BioShock widescreen issue causing complaints

More news I do not care about. I feel like I am watching Attack of the Show. Now if only I could jump forward in time so I can go home and play this game.

1. Doesn't matter weather the examples Joystiq gave are actually taken at the same point this issue does exist within the game.

2. Its amazing how many people on joystiq can't get the concept of whats being down here. Its not stretching the image its cropping it.

I swear some people found the 'Panoramic' button on their wide screen TVs and they can't comprehend this issue any other way.

I can't believe more people aren't offended by this. Something billed as widescreen should be as such.

It's not called squatscreen, shortscreen, or cropovision - therefore I believe it is a very serious flaw in the game to remove information from the top and bottom of the screen. Don't see why more people don't see it that way.

My big complaint is that when you look down, you have no feet. What the hell? I have hands in this game, but no feet?

That was one thing I liked about The Darkness, your guy had legs, feet, arms and a body that moved when you walked or ran that you could see while looking down.

The no feet thing in FPS has always bugged me since Goldeneye 007. This is 2007, make our FPS guys have feet already!

Well that's odd... Isn't it usually the other way around now-a-days? Who actually programs in 4:3 and then converts to 16:9 now? Seriously... That completely sucks. What is this, the ******* Wii? And most likely anyone who isn't upset by this, isn't playing in 16:9.

Of course 16:9 and 4:3 would show a different amount of data.

Maybe I'm confused, the wouldn't it either be this or making 16:9 standard and cropping the sides and zooming in to get to 4:3?

I'm just saying somewhere somehow someone's losing visual data.

Definatly not a deal breaker. since in game you are constantly looking around I don't see this as an issue in limiting the view cause unlike film games are not all fixed perspectives. Now I do hope this does not affect the cinimatics in the game.

I'm definitely not feeling that.

Funny thing is I played this game just about all the way to the end and this was never an issue for me. I didn't even notice it until I read this post here today.

I think gamers live to complain, bitch and cry. It is there goal in life outside of games.

I'm playing Bioshock right now, and yes it's a crop similar to what's shown in the pictures. Stop arguing about the exact positioning, I'm playing it NOW and YES the widescreen is a crop. It kinda dampened the opening sequence, because the window was cropped on the top and bottom.

Ugh...How ridiculous, especially for such a big release as this. I'm personally not interested in the game, but if I were to play it, I'd stick with 4:3. Losing important information is far worse that not using the entire screen of your TV.

is this even fixable with a downloadable patch?

Its about field of view people. Basically if it is more zoomed in (AKA the tops are cropped), then the vertical FOV has decreased. Has anyone here played halo 2 right after playing halo 1. Well halo 2's FOV is terribly small, even a couple degrees makes a huge difference. In the same way a larger FOV makes you feel like you can get a better impression of whats going on around you, which is why widescreen is nice. I am hoping that with steam I will still be able to edit ini files to fix this (like in alot of pc games).

As I said in the last post about this....I'm surprised this is such an issue....nobody cried when any of the GTAs did this, or the God of Wars, and who knows what else out there....the only game that comes to mind that gives you extra information on the sides is Half Life 2....I'm sure there's others, but I've been gaming on widescreen for over 3yrs, I figured cropping was common practice....dear lord, I hope some of you guys don't notice the movies that are shot in Super35....

Why do people care so much about this!? Step back from all the mob mentality and think about this yourself for a moment. If you have a widescreen monitor, you're seeing the game the way Irrational WANTS YOU TO! (I honestly doubt they tested and designed Bioshock on SD monitors. If you think so, take it up with them and prepare to be laughed at.)

Here's what happened: Bioshock was developed with widescreen in mind. As development rolled on far past word from Chris Kline, they began to realize that all of the architecture, the art, the careful framing of the world was designed for the WIDESCREEN point of view -- it would be compromised when playing on an SD monitor and a LARGE portion of gaming public would miss out on a large part of their careful design and direction. From there, Irrational likely decided that it would compromise the integrity of their work (something they obviously took a lot of care in) if they were to lop off both sides of their design in 4:3. 4:3 users, still the great majority of the gaming public, would not be seeing the game as intended. In other words, it would be better suited if ALL users retained the same horizontal frame of view that they developed the game around.

