Products You May Like
I’ve never really understood the charm of ultrawide monitors. I dare boldly to maintain that there is such a thing as Too Wide, a point beyond which the extra visual estate becomes a waste of electricity, unless you watch the screen in pairs. I can only assume people who use ultrawide monitors live in constant terror of flanking manoeuvres and demand the maximum amount of peripheral vision. Mind you, I tend to play games with my nose about 10 centimetres from the screen. Forget being flanked – it’s the prospect of snipers up ahead I’m worried about.
If you’re among the people who fret excessively about flankers, I’ve got great news from Uncle BioWare. Forthcoming RPG Dragon Age: The Veilguard will support 21:9 ultrawide monitors. The ultrawide functionality extends to cinematics – you can disable “cinematic aspect ratios” to switch off the black bars that otherwise hem in the view. It’s one of several PC-specific flourishes they’ve just blogged about. Have a look.
Properly panoramic vistas aside, Veilguard will offer HDR and uncapped framerates together with an FOV slider. It supports a bunch of different ray tracing features, too, all the way from ray-traced reflections up to “Ultra RT” mode for “extremely high end rigs”. I’m guessing none of these will work on my own PC, which seems to despise Ray and all his works.
There’ll be upscaling options in the shape of NVIDIA DLSS 3, FSR 2.2 – “which has been heavily modified, specifically for the game” – and XeSS. Veilguard also supports DLSS 3 with frame generation and NVIDIA Reflex. All that’s in addition to some more familiar graphics settings that let you mishandle and warp the simulation like one of the game’s own escaped Elven deities. You can turn up and down the texture quality, mess with the shadows, apply camera effects such as motion blur, and turn up and down the hairiness of hair. Find out more in the full blog.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard releases on 31st October. There was a time when I was quite worried about it. There are still a few things I’m iffy on. But I’m looking forward to it now, if only because I like the Dragon Age world. So is former Dragon Age executive producer Mark Darrah, who has returned to work as a consultant on Veilguard. He thinks Veilguard is the first Dragon Age where “the combat’s actually fun”.