12
votes
Are there any games that utilize ultrawide aspect ratios in creative ways?
I've lately exhausted most of my main library of games that would work well with an ultrawide monitor (mine being 21:9). I've been trying to find some new games to try or buy that utilize ultrawides to their potential. I think the default games that they're generally used are first person shooters given the FOV is comfortably wider and gives a competitive edge, but I'm looking for more creative utilization types.
An off-the-cuff example would be It Takes Two: It's still a gain in FOV, but it thoroughly improves the experience when both players can see more of their half of the game. Can anyone think of any other games where the whole ultrawide gets utilized well in either FOV, UI placement, or general design choices?
It's been a while so maybe this has changed, but back when I first got a 21:9 monitor, Guild Wars 2 had full support for whatever aspect ratio your monitor was and I discovered that I was able to use the catapults in the WvW game mode more effectively than others because the targeting of the catapult was based on what you could see and with 16:9 you'd often not be able to see spots behind and over walls, while the 21:9 could get your targeting reticule there and thus allow you to get a shot off that would have been otherwise impossible.
A bunch of people in my guild started running windowed mode and squishing the window down into the ballpark of 32:9 to really take advantage of this, it never stopped working in the 5 years I played, but I can imagine that with the recent engine change from DX9 to DX11, they had to have put something in to stop this, it was basically cheating, but it was awesome.
That's hilarious, as I literally just downloaded that last night and plan on hopping in for the first time separate from new games specifically for monitor utilization. I'll have to keep an eye out and/or update what I find about that! (I won't abuse it and play fair, but it'd be funny if it was mechanically still a thing).
In FFXIV raids there's a fair amount of mechanics telegraphed by entities or tells or some things at the arena edges, where ultrawide helps see more of it without as much camera turning, much milder but it's something. Never knew that about GW2 catapults but I'm not really a WvW player in that game so thanks for sharing.
There's fairly little that I'm aware of honestly. If you want to try something different with a bit of an edge in certain scenarios, grab some more screens and try a multi-head setup.
I run three screens with an UW in the middle for an overall resolution of 6400x1080, in the admittedly few games it works in it's amazing, the productivity benefits are quite immense and even the flexibility is quite nice. (eg. Got two 1080p screens and a splitscreen game? Set them up as adjacent screens in your display settings and play the game in Windowed mode, stretched to fill both screens. Now you've got one screen per player, which is helpful for coop games but very helpful for competitive split-screen games as you can entirely prevent player 1 from looking at player 2s screen and visa versa)
Back before Rocket League switched to Unreal Engine, I did the LAN multiplayer a couple times using the setup you describe. It was really fun, but I also had a suuuuuper squishy computer back then so it wasn't happy. No idea if it's still possible, but if it is I absolutely recommend this to anyone who still plays and wants to local 1v1/2v2.