Those going out to buy BioShock today to play it on their ultra spiffy widescreen HDTV may get surprise when it comes to the field of vision for the game. A senior moderator at Widescreen Gaming Forums has uncovered the method of how BioShock displays the game in widescreen and according to him it isn’t actually widescreen at all.
What BioShock does is instead of extending the field of vision to the left and right, it crops the FOV (field of view) on the top and bottom and magnifies that cropped image to fill the widescreen HDTV. Where HDTV owners usually got more to look at, in this case they are actually seeing less. A thread over at 2K’s website forum has already begun, hopefully bringing the glitch to the team’s attention.
Since other people haven’t reported this issue with their copies of BioShock, and the game has just been released, it is unclear if the widescreen issue pertains to only certain HDTVs. Halo 2 shipped with this similar problem and it was easily fixable. Let’s hope that BioShock’s issues are only a small batch or can be fixed quickly before the game reaches critical mass.
