On the Subject of Bioshock 2

Some model or other

Today got off to a positive start, with me enjoying a good old chuckle over the latest developments in the Bioshock 2 widescreen fiasco. Of course I haven't bothered with buying the game itself, on account of the first one being a mediocre effort and all indications suggesting that this one is more of the same.

But that's neither here nor there. The important point is that Bioshock 2 shipped with the same console-oriented field of view as the original game. That's amazing enough in itself, given the furore that 2K faced first time around. Sure enough, once again people started mistaking widescreengamingforums for some sort of important authoritative organisation rather than the random collection of self-important twats it actually is. Once again they began bitching and moaning about "horizontal+" and overlooking the actual issue, which is the limited fov which was designed for people sitting on a sofa playing games on their tv, not for the more sophisticated PC gamer.

Unsurprisingly, 2K developed a patch to address the issue. Again. What struck me as particularly amusing is how they have chosen to address the "problem". Bear in mind that when they patched Bioshock the first time, they never really admitted that they were fixing a bug, instead choosing to have a sly dig at the naysayers, suggesting they found the game too "intense". According to reports, the new patch for B2 does indeed apply a "horizontal+" logic to the widescreen cropping. So it's all good, right? Surely all those fucking idiots who raged about people on 4:3 displays being able to see more of the game world than them, the oh-so-select few with their fancy widescreen monitors, can shut the fuck up and crawl back under their rocks.

Seriously, how many people even game on 4:3 displays now? Surprisingly, looking at the latest Steam survey reveals the most common resolution is the 4:3 1280x1024. But if you start summing the results by ratio (which I can't be arsed to do throroughly) then it looks like more are playing at 16:10 resolutions. And I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the 1280x1024 players are actually playing at the wrong resolution for their display. The idiots. In any case, widescreen monitors are far from some sort of exclusive luxury item available only to a privileged few, as some people seem to believe.

Unfortunately, rather than expanding the horizontal fov with increased aspect ratio, 2K choose to close it down as the aspect ratio diminishes. So players on 16:9 displays experience no change, players on 16:10 see a bit less than they did before, and 4:3 see a lot less. The reason I find that so chucklesome is because it really highlights the two-pronged nature of the problem. All those fucking cocks who moaned about the unfairness of people with 4:3 displays seeing more should be satisfied, but of course they're in the uncomfortable position of realising that the cropping wasn't the actual problem in the first place.

Who gives a fuck what people on different displays see when they play the game? Really, if the game is comfortable and immersive to play, what does it matter to you if someone else sees a bit more at the top and bottom of the screen? Especially in a first-person shooter which a) is not multi-player oriented in the first place, and b) features most of the action on the horizontal ground plane, not above or below you.
So yes, I do think the fov should be adjustable, because people's situations and preferences vary. But beyond that, why do you fucking cunts even care about cropping? If the fov was adjustable within some mad range, like 60-150 degrees, what difference would it make if the 4:3 image was vert-? It wouldn't make any fucking difference, but you can guarantee the same shit-munchers would still bitch about it being "wrong". Or to look at it another way, if the fov was simply more sensible in the PC version, but the cropping was still vert-, why should widescreen players complain? Of course they shouldn't, it should be the 4:3 owners who are up in arms about the fov being too high on their displays but you can bet you'll never encounter that complaint.

More on the Subject of Mass Effect 2

Let's not beat around the bush.



The Bennett Cross
"... most conspicuous gameplay, or some daring or pre-eminent act of valour or self-sacrifice, or extreme devotion to entertainment in the presence of the enemy"

Mass Effect 2

I will be shocked if a better game is released this year, so I'm quite confident in awarding ME2 the top gong for 2010 even though it's only February.

Essentially it's like a big-budget Hollywood remake of Mass Effect, but without straying into Chris Roberts "I'm a proper director, me" pretension. Everything that was good about Mass Effect is cranked up to 11, mostly the characterisation, dialogue and storyline. The combat is more involved, and more fun, and "bigger". You're still stuck with only a couple of squad mates at any given time, and you can always see a firefight coming when you enter a region populated with convenient crates to take cover behind. But the action seems somehow better integrated with the cutscenes, maybe because the game has had an impressive visual makeover which can look quite stunning. Talking of cutscenes, there are lots and lots of them. Even the side-missions will feature a handful, even if the mission itself is no more involved than they were in the first game. It's all the more incentive to go exploring, because there are a lot of systems to visit which aren't touched by the primary storyline.
The paragon/renegade tracks are back, and have the amusing side-effect of being reflected in the state of Shepard's facial scars. Which just made me want to see how fucked-up she would look if I pushed her as far into renegade as possible. Unfortunately it seems to be difficult to minimise the paragon points because sometimes you get loads just for completing a mission, and as the paragon points increase they (visually) cancel out the renegade ones. Still, with glowing red terminator eyes which even seem to get reflected in the eyes of other cutscene characters, she ended up looking like a satisfyingly nasty piece of work. Plus the renegade dialogue tracks involve a lot of dark humour, not just Shepard being a bitch/bastard.

