As Rapture Turns: The Conclusion To The Widescreen Dilemma
Well, turns out that the game isn't cropping widescreen users after all. Thanks to THE TRUTH ABOUT WIDESCREEN from The Cult of Rapture, turns out the developers were thinking about 16:9 from the start. In a rather detailed manner, turns out the Field of Vision (FOV) was designed to supply the best vantage for high definition players. Going on to say that 90% of their developers run at this ratio and that they tooled it to be the most appealing to them.
Instead of cropping the FOV for 4:3 displays and making all 4:3 owners mad in doing so, we slightly extended the vertical FOV for standard def mode: we never wanted to have black bars on people’s displays. (This way, everybody is happy…) This does mean that people playing on a standard def display see slightly more vertical space, but, this does not significantly affect the game-play experience and, we felt that it best served our goal of keeping the game experience as close as possible to the original design and art vision on both types of displays. Reports of the widescreen FOV being a crop of the 4:3 FOV are completely false.
It all makes perfect sense! Where visibility is concerned, needless scaling up vertically is significantly better than cropping horizontal periphery. It's the easiest way to be fair to all players, and since there is no multi-player there is no need to worry about either group having a leg up in online play.
Somehow I don't think this response is really going to quell the blood-thirst of the angry flame trolls on the 2k forums. They are however missing out on some lovely pillar tops and sleeves. Lucky for them they hinted that they are working on a feature to allow users to adjust their FOV in the configuration.
[via Kotaku]
Asterick
Posted to Hot Stuff, Video Games on 22 August 2007
· Comments (3)
Other stuff like this: bioshock, drama, flame war, fov, rapture
dilemma?
dilemma? :P
I'm not really bothered about this issue but I like to give my two pence. :)
I think this wouldn't have mattered if Rapture did it the proper way round - people *expect* to see more on a widescreen. It's why we brought widescreen, to see the extra bit that *don't matter*. So what Rapture should have done, is create the game at 4:3, then shoed the extra bits on the side for people with widescreen.
It baffled me they did it the other way round which gave more for standard view. To me that's kind of backward to what people (or I :)) would expect.
Ultimately, the extra bit doesn't matter of course as many have pointed out.