the game is 21:9, yet there is no 21:9 support. in fact the game is unplayable!
The game wants to deliver a cinematic experience. Meaning it adds black bars on the top and bottom, making the image effectively 21:9. Well, I have a 21:9 display. But instead of displaying the image fullscreen, it just displays a 16:9 image (despite offering my resolution in the menu). That means I have black bars on all 4 sides, and only about 40% of my monitor is used. I consider it unplayable that way.
I had to zoom in with my monitor settings, which makes the game ugly (pixely) and causes UI problems. For instance, I cannot see the time indicator when making decisions. It's just not fun like this.
Aside from that it also crashes repeatedly at a certain point. I can't progress any further.
I am a big Telltale fan. But this is just unacceptable. Therefore I had to give it a negative review on Steam. Will edit the review when they make the game playable for me. A shame, really...
Comments
Care to take a screenshot of this? I'm curious how it looks.
Sure, here you go:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=736589489
A little correction - it's about 55% of my monitor used, not 40%. Mixed that up with another game (which has a 32:9 resolution). That doesn't make it better, though.
fix it already, telltale. we paid good money for the game and can't play it. that sucks. and you don't even react. have you grown so big you don't need to care about your customers anymore? i trusted you with my money, which was a mistake i won't make again. i always say how important it is that we buy good games on release for full price in order to support further development. even the episodic ones. but after this one - i guess in the future i will just wait for a 5.74€ sale or a bundle. if you can't deliver a working product, you really can't expect me to pay anything close to full price. i wouldn't be so angry if you at least said something, here or on the steam forum. but it seems you're a big company now, so you act like one. i remember the old times when you actually talked to your customers.
This is the messiest launch they have had honestly, so this isn't some thing people could've seen coming, that's no excuse of course on how fucked things have actually been, but at least wait till episode 2 is released (with hopefully a large patch that should fix MANY of the problems people have been having) before you start boycotting.
you're right, it's not quite 21:9. still, there is no good reason to not at least crop the image to fullscreen, or give us a proper 21:9 image (other than lazyness or ignorance). this is very frustrating, and i haven't played the game to this very day because of this. it's just not fun to see the game through a little window in the middle of my screen. and it seems, they will repeat this with TWD3. i am a big fan (or i was), but i won't buy another game like this.
It's 21:10.
and it would be so easy to display the game at 21:9 with small black bars. instead we get this unplayable mess...
Honestly, I'd chalk this up to a simple fact: Telltale's engine is not up to the current times. They designed the game to run at a 16:9 ratio at maximum. Despite allowing you to set it to your native res, it is not designed to be played on it whatsoever. Telltale might make some good stories, but there's no doubt about it-- they are quite behind on the times as far as their tech is concerned.
Honestly, the best option you have is lowering your aspect ratio. You'd be sacrificing some quality, but it's better than trying to play it on a tiny screen. It'd be a pain in the ass having to resize everything afterwards, but I'd put up with that over having to squint at the screen.
the engine is not the problem. that is basically proven by all the custom user hacks we got for older TT titles like TWD1+2, TWAU or Borderlands. all they do is they change a few bytes in memory. so the engine is very capable of other aspect ratios. they just hardcoded 16:9, that's all.
what do you mean by lowering my aspect ratio? i'm really not sure. i have only one monitor, i can't change that. that one has a fixed aspect ratio of 21:9. the only reasonable thing i can do is to display a 16:9 image on that monitor, which then gets even smaller due to the additional letterboxing. i could also set my monitor to "stretch to fullscreen". but a 16:9 image stretched to 21:9 looks horrible. i could never play that way. all people look so small and fat then.
your engine is very capable of supporting different aspect ratios like 21:9. a simple memory hack produced this:
http://i.imgur.com/8rDRIK9.jpg
all you need to do is invest a day or two and fix the obvious issues. i really don't feel like this is too much to ask. the game is glorious in 21:9. just buy a 21:9 monitor for a few hundred bucks, put it in your office and show it to the team. i bet many will be impressed by how cinematic it looks on such a screen.