opinion on Oblivity in one of my conversations with him. While it’s somewhat a competitor to his own aim trainer, I haven’t come across him as a person who badmouths alternative approaches.

KovaaK’s response was that the game has a very good base as an aim trainer, but the idea of ​​perfect sensitivity is difficult:

I’m not a fan of the concept of “perfect sensitivity” though. One can find optimal hand, wrist, and arm motions that work well and allow for perfect control, but in-game implementation is a function of distance to target and mouse speed. So unless you have a static distance to the target, there is no such thing as perfect sensitivity.

KovaaK via Oblivity

So I’m not the only one who thinks a program that automatically varies the sensitivity and records and analyzes your performance is a great idea. This is where Oblivity can really score.

But the promise of “perfection” is deceptive marketing, which unfortunately sells the very false and misleading ideas that I and people like Kovaak warn against.

In addition, the game has another fundamental problem in logic. It ignores the fact that you generally get better at the digital shooting gallery with more play time – even with settings that you haven’t tried in a long time.

The algorithm of the training program forgets to calculate the training effect. In any case, the result will be falsified. This shows again how misguided the search for objectively perfect settings is.

So if you want to get Oblivity to find the perfect setting, I would advise against the program on principle. However, if I want an easy way to test multiple settings in a solid digital training environment, Oblivity is definitely worth looking at.

You can also try this out in the game of your choice just by changing the settings over and over again.

By the way, if you want to know what I think will be the best shooter of the year 2022, I have an article for you here:

Forget Steam or PS5 – The best shooter of 2022 is coming to the Switch