Rose

Ghostbusters Spirits Unleashed ultrawide & wider solution

Added 2023-05-22 06:52:08 +0000 UTC

I saw Illfonic as one of the worst offenders in relation to ultrawide. Not only have they shipped games without any ultrawide support, but they also protected their games with Easy Anti-Cheat, preventing any user-available modifications.

Personally, I was really into the franchises they built their games around, but I couldn't get myself to buy Friday the 13th or Predator due to the games being so hostile to ultrawide users.

A step in the right direction, probably by coincidence, was Arcadegeddon, which did not have EAC, so it allowed people to mod it for ultrawide.

Then more recently, in 2022, the developer released Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed. I couldn't find any information about its ultrawide support, so I decided to see for myself. Going into it, I had the lowest expectations, but the situation didn't turn out to be so bad.

For one, the game did not have EAC. Secondly, it seemed to attempt to cater to ultrawide users, because its cutscenes were expanded beyond 16:9, although still not quite reaching 21:9. The game even includes an FOV slider and has two options dedicated to UI placement.

Given the developer's history, I can accept that as a first attempt, however, the FOV scaling was still vert- and the black bars could still be removed from the cutscenes - with 32:9 and wider users to benefit the most.

So I took on it and addressed both issues using my prior findings into the engine, making the game close to perfect in ultrawide, with the gameplay, weapon and character screens all corrected for proper FOV.

It's worth noting that after those early titles, I feel like the developer may always decide to add EAC to this game as well, but the promising thing is that we can at least try to increase the FOV via the config if they do. Otherwise, purchasing the game would be a huge gamble similar to Fall Guys and other games where your positive ultrawide experience can easily be turned into nothing with a game update and no chance for a refund.