Anti-Aliased: Eye candy leaves a bad taste in my mouth
Global Agenda is one of those games that's really dividing people. Some people love the game for whatever reason, other people bash on the game for whatever reason, and that's fine by me. While I personally love the game and have been playing it a bunch as my permanent side game, I gave it a less than stellar review that I thought was fair of the game at the time I wrote the review. Of course, since then, many changes are coming (many of which I approve of) and I think Hi-Rez has a pretty good roadmap for their game in place.
However, one of my twitter followers recently pointed me to an editorial posted by Kyle Bennett, founder of HardOCP -- a website dedicated to hardcore gaming. Kyle's going for a full blown boycott against the indie company for one simple reason: they won't let him rock his multi-monitor setup because it could "give him an unfair advantage."
While Kyle's entitled to his opinion and dissatisfaction, I have two problems with his editorial. The first lies in a misconstruction of the facts and the second lies in the nature of his request.
A failure in communication
Kyle's editorial is founded on the notion that HiRezErez, aka Erez Goren (not HiRezStew/Stew Chisam, as incorrectly noted in the link in his editorial) is against multi-monitor gameplay because it would offer an unfair advantage against players not using the hardware. While Kyle's position is solid (multi-monitor gameplay offers no advantage because it uses the same aspect ratios and same field of view as a single monitor), the post that he's using as his platform is off. Way off.
Let me backtrack for a moment here, so I can get everyone on the same page. When Kyle talks about multi-monitor gameplay, he's not talking about the typical three monitor surround setup that everyone gets in their heads. Instead, he's talking about using three monitors, turned vertically, or six monitors that function as a single monitor. This gives you more pixels and a bigger monitor overall -- kinda like using a really hi-resolution big screen TV that has annoying black bars down the middle.
Currently, Global Agenda can't handle that. When it runs on this type of setup, it only focuses on the middle of the screen and cuts off the top and bottom of the field of view. That's annoying and it sucks that it can't be fixed by the user. Why? Because Global Agenda's field of view setting is locked and can't be manipulated.
When this issue was originally brought up by a multi-monitor user on the beta forums, