Widescreen owners rage over BioshockBioshocking support for standard displaysBy Wily Ferret: Thursday 23 August 2007, 09:22Click here to find out more!DESPITE THE awards being won around the web for its must-play shooter Bioshock, developer 2K Games is under fire from hardware enthusiasts who have invested big money in widescreen displays - only to find their vision is more limited than those on skanky old CRTs.Here's the thing: most games, unlike films and TV these days, are written for the standard 4:3 aspect ratio. Widescreen support, if it exists on the PC, generally enlarges the field of vision in the same way that a widescreen view of a film gets rid of pan and scan. Since Bioshock is also an Xbox 360 game, however, the whole thing was designed for widescreen and so PC owners with big monitors were chuffed at the prospect of lording it over their poorer mates.Not so. Rather than chop the sides off the widescreen - making the square display - 2K Games has added more to the top of the picture, thus making the square. And, in the process, effectively making widescreen gamers second-class citizens who now get less picture on their screen than 4:3 gamers, not more.Now given that widescreen monitors are still much rarer than standard ratio monitors, this isn't necessarily a bad design choice. But given that those buying widescreen monitors are the loud, enthusiastic, vocal minority, you can see where the problem comes in.For its part, 2K felt compelled enough to issue a statement clarifying its position:"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."One thing we can assure you that all these decisions were made with the best interests of the game in mind. " Although he explained the history of the game development in a bid to justify his statement that the widescreen FOV is not a crop - how the 4:3 FOV is an enlarged version of the widescreen FOV - the fundamental point he makes is, nonetheless, clearly wrong. However you choose to phrase it, widescreen gamers get less action. That said, 2K Games has clearly said its part on the matter and that's that.For our part, we suggest people stop worrying about the viewing angle and get on with the business of playing one of the greatest games ever made - and just be thankful that, given the massive success this is going to have on the Xbox 360, it got ported to the PC at all.But, as always, the saga doesn't end there. PC owners are reporting problems installing the game - if you install the game more than twice, users say, the Bioshock activation process locks you out. This will happen if you fail to uninstall the game before removing it - for example, if you just format your system and reinstall Windows. This is because 2K games has contracted Securom to manage 'activations' for the game - more than two activations and, like Windows, the software starts getting antsy.2K said that "if you use the game as you normally do, you won't notice this at all". Obviously, 2K's spokeswoman has never met crazy hardware enthusiast people. More details on the workaround for that are here. µ
