Bioshock: Widescreen Woes, But Still An Awesome Game

2K Boston / 2K Australia (formerly Irrational games) has finally released the epic game Bioshock, the Ayn Rand inspired vision of the 60s that takes place in a decaying underwater city.  It’s truly an amazing experience, and will get a proper review once I’ve completed the story.

But shortly after the release, postings were made to various message boards stating that the widescreen version of the game was missing parts of the screen that were visible when playing in normal 4:3 resolutions.  This problem appears in both the PC and 360 versions of the game.  A lengthy discussion erupted, soon turning into a troll flame festival, but the fact is, you see more running in a 4:3 screen than you do on a widescreen tv/monitor.  And that is not what people expect.  Some folks devised a fix for the PC version to enable the field of vision to extend out further on the Widescreen version on PC, but nothing can be done at this time to adjust the 360 version (apart from running it in 480p, which defeats the purpose of having an HDTV).

2K Games responded earlier today that everything is as  they intended.  They are saying that the game was designed with the Widescreen gamer in mind, and that the 4:3 folks have the same horizontal fov (side to side) as the widescreen people, but simply have more vertical vision.

“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.”

Ok, so they say the widescreen version is not a crop of the 4:3.  They say it’s just that the 4:3 version has more than the widescreen.  2K… Regardless of how you term it, it means the exact same thing!  They will likely release a patch enabling a different FOV for 360 users, especially with some users reportedly getting very motion sick.