Widescreen Gaming Forum

Following on from my last video in this series this time I try to take a balanced look at how much of an advantage a multi-monitor system gives in first person shooters like Titanfall, Battlefield and Call of Duty, and whether or not it's reasonable to call it an unfair advantage. The game in the background is Titanfall, recorded during the beta, original resolution was 5040x1050 aspect ratio of (48:10). The video shows a replay that was original played on a single monitor, only the replay is being shown on a multi-monitor resolution.



Direct Video Link: Multi-Monitor Gaming, an Unfair Advantage?! (FPSs)
Channel Link: /n11skid


While this video can be watched on any screen it has been encoded to look best on a multi-monitor system, so if your running such a system, then select 4K quality from the drop down box and watch in fullscreen.

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: ) Skid : )
My Multi-Monitor Focused YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/c/SkidIncGaming
My Twitch channel which I've been known to stream on from time to time: http://www.twitch.tv/SkidInc
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality."

Nice fair take on the unfare advantage topic.

I do hate even going down this path of an unfair advantage with multi monitor setups. I personally want the best experience when I play.
If devs start crippling games to try to be fair for everyone we'll be playing at a fixed low resolution so everyone has equal frames per second over a throttled connection speed with limited input configurations.

Sure the best hardware may give an unskilled player a slight advantage in the beginning but we all play at different skill levels on different hardware over different internet connections.
How about play time? should a player that has 1000 hours of playtime not be able to fight someone who just bought the game to be fair? how about fps should <30fps players be grouped because they can't compete users with high end hardware.

If people don't like it don't play on a pc go get an xbox and play on your tv but then hmm that 60" plasma may give you a better view of a person in the distance so that should be banned as well.

It's a slippery slope and I'd hate to see game developers start to limit resolution or hardware advances to try to make the game seem fair in their eyes.
Personally if a game doesn't support triple monitors I do not play them so if Titanfall doesn't fix the hud issue they wont have to worry about me playing their game anyway. I want the immersive gaming experience that only eyefinity can give you or why bother playing.

Just my thoughts

My argument has always been that not everyone sits the same distance from the same size monitor with the same hardware (CPU+GPU, panel type).

Besides that, not everyone has the same preferences when it comes to FOV. To me FOV is just as personal as your key bindings or choice of hardware.

Ok. I can see more left and right in my peripheral vision (key words being peripheral vision). But that almost never comes into game-changing play. The biggest factor is immersion.

But what about people playing on monitors with a very high pixel density? Friends of mine playing at 2560x1600 or 4k have a huge advantage in that they can see much more detail further away. In pixel hunting shooters like the Red Orchestra or the Arma series, this is an unreal advantage.

There is one thing thats not entirely true about Widescreen being an unfair advantage due to others not being able to simulate similar conditions.

People can technically gain a wider aspect ratio (hence better FoV) by instead of increasing horizontal pixel count, reducing vertical pixel count on their monitors (an example being 1920x720 which gets you 24:9 on a standard 1080p monitor). This is even better for those with high resolution monitors as they have more leeway on lowering their vertical count by however much they'd like their aspect ratio to change.

Although they'd have to deal with some other cons (black bars, less screen estate, custom resolutions) it cant be said that you cannot gain a similar advantage to those running Surround/Eyefinity setup especially with the ease of nvidia control panel and custom resolutions.

That's very true Spartan I remember running the fov so wide in quake 2 back in the day I could almost see behind me

We could even argue that we have less of an advantage because we're more likely to get distracted by teammates/explosions/etc in our peripheral vision. God knows we have to deal with all the menu, game play and hud issues that plague wide screen gamers because most developers don't show us any love.

I'm just worried about restrictions I don't care who kills me in a game if it's a great fast player I applaud his skill as long as it's not a hack that modifies his stats to provide an unfair advantage who cares.
He could be using two more mice with his feet that make him play better and I'd think to myself that's pretty damn cool that he's able to do that.