Halo, Forza, and CoD tried the same thing and it didn’t really pan out. Does anyone even care about Ubisoft Connect? It adds nothing to my experience except for a way to gate cosmetics behind a disguised grind wall.
Most gameplay reveals are all fake anyway. I love Forza, but everytime they do a multiplayer gameplay for the Horizon series, it's clearly fake, and people just go along with it. Same with the "gameplay" videos when Ubi revealed The Division. You can just hear the canned acting in their voices, and the camera moves so unnaturally that you just know it isn't gameplay footage.
@ecs35: I don't even care that they're there. The issue is how they were implemented. They still force you to render everything underneath, and even though its an overlay, they still force UI elements inward with it. So lets say you were having performance issues at 3440x1440, you'd think that if you weren't rendering the stuff on the edges of the screen you'd get a slight performance bump, right? Well, not this way. You still render the game under the black bars, and get the UI scrunched inward as an extra kick in the nuts. Why not let inventory and character stat screens pop up at the edges of the screen instead of inside the black bars? Why not let us run whatever 19:9 equivalent, or 16:9 resolution instead so people with screens that are super hi-res don't have to physically change their desktop resolution before launching the game? Or instead of just having a scaling slider, maybe actually show what resolution it's running at instead of just 71% of 4k, whatever that would math down to.
@sakaixx: the black bars are the vignette, trust me. “ a small illustration or portrait photograph which fades into its background without a definite border.” is one definition, as we’ve seen in the beta. They said they acknowledge the frustration, but they’re also the cause of it, and they really don’t care. They’re not going to design any fancy art to stick on the sides, it’s going to be the lazy fade job they did.
@jenovaschilld: the game fully renders underneath the black bars, and the ui elements are scrunched inwards, so the ui is already free-floating. They just decided to do it this way. They could easily have the ui pop up on the far left and right of the screen OVER the black bars, where they would have in the alpha, but nope, black bars, and the menu gets pushed in with it. It’s a lazy “fix”, amongst all the other wonderful additions and subtractions you mentioned.
The black bars are just a lazy method of doing this. Why not allow us to have menus like inventory and character stats go over the bars instead of being lazy? Oh wait, they're so lazy that when you're in fullscreen, it's actually just a borderless window and you're forced to run the game at your desktop resolution, and the only option is to do a percentage scale based on that. Why not let someone with a 4k screen run `1440p or 1080p to get a better framerate? Laziness all around.
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