God of War is heading to PC with a cluster of new features including Nvidia DLSS integration, keyboard mapping, and ultra-widescreen support, but adding the latter quickly became an almighty, time-consuming affair.
During a recent interview with PC Gamer, God of War’s lead UX designer Mila Pavlin said enabling ultra-wide support in particular was absolutely essential if the dev team wanted to truly showcase the title’s cinematic credentials on PC.
Indeed, if you could reduce God of War down to a single adjective, it’d be ‘spectacular.’ Whether you’re simply wandering through the title’s mystical Norse realms or going toe-to-toe with a colossal beast, God of War dishes out vista-laden, grandiose spectacle in spades.
Translating that to PC platforms with widescreen support in tow, however, wasn’t straightforward. As noted by Matt DeWald, senior technical producer on the PC version, you can’t just adjust the resolution and call it a day.
“If you widen the aspect ratio without increasing FOV, it just doesn’t look quite right to our brains. But once you widen the FOV, you start seeing things that you were never supposed to, like in bad ‘HD remasters’ of old TV shows,” explained DeWald.
“Now there’s all this stuff that was on the edge and cut off on 16:9 that now is in the scene. Like ‘Oh no, Atreus is warping through the scene because he’s getting into position.'”
Eliminating those immersion shattering faux pas required the team to go back and animate them all over again. Identifying moments that actually needed reworking was also a challenge, necessitating multiple widescreen playthroughs of the game to ensure no stone was left unturned.
“Because it’s hard to systematically find these issues, it requires a human being to look at it and watch it, you can imagine playing through not only a 30 hour game from the core game elements, but also all the exploration spaces and all that stuff, you’re talking about 80-plus hours to play through the entire game to find the visual things,” DeWald continues. “And you’ve got to run through that multiple times.”
You can hear more from the developers behind God of War’s revamped PC port by checking out the full interview on PC Gamer.