Controllers are inherently an inferior control device to mouse and keyboard, especially for shooters.

No trick. It’s just harder on a controller and you need to practice

Hate to say it but….this is literally a skill issue lol

enable auto-aim. most console shooters are made with it in mind. so was doom and quake for that matter.

It’s been more than a decade since I’ve played a shooter with a controller, so idk how much of a difference this makes.

When you need to make small horizontal adjustments to your aim, try strafing instead; when that isn’t possible, and if you’re using some low-ROF semi-auto weapon, swing your reticle around the enemy, turning a matter of precision into a matter of timing.

The trick to Returnal, specifically, is to turn the aim asssist to max, and then also go into Accessibility options and make the crosshair as large as possible; the aim assist works off what’s inside tye crosshairs, so if you make it the size of the whole screen, you can’t really miss.

Control you just gotta be good. It’s aim assist fucking sucks. But that’s for the Service Weapon; you really should be meleeing and using telekinesis as your main damage output, and those do get a good aim assist.

Horizon also has great melee and aim assist, tho it’s aim assist doesn’t move the xhair onto things, it moves your arrows toward the target instead. Just keep the circle near enough to what you want to hit.

Also: Hella games support M&KB on PS5 and the PS5 now supports a heap of peripherials. Even my shit-ass Logitech K140 set works if I plug the wireless dongle into the PS5 when it did not work when I got the PS5.

Edit: Oh, also many games on the console have the option to use the gyro controls to aim. That can be a big help for some.

Everyone keeps mentioning autoaim, but my friends and I would play with it off or turned down since its get in the way, I guess modern cod does have stronger auto aim, but it still swings towards the general direction and you have to correct it, plus everyone has auto aim so you have to actually aim and go for headshots if you want to beat the other ppl to the punch

Have you tried using motion control?
My aim with controllers isn’t as accurate as m+kb, however I can get pretty close with the right motion control / gyro setup. It’s unfortunately not a given in every game on PS5, but most first-party titles and a good chunk of FPS should offer something.
To be clear, I’m talking about motion control for micro-adjustments in addition to fast movement with sticks, not as a sole replacement for stick based input.

As someone who basically only plays on controllers I find the default control layouts in most games rather bad tbh, so I always rebind my keys to something I find more smooth (l2 as jump, r2 as crouch/dash/slide or whatever other movement, l1 as aim r1 as shoot are the big ones I rebind) and also gyro aim, that’s a big one that helps for me :3 I know gyro support isn’t optimal on consoles tho

I suggest you play Portal. It’s an older game, and you might have better luck getting it on PC. On PS3 (and 360) it was part of a package called The Orange Box; you might check the PS Store for deals on that, if it’s available on PS5 (I’m not sure, my last PlayStation was/is a PS3). If you play it on PC, use a controller.

I’m kind of in the same boat as you. I played shooters on PC with the luxury of a keyboard and mouse. I remember my brother getting GoldenEye and challenging him to matches. I told him the only reason he won was because of the controller; with a keyboard and mouse, I’d win every time. Of course, the N64 also reversed its axes, so it was hard for me to control even in a “slower” game like Zelda 64 (Ocarina of Time). Later, he got Halo on the OG Xbox, and I thought it was an awesome game, but for the gamepad requirement. This time I got to prove myself — when Halo CE came to Windows, I beat it fairly easily with a keyboard and mouse.

After I got married, I wanted to get a PS3 (and eventually did get one), but my wife wanted an Xbox 360 so she could play online with her brother and some friends who had the same console. So there were some games I did okay on, but I could not get the hang of most shooters. I did okay in Fallout 3 and Oblivion though, but those moved more slowly than Halo.

I picked up The Orange Box on sale for $20 (it was never very expensive, IIRC, despite having four or five games on the disc) and I struggled to play Half-Life 2, which is what I bought it for. (My CPU+Motherboard came with a digital code for HL2 on Steam, but the computer was not powerful enough to run the game, so I bought it on Xbox.) I couldn’t do the controls. I left it alone for a bit, but then I tried Portal. It was a simpler game that didn’t push you to make moves right away (until much later, anyway).

If you’re not familiar with Portal, it’s actually a very simple concept. The Portal Gun shoots two portals, one orange, one blue. One’s fired from the left trigger; the other, from the right (and I forget which is which, it doesn’t matter, but you do need to know it, but fortunately there are visual cues in the game). Anything that enters one will emerge from the other in the same orientation with the same velocity. “In other words,” the narrator says, “Speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out.” At first you’re just doing dumb shit with the Portal Gun like bypassing walls and moving blocks around to place on oversized buttons.

The puzzle that taught me how to dance with a controller brings you to an acid pit, with several pillars rising up, to a goal even higher up. Behind the pit back the way you came is a pit that leads to nothing but floor. The first pillar in the acid pit is at your level, so what you’re meant to do is place a portal on it, then jump down the “safe” pit, and, as you rocket toward the floor, place the other portal on the ground. Thus, you come flying up out of the one on the pillar in the acid pit, and you have to orient yourself toward the next pillar up, and place the same portal you placed in the “safe” pit on this pillar, so that when you fall through the first one, you fly up out of the second one. You have to repeat this dance five or six times, alternating portals.

After that, I was pretty good at aiming with a controller. I still prefer kb/m for FPS games, but I’m totally comfortable with a controller. (Now, going from Xbox to Switch and vice-versa is tricky, because the Switch reverses the buttons. Switch says press A, it means the button on the right (e.g. Circle on a PS5 controller). Xbox says press A, it means the one on the bottom (X on PS5). X and Y are also reversed: Y is Triangle on Xbox, and Square on Switch, and X is Square on Xbox, and Triangle on Switch. I know this, but the muscle memory doesn’t work. But I can easily go between either and PlayStation because I know where those four symbols are. (Fun fact: my keyboard has the PlayStation buttons above the NumPad: Circle, Triangle, Square, and X. They’re programmable, but I’ve never set it up.)

No, you’re not missing any trick. Aiming with controllers has always been less precise. Just get used to it.

You’ll never match the speed, acceleration and accuracy of a mouse while using a controller, but look sensitivity to max and buckets of practice will get you as close as possible with a controller.

Or just plug a mouse and keyboard into your PS5

You are gonna love steam machine when it’s gonna be released