Wrapping up 2021

2021 was another productive year for me, with many solutions made for the widescreen community! Let's break it down with some highlights!

In January, The Medium was released and its developers began the chain of false claims regarding ultrawide support, stating that it was not possible for the game. I spent many hours on a solution to prove them wrong. The solution was flawed, so Helifax reverse engineered it and released his version. Then in turn I reverse engineered his solution and further improved it, taking the higher ground and crediting him for some of the findings. That did not last very long, as the developers soon updated the game with some form of ultrawide support, changing all the relevant original code and causing me to start over. This time I relied purely on my own research and it has been a success with over 2,000 downloads in total. I would later end up playing through the game with the solution as well!

The fixes that followed were the improvement of the ultrawide support for Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Earthblood, an ultrawide patcher for Foregone, Game Pass solutions for Code Vein, Ori and the Blind Forest: Definitive Edition, Torchlight 3, and The Evil Within.

I then released a 32:9 and wider fix for Magic: Legends but the game was shortly shut down, making an interesting case!

The later solutions were for Genesis Noir, Blue Fire, separate fixes for all three games of the Yakuza Collection, Yakuza 6, 8Doors: Arum's Afterlife Adventure, Lost Words: Beyond the Page, R-Type Final 2, a working and improved solution for Yoku's Island Express, a notable fix for Biomutant that gave way to a form of official support, solutions for Huntdown, Backbone, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint, the simple but extremely useful fix for Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance (now with over 4,000 downloads), and a patcher for Afterparty.

Another highlight was the Scarlet Nexus solution. Despite the presence of an existing workaround, I was approached by a person unsatisfied with it, asking for more. I did just that for even better scaling, and that has been downloaded over 1,000 times.

After having released a fix for Omno, I began to work on addressing The Ascent whose developers had famously bragged about ultrawide support but it turned out to be essentially cropped from 16:9. I put out a solution removing the black bars and fixing the field of view and the cutscenes for perfect scaling. That was the only way to properly play the game for months, and so it has been downloaded over 4,800 times. The game was updated around October to include official 21:9 support, somewhat breaking my solution in that it now overcompensates when playing at anything wider. Recently, I spent hours trying to pinpoint the command or code responsible for the camera distance used to achieve the FOV increase at 21:9 so I could disable it or account for it, but I had no success. I'll let the community judge whether the update was for the better!

Following the solution for The Ascent, I fixed the Game Pass versions of Lethal League Blaze and Twelve Minutes, then combined my own and czarman's findings to make a Ghostbusters Remastered fix as part of Flawless Widescreen.

Another big game, Psychonauts 2, came out with its cutscenes pillarboxed. I promptly addressed the issue and the fix has been downloaded over 1,000 times.

The later fixes were for WWE 2K16, Lake, The Artful Escape, and I Am Fish.

My patcher for Kena: Bridge of Spirits must have been so successful that the findings were copied and repackaged by a user who proceeded to ask for donations for it. You can see how that went down in my dedicated post! In any case, the solution has had 4,400 downloads and, as it often goes, must have played a role in the developers fixing some of the issues in an official update some time later. 

For every solution that is in demand, the developers understand that they would not have much to lose from making some of it official - perhaps even gaining some sales as a result.

From then on, I released solutions for Deadly Premonition, They Always Run, and one for the FOV of Far Cry 6, as requested by a person familiar with all the existing fixes but not happy with either.

It was around this time in early November that I had to depart from PCGamingWiki due to its poor moderation practices, aggressive ad placement, and some other issues boiling down to not being heard, or the insufficient activity in improving the platform and addressing some of its technical problems after concrete proposals. The founder did not want me to leave, and some of the most active users seemed sad to see me go, but I could no longer align myself with those practices. I still believe in the community surrounding the platform, so even when I was privately messaged by editors feeling uncertain after my departure, I did not lay out any exact reasons and tried to convince them to stay, as long as it worked for them. Sometimes I feel limited in what I can give now that I will not add to the articles, and it gets me thinking of starting something brand new, but I don't think I have the resources. Never say never though, right?

For all the downsides, leaving PCGW also freed up my time previously spent on constantly communicating with game publishers, reviewing assignments, thoroughly covering game features, helping with some of the technical aspects, running the news and releases sections of the front page, or just chatting on the Discord. Now I could dedicate more attention to ultrawide solutions or even Detailed Reports on WSGF.org. There is a flaw in the grading system of the site, as it remains based around 4:3, but I truly hope that I can get the staff with access to the server to update it to cater to the modern world of 16:9 being the norm and default for all scaling grades.

Now let's go over the solutions released from that point on!

I responded to a request for letterboxing removal for Saints Row: The Third Remastered and got it done. I released fixes for Undungeon, Subverse and Echo Generation.

After the release of Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One, which I had no access to at the time, I still tried to help out by explaining the basics of FOV conversion to PhantomGamers, who too had helped me brainstorm a number of other things. That allowed him to update his solution, and then inform me of my The Sinking City solution being helpful with Sherlock Holmes as well. We discussed the limitations of his approach, I explained the role of some of the common Unreal Engine 4 bytes, and now with access to the game, I filled the gap by releasing my own solution.

I also put out a fix to improve Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice after its Enhanced update effectively destroyed its previously great ultrawide support, which was followed by a game update to address the issue officially. The last of my fixes this year were for Far Cry Primal, improving its existing ultrawide and wider support, The Gunk, correcting the FOV, and Rubber Bandits, improving the UI scaling.

There were many solution updates in between, sometimes requiring to start from scratch or extensive research, and sometimes I also documented simple solutions on PCGW pages or on the WSGF Discord. It's hard to keep track of those!

Enough about what I've done though! The thing that I find truly important is that after I launched this page about a year ago, you joined me on this tough journey of fixing and improving games. It's been heartwarming and motivational to see people believe in this work so much that they would take the extra step to support it. I roughly counted the number of games covered by my standalone solutions and the resulting figure was over 100, which is close to the number of games covered by Flawless Widescreen - arguably the biggest collection out there, built over years. Thanks to you and all the others who have supported me, we are right on track to continue and make 2022 just as fruitful if not better. There is Unreal Engine 5 to dive into and many big games to check out.

So buckle up and have a great time until then!

Happy holidays!