2K Games: BioShock widescreen "issues" non-existent

2K Games responds to the furor over BioShock's supposed loss of vertical FOV (field of view) when playing in widescreen (16:9 or 16:10) aspect ratios, explaining that BioShock was designed from the group up with widescreen gaming in mind. Irrational (now 2K Games Boston and Australia) then made concessions for the 4:3 aspect ratios by increasing the vertical FOV to accommodate the increased "height" in visual real estate.

Essentially the horizontal FOV which is locked to 75 degrees for both widescreen and standard resolutions in BioShock, but gameplay in 4:3 yields a higher vertical FOV than intended. This is a rather unique decision on the developer's part, as most games do it the other way around by locking the vertical FOV and bumping up the horizontal FOV to 90 degrees for widescreen. Assuming this line of reasoning is simply not an attempt by 2K Games to quell discontent for the time being, it should provide reassurance for widescreen PC gamers (like myself, on occasion) who were worried about "missing" visual elements. 

BioShock was primarily developed and tuned for widescreen mode. Artists and designers worked with widescreen displays and chose a field of view (FOV) that best reflected their intentions with respect to the way the world is perceived, the perceived speed of movement of the player relative to the world and the amount of the world they wanted to be viewed for the best game-play experience. We went through dozens of iterations and finally settled upon a widescreen aspect ratio that best suited the gameplay experience.

When playing in widescreen modes the game makes use of the full screen resolution, and does not crop or stretch a lower resolution image into a wide screen one. For example, at 720p the game renders natively to the full 1280x720 resolution.

Instead of cropping the FOV for 4:3 displays and making all 4:3 owners mad in doing so, we slightly extended the vertical FOV for standard def mode: we never wanted to have black bars on people’s displays. (This way, everybody is happy…) This does mean that people playing on a standard def display see slightly more vertical space, but, this does not significantly affect the game-play experience and, we felt that it best served our goal of keeping the game experience as close as possible to the original design and art vision on both types of displays. Reports of the widescreen FOV being a crop of the 4:3 FOV are completely false.