2022 shouldn’t be a tough time to have an ultra-wide monitor, but here we are. Plenty of PC gamers anxious to play Elden Ring were annoyed when FromSoftware noted that the highly-anticipated game wouldn’t offer support for ultra-wide aspect ratios. While it isn’t a surprise–none of the studio’s previous PC releases have offered ultra-wide support officially–it is a massive disappointment given the standards for AAA PC games today. Get ready to get more irritated, because it turns out that the company might be blocking ultra-wide aspect ratios deliberately.
A post by the user Ewoek on Reddit is starting to go viral, with the user noting that while Elden Ring seems to occasionally load in its proper 32:9 aspect ratio on startup, black bars appear on either side of the screen about 30 seconds into the game. Ewoek wasn’t the only one making the claim, with plenty of players chiming in to verify his claims. It turns out that Elden Ring‘s lack of ultra-wide support might be more complicated than we realized.
There seems to be a work-in-progress vignette effect rendered before the black bars appear on either side, hinting at early work on ultra-wide ratios. Support may come alongside the upcoming raytracing update.
The fact that Elden Ring has no support for 21:9 and 32:9 aspect ratios by default has already been called out by frustrated fans on social media, more attention has been given to the many performance issues across all platforms upon release. A mod has already been developed to give the title ultra-wide support using Flawless Widescreen, but it’s a shame that FromSoftware couldn’t find a way to include it to begin with.
The only reason to believe they deliberately blocked these ratios is that they planned to include 21:9 and 32:9 support initially, but were unable to properly implement it before launch.
Elden Ring officially releases worldwide today, February 25 on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. On Wednesday, the game became the highest-rated game of all time on Opencritic.