This entire "debacle" sounds more like a bunch of measurebators acting jipped because those on SD see "more," something they feel entitled to with their widescreen monitors. You know what? I'm as anal (likely more so) than anyone about seeing everything I'm supposed to see. I hate full-framed movies and I can't stand people who destroy the EQ of the music they listen to. Ask yourself this: would you rather have a widescreen HD experience that the developers didn't want you to have? I sure as shit wouldn't. That's why all these calls for "I need to see more on the sides than SD gamers!" as completely missing the point of what is, in the end, art. I'd rather see the game as Irrational, Ken Levine, and everyone else on the team designed it to be.

You're seeing the game on widescreen as they intended. The only difference is that Irrational decided not to destroy their work by cutting off large portions of the important horizontal view. Instead of lopping off the edges because hardcore gamers like you and I might complain, they pulled the camera back some and retained the same careful framing. I can't blame them -- if I spent years of my life designing a world full of interesting architecture and carefully planned first-person cinematics, I wouldn't want to bastardize the experience I'd give to more than half of my potential user base. Try telling a movie director that you're pissed he's not showing you an even wider screen and he'll tell you that he's presenting his work to you exactly as he wanted to. Try telling a photographer that you're pissed they didn't take that photo in a widescreen format and they'll tell you that the framing he achieved was exactly what he set out for. Again, the game was designed in and for widescreen HD.

Like it or not, the vertical plane isn't nearly as important in a game like this, and SD users are gaining very little from their inclusion. What you can see on the extreme left and right is much more important.

I own an HD television and I'm okay playing Bioshock as the developers intended. Nobody should be pissed off that Irrational didn't piss ON SD gamers by destroying their work so that some of us couldn't complain about the game "not really being widescreen."

Most importantly: for all the talk of wanting games to be treated as art and that THIS GAME IN PARTICULAR is an example of that art, you guys are getting bent out of shape over what is, in the end, a developer making an ARTISTIC DECISION. You're asking for this game and its artistic vision to be compromised so that you can feel you have more view than another gamer. If the general consensus of the gaming public is that this sentiment is correct, it shows that even gamers do not consider their games art.

"what I meant was, what is the point of widescreen, instead of say, tallscreen? or juse wider and taller screen, so you can see more in EVERY direction??"

Dude, you're trying to preach logic to people who have the hundreds (sometimes thousands) of dollars to blow on a TV to get like two more inches of horizontal picture on either side of the screen. If you're the average joe who's still got a $100 SDTV and can't afford anything better, trust me, this does not affect you. It's a bunch of babies whining because their caviar wasn't up to snuff. Buy a cheeseburger, enjoy it, stop looking under this crap with a microscope. Widescreen gaming isn't any more from gaming fullscreen than it is to game at 4x and 8x antialiasing. If you choose to make it an issue, it will be. If you instead choose to enjoy your game, you won't care.

But since it's cool to make a huge deal out of crap that doesn't matter, watch my post fade into white. Whee!

Post like Joystiq's must make a developer pull out their hair in frustration. None of you guys understand what you are complaining about. This game is natively 1280x720p, that is widescreen 16:9. It's the way the game is designed. The 360 can output 480i 4:3 for older sets. One way you can switch a native 16:9 image to 4:3 is by adding some to the top and bottom of the view. Which is what they probably did. You've got to do something! 16:9 does not fit in 4:3. How in the world is this a complaint? I don't even understand the point!

Honestly, it's damn near unbelievable that 2K would try to slip this past widescreen gamers in 2007. It's totally unacceptable. I was on the fence about BioShock anyway, thanks to the wonky way the world doesn't reset when you die (making it more like an interactive story than an actual video game that challenges one's skills). But now with widescreen gamers being totally shat on, I think I'll bypass BioShock for Metroid Prime 3 (which, despite being a Wii title, actually -- gasps! -- supports widescreen TVs).

this insnt a big problem for me.
i didnt even notice it while playing.
wuts the diff if u miss the top and bottom? just move bak and u'll see the exact thing plus more on the sides.

