News Ken Levine responds to BioShock widescreen issue

that should probably time out after, say, 3 months...

 

While I am glad that the situation is not as bad as it has been made out, constantly needing to inform the copy protection folk is still pretty stupid.

What about if I need to go pee while playing, do I have to tell the Securom guys then too?

 

Irregardless, you are correct in your original assumptions that they are confirming this as a design choice:

http://www.2kgames.com/cultofrapture/home.html

Although I suspect 90% of this spiel is damage control from the company line, it is nice that they do say they will be looking at a way to adjust the FOV manually. Although their 'artistic choice' of going with VERT- is a bit bizarre in my opinion (because the viewpoint they've used is entirely unnatural for a first person game, really), it's good to see that the slew of people trying the hotfix for HOR+ say that the game is far far better with an expanded view. So, yeah. I just hope a 2K 'fix' finds it's way to the 360 version too.

 

All things considered, that reply on the bioshock website (quoted above) does seem like the biggest load of ******** ever. The fact of the matter is, the widescreen view is cropped and reduced compared to the 4:3. They claim, they designed on widescreen first, then made it work with 4:3 as an afterthought by adding more vertical view. Which is of course ridiculous - if widescreen was the priority, the "correct" view, the one which all their design effort went into, the one which they believe offers the perfect experience (as he claims in that post) then the 4:3 would have had the sides cropped off, not the widescreen having the top and bottom cut off.

All of which is totally irrelevant anyway, as (at least as it's been explained to me) you can just tell direct x to render a scene to a particular aspect ratio and it will - no need for a half-arsed solution in the first place.

All of which means - thank god for widescreengaming forum There's already a hack to give the proper fov for dx9 out, and hopefully a dx10 one will follow.

This reminds me very much of stalker a few months ago - they did the same thing, claimed "native widescreen support" but actually just cropped the view - wsg forum had a hack soon enough, and it was fixed in a patch soon after that. Everyone (eventually) happy. BUT it looks like the bioshock people are setting up to refuse to patch it, actually having the gall to say they intended it to be this way! Funny if it weren't so annoying....

 

I thank you

 

Ha-ha, he said 'irregardless'.

 

Well, it doesn't mean it's a good choice! Hah.

And there ain't nothing wrong with double negatives.

 

Ach guys, is this really that much of a problem? If they crop it the otherway 4:3 people will complain. It's a lose lose situation on a really minor issue (in my opinion of course). Maybe the only way to please everyone would be an option of width/height croppage in the settings, which seems like alot of effort for little gain.

 

Finished downloading and got around to playing the demo last night, encountered three things with it fundamentally right off the bat :

1> The view felt wierd, mostly in the lacking height feeling like I was trying to stare though a letterbox to some extent, tops of peoples heads and upper details missing or being very close to the top of the screen.

2> Didn't run anywhere near as smoothly as I'd hoped at native resolution (1680*1050) with some of the options turned down a bit.

3> Could be imagining it and getting the view and frame rate chipping in, but the mouse movement felt odd, like maybe horizontal and vertical movement were happenning at different speeds.

I ended up turning the resolution down to non-widescreen (1152*864 I think, which the readme reccommended for "high end systems") which eased both of the first two problems, though it did cause the game to look a bit notably pants and pixelated at times, more so than turning off the high detail options already had done.

Went on and played a bit it though and it felt good, I particularly liked the hacking and the friendly drones happy buzzing, though I felt myself missing the depth that was back in SS2.

Overall I think it confirmed it to go on my "to buy sometime" list, but if anything it felt a little dissapointing after all the reviews and my prior enthusiasm, I think probably it'l get backburnered untill such time as I actually get around to buying an 8800GT(640) + vista, which might not be that soon since I'm uncomfortable paying how much they still ask for those cards considering how long its been since they came out (past experience is banging away at the back of my mind that they normally would have released new cards 6+ months ago .. so surely if I bought one they'd come out with a new one within a few weeks which was a lot faster for less money as happenned with the 7800GT ;p)

 

You can't really compare the depth of the demo to the full SS2 game. There is loads of things missing from the demo.

 

Interesting comments bladestorm as i was about to post almost the exact same thing.

1 - The view felt weird for me too and i am also running 1680x1050, to much vertical squash.

3 - Mouse movement also felt weird, it was slightly jerky and movement seemed to stop suddenly instead of a gradual slow down. Weirdly after a cut scene or in game movie it sped up for a while. I think it is a graphic issue as it was worse when standing in flowing water and got better when i turned down the options a bit.

Overall though i did not think the graphics where as good as everyone has been banging on about tbh but the game is definetly atmospheric and quite creepy.

 

I think Tim's article on the games graphics in DX10 vs DX9 could prove quite enlightening, that or a bit dissapointing, but probably the former, we'll just have to wait and see what he has to say I guess.

And I felt the very first supposedly scary moment upon arrival in the city spoiled a touch because I was trying to spin around and see what was going on, not so much in a "its dark and scary" way as in an "ack where's my flipping view gone!" immersion-breaking kind of a way, but that might just be me

 

I think the one major difference between DX9 and 10 is that the shadows look a bit better in the latter mode. Exciting!

I do hope they do something about the FOV though for both formats. An option to switch between the default intended view and a wider view is surely the easiest way to appease everyone whilst saving face?