Widescreen Gaming Forum

If 16:9 is baseline, but "vert +" in 4:3 improves the game, then the vertical FOV in 4:3 should have been baseline to begin with.

This sums up my feelings as well.

If you are supporting multiple aspect ratios you should have a consistent view between them or otherwise admit that you don't care how the game displays and give the players full customization controls.

I wouldn't wamt to make a game without knowing how it would display however. But maybe I am behind the times.

I see no value in vert - solutions. If 16:9 truly is the baseline behavior, and taking away from the sides would detract from the game, then the game should be anamorphic, with hor + for surround users, such as in The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Dark Athena.

If 16:9 is baseline, but "vert +" in 4:3 improves the game, then the vertical FOV in 4:3 should have been baseline to begin with.

Mostly agree with this.

The problem is that the FOV for these games is based on sitting 10 feet from a TV, not 2 feet from a monitor. I have no doubt BioShock 2, Mass Effect 2, Borderlands and others were designed for 16:9, but on PC the FOV makes it feel too cramped at 16:9, even if it was designed for that ratio. It would be a relatively simple thing to do to add 10-20 to the FOV value for the PC version but developers don't bother, either because they don't care about the PC version being the best it can be or because it increases testing costs and such.

I agree that we should note a difference between "Vert-" widescreen support or "Vert+" 4:3 support, but it's hard because it is not a quantifiable thing, you sort of have to feel it out. I tend to make a notation in a detailed report that it was likely designed for 16:9 and leave it at that. There are games with proper FOV that have more Vert+ behavior and still get bad grades... Wheelman is one, if you ask me, the FOV in 16:9 feels perfect and increasing it to make it Hor+ compared to 4:3 makes it way too zoomed out.

If 16:9 is baseline, but "vert +" in 4:3 improves the game, then the vertical FOV in 4:3 should have been baseline to begin with.

QFT, cranky.

My main concern is that now we have most games being multiplatform. This means we have a mix of people playing far away from the screen (consoles) and people playing close to the screen (PC). Both of these settings can call for different FOV; a lower FOV wouldn't seem so awful if you were far away from the screen when playing on a console, but once you boot up your PC it's suddenly an issue because a lower FOV wont cut it when you're that close. Not many games (if any) have different FOVs, or adjustable settings based on the platform the game is being played on.

Then we have the issue of baseline 16:9 -> 4:3. The best implementation of flexibility in this aspect is FEAR 2 (after patch). By default the game is set to animorphic behavior in 4:3/5:4, while this preserves the "artistic vision" of the baseline 16:9, it wastes a lot of screen space. Some people would rather sacrifice their FOV than have wasted screen space- things are also a lot smaller in animorphic solutions, so for those people FEAR 2 has the option to go HOR- from the 16:9 baseline. I applaud this flexibility and I think it's the closest thing we can get to a "perfect" solution, mostly because it caters to pretty much everybody's tastes.

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I see no value in vert - solutions. If 16:9 truly is the baseline behavior, and taking away from the sides would detract from the game, then the game should be anamorphic, with hor + for surround users, such as in The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Dark Athena.

If 16:9 is baseline, but "vert +" in 4:3 improves the game, then the vertical FOV in 4:3 should have been baseline to begin with.

This is what I don't understand.You basically take the position that single widescreen users shouldn't see less than standard screen users (I say it depends on baseline aspect)... and building on that thinking, multi monitor wide users shouldn't see less than single widescreen users (I agree), regardless of what the baseline aspect is.

But why do you think standard screen users SHOULD see less than single widescreen users in all cases? Why can't they see more as well, where the game is say, Vert+ on aspects lower than the baseline aspect, and Hor+ higher aspects (eyefinity/th2go)?

If you have a single monitor that's already at the baseline, you're getting everything the developer wanted to show you. Why does it matter if someone else with a different setup is seeing even more (multi monitor users seeing more on the sides w/ Hor+ implementation, standard screen users seeing more on the top and bottom w/ Vert- implementation)

It's not fair? It's no less than the intended view!

or otherwise admit that you don't care how the game displays and give the players full customization controls.

This is what I do personally :)

A hidden option for absolutely everything.

Good sir, I think in general the best solution would being able to customize the game however the user feels comfortable. This is true with controls, and graphic settings, why not just add a slider or user input to the FOV commands, for both Hor and Vert values in both directions (4 values).

We PC gamers have at our finger tips the niceness of an open platform where we can tweak things to our liking (no so with consoles), I think we should, instead of Pushing Hor+, Push fully customizable FOV.

I'll be honest, in plenty of games I do wanna see more up and down as well as left and right (I'm a Surround Gamer)

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Since we seem to be back to debating the same issue we had when the first Bioshock game came out, I would like to link a post that I found to sum up quite nicely the argument that HOR+ from 4:3 makes the most sense; regardless of the designed baseline for the game.

http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=109322#p109322

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funny posts, but they doesn't make any arguments on why games should never be Vert-.

I just think it often happens that people see 4:3 with more FOV than 16:9, and they jump to thinking 16:9 is missing information information that is intended, instead of considering that 4:3 is gaining more information than intended.

we shouldnt be so quick to add FOV to single widescreen aspects in games with Vert-, because perhaps 16:9 already looks just the way it should.


clearly, in the past, most games looked "as they should" at 4:3, so giving ourselves more information on our widescreens, rather than less, was ideal.

I'm not convinced that's the case these days. I'd sooner believe 16:9 is the baseline in a lot of cases, and what you get is what you should be seeing, and thus whether 4:3 compared to it was taller or narrower is totally irrelevant, and any changes to increase FOV at the already correct 16:9 are detrimental to designer's vision.

I'm not convinced that's the case these days. I'd sooner believe 16:9 is the baseline in a lot of cases, and what you get is what you should be seeing, and thus whether 4:3 compared to it was taller or narrower is totally irrelevant, and any changes to increase FOV at the already correct 16:9 are detrimental to designer's vision.

PC gaming is about the power to ignore the developer's vision in a lot of ways. I almost wonder if that has something to do with console gaming being more of a focus now that games are almost on the same level as movies.

Anyway, I think both you and cranky are right along with everyone in between. The 16:9 view is almost surely the baseline for a ton of these games which really does call into question the whole "vert-" thing, you are not the first to say so, but at the end of the day how would you make a grading system based on that? The only way to know for sure for a graded report would be a direct developer comment which is pretty hard to obtain.

In the end we should follow the grading system but also make comments to the effect of "seems to be developed with 16:9 in mind" to further inform the reader.

Yeah I think it needs to go in there somewhere. Otherwise it's perpetuating a mentality that Vert- = always wrong, and that's really not necessarily true.

There must be at least one notable game that has Vert- behavior, where 16:9 is commonly agreed to be correct and proper and plays right and looks good all the same, and thus no changes (Hor+ hacks) should be used if you're using a single widescreen