I’ve never really understood the appeal of ultrawide monitors. I daresay there’s a phenomenon called “too wide,” a point beyond which the extra visual real estate becomes a waste of electricity unless you’re looking at the screen with two people. I can only assume that people who use ultrawide monitors live in constant terror of flanking maneuvers and demand maximum peripheral vision. Mind you, I tend to play with my nose about four inches from the screen. Forget about being flanked—it’s the prospect of snipers in front of me that worries me.
If you're one of those who are overly concerned about the sides, I have good news from Uncle BioWare. The upcoming RPG Dragon Age: The Veilguard will support 21:9 ultrawide monitors. The ultrawide functionality extends to cutscenes – you can turn off “cinematic aspect ratios” to remove the black bars that otherwise clutter the view. It's one of the many PC-specific improvements they just talked about on their blog. Check it out.
Aside from panoramic views, Veilguard will offer HDR and unlimited frame rates as well as a FOV slider. It also supports a bunch of different ray tracing features, from ray traced reflections to “Ultra RT” mode for “extremely high-end rigs.” I suspect none of these features will work on my own PC, which seems to despise Ray and all his works.
There will be scaling options in the form 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 of this is in addition to more familiar graphics settings that let you mishandle and distort the simulation like one of the game’s escaped elven deities. You can increase or decrease texture quality, play with shadows, apply camera effects like motion blur, and increase or decrease hairiness. For more, read the full blog.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard is coming out on October 31st. There was a time when I was pretty nervous about it. There are still a few things I'm unsure about. But I'm looking forward to it now, if only because I love the world of Dragon Age. So does Mark Darrah, former executive producer of Dragon Age, who returned to work as a consultant on Veilguard. He thinks Veilguard is the first Dragon Age where “the combat is actually fun.”