What's not to like? Well, some of the guis are more console-friendly than they ought to be in the PC version. No double-clicking to select options? Drilling down page after page just to change a quad member's weapons? Having to drop out to the main menu in order to get to the mission journal? Over-simplified RPG elements? Well, that last one is debatable. Yes, it is a shame to have to rely on drip-fed research to unlock new weapons and upgrades, and the armour selection is very limited compared with the first game. Is it a problem? Probably not. It's ultimately less micro-management, something which was somewhat painful in Dragon Age. The lack of variety and the reduced potential to customise your Shepard, both in terms of appearance and abilities, does grate occasionally. And as I already suspected in the preview, the Illusive Man is a pretty lazy, cliched addition which you could imagine the Half-Life "writers" coming up with.
I'm also not convinced that the repetitive and mindless planet scanning is an improvement over the repetitive and mindless Mako driving from the previous game. Scanning planets feels like something one of the Normandy's junior minions ought to be doing, not galactic savior and double-hard bastard Shepard.

Most importantly the game's too short, but only in the sense that it doesn't continue forever. Still, maybe they'll knock out a few DLC expansions to tide us over until ME3. Some Shepard back-story adventures would be nice. (S)he is "The Butcher of Torfan" after all, something you only learn about through some minor dialogue (and less so in ME2).

Anyway, enough talking about it, back to playing it. Meanwhile, pretty pictures ("Take pictures!"), including a disproportionate number featuring Miranda's impressive rack.

On the Subject of Dead Space 2

No Dead Space 2 for the PC? Ahahahahahahahahaha. Good fucking riddance.

That is all.

Edit: it seems like the PC version is still TBD. Oh well, it was amusing while it lasted.

On the Subject of Bioshock 2

Evie Delatosso

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. It looks like Bioshock 2 features the same widescreen cropping as (pre-patch) Bioshock. Which is to say "vert-", which as I've previously discussed, involves widescreen aspect ratios having the same horizontal field of view as lower ratios (i.e. 4x3, or 1.333), with the top and bottom cropped.

Now on the off-chance that someone stumbles across this while they're out and about with their flaming torch and pitchfork, hunting for 2K devs to string up to the nearest tree, let me clarify that it's not 2K I'm laughing/crying about, it's the fucking retard bandwagon-jumping reactionary cunts who continue to claim that Bioshock's widescreen support is "broken" or "wrong".

Aspect ratio support is only "wrong" if the image comes out distorted (i.e. stretched) due to the game essentially rendering through a camera set to one aspect ratio, and drawing the image to a display with another.

That aside (and it's relatively rare, if not unheard of, for a game's aspect ratio support to be genuinely broken in that way), there are actually two separate issues involved when people talk about widescreen support. One of those is the choice of aspect ratio support, whether it's "vert-" or "horizontal+". There is no fucking right or wrong way to do it. But try telling that to some fucking bottom-feeding cock who believes that widescreengamingforums is some sort of official widescreen architecture review board. "Waaaah, I have a widescreen monitor, therefore I should see more than some loser who doesn't, waaaah". That stupid argument, which essentially boils down to "entitlement", can easily be thwarted with the simple example of a widescreen monitor vs a physically larger, 4x3 display (for example, one which has the same physical horizontal width as the widescreen display). Why should the 4x3 display, which offers a considerably larger screen area, display less of the camera view than the smaller monitor? Should someone on a 3x2 eyefinity display have to put up with a narrower horizontal fov than someone on a 3x1 setup? Should someone on a 16x9, 23" display have a wider fov than someone on a 30" 16x10?
In other words the fov should be a function of the physical size of the display relative to the viewer, and that might result in either form of cropping, depending on the circumstances. Why is it the widescreen mode that's wrong, why not the 4x3 mode? Have fun trying to get some cunt who's determined to rage against 2K to even acknowledge that argument. They're much too full of ignorance and entitlement to respond to logic.

The problem is that a lot of people seem to be unable to differentiate between the issue of cropping, and the confusingly similar issue of field of view. It's increasingly common for games which are primarily designed for consoles to appear on the PC without any compensation for the different viewing geometry. A game designed to be played by someone sitting on a sofa 6' from their TV will not offer an optimal viewing experience for me, sitting 18" from my 30" monitor*. So there's a perfectly valid argument that PC games should in general offer a wider horizontal field of view than a console game, in order to maximise immersion and also reduce potential motion sickness in those people who suffer from it. But that is nothing to do with widescreen cropping. It's like when religious idiots try to entwine their bullshit sky wizard fairy tales with common sense notions like people not killing each other, the implication being that if you don't believe in their particular magic beardy man you must be some sort of child-raping murderer. "If you don't agree that all widescreen modes should be horizontal+, you can't possibly agree that the fov should be wider, because they're the same thing". They're not, you're a cunt.

That said, it's quite staggering that 2K have chosen to implement the same design a second time (especially given that they eventually patched the original game). Not because it was ever wrong, but because of the shitstorm it caused last time around. It is (probably quite rightly) being seen as a symptom of general laziness and disinterest when it came to porting the PC version of the game.

In any case I didn't think Bioshock was all that in the first place so I never had any intention of picking up the sequel.

P.S. Maximum respect to kotaku commenter saifrc who is the only other person I've ever seen offering a rational and informed rebuttal to the "controversy".

* incidentally, since most TVs are now 16x9, but most widescreen PC monitors are 16x10, does that mean the fov should actually be narrower on the PC than on the consoles? Obviously not, you cock.