If this actually sways people from buying this game, then they are idiots pure and simple. Missing out on possibly the best game of the year because of a screen format issue is ridiculous.

If the game is designed with 16:9 as the primary aspect ratio (like all Xbox 360 games most probably are), how is 4:3 supposed to be better, even if you see more stuff? If seeing more would automatically be better, shouldn't all 3D games have the field of view as large as possible, instead of the measly 100-something degrees they give us now. Think of it this way - in 4:3, you just see stuff you're actually not supposed to be seeing from the designer standpoint. Where's the problem for widescreen users? And the image is not stretched out of proportion either way, just "cropped" (overlaid the two pictures in PhotoShop just be 100% sure). I guess most people that buy the game won't even notice the so called problem. Even if 2K released a fix for this, it would probably be cutting down the 4:3, not increasing the FOV on 16:9.

my problem was different. I think my tv in in 4/3 mode (can't remember off top of my head). I was able to see my hp bar while playing the demo, but the far right and left edges of the screen were chopped off a tiny bit. Like when the guy talked to me on the radio, the last letter of his name was off-screen

weird

Played the game for an hour over lunch on a Sony 70" DLP and didn't notice this -- hud was totally visible.

Very few posters understand the problem.

The FOV is wrong. If you can't understand what FOV is then go back to smashing your head into your keyboard.

Widescreen has been around long enough that this shouldn't have even made it to the retail box in this condition. This is the type of crap they try to pass as widescreen support from developers in 1999 (or developers like EA).

To further burn the widescreen crowd the development team CLEARLY STATED that widescreen was going to be drawn correctly.

I want it fixed because I noticed it in the demo and it makes my head hurt.

I bought the game anyway because of the reviews.

So I hope a patch is coming so I don't have to play through the game with some Tylenol to enjoy it. Everything felt too close and mashed into my face. Now I know why.

So that clearly explains why I felt so claustrophobic while playing Bioshock in a 42" HDTV. I had to look around so much just to take the whole area in that I asked myself if I was playing on a cell phone screen. I'll give Irrational a couple of days to come out of hiding and redeem themselves with when the Bioshock patch is coming out very soon. I did pick up the game ONLY because I cannot avoid passing by gamestop store on my way home and I had put a preorder. But there is Bioshock sitting on a table with its fresh store receipt next to it waiting to see if the Irrational patch will save it or if I'll just return it to the store and get my money back only to swoop back down and get it when its about $30.

I don't see the problem. It's not cropped, they're rendering into a different size using a different projection matrix, and the result is that you're getting a slightly wider but not as tall view. In fact I don't even think you're losing anything - the different projection simply makes things directly infront of you appear slightly closer. Or conversely, they appear further away in the 4:3 version, as I suspect that it's that one which is the problem. The lead platform for Bioshock is the 360, it's most likely that they've built it in widescreen.

Erm, from a computer graphics perspective, everything seems perfectly correct to me.

Computer graphics aren't accomplished by "cropping" or "adding", but by "projecting".

Imagine holding up a big sheet of glass in front of you. Changing the ratio of the glass changes what you see. That's essentially what the math inside a graphics engine does. If the glass had a grid on it, the graphics engine would analyze the color of each pixel and push it to the video buffer.

"Cropping" an image just doesn't make sense. The way the math works out, you can change your aspect ratio at whim and it all works fine.

@SuperChuck

And people are pissed that their expensive wide sheets of glass are held closer than they normally used to.

Is there a rule that wide sheets of glass must be held just as far as taller sheets of glass?

well duh, Nintendo/Hudson had it right with Mario Party 8!
http://seenew.net/vt/bioshock.jpg

Haha.

How about on cutscenes when you can't control the camera? How about missing half of your hand (look at the picture) and consequently the lower half of all weapon models? It's not as simple as "moving back".

what a bunch of goddamn crybabies. they create an effing masterpiece and a bunch of little bitches whine about an imaginary lost half an inch in vertical image. piss off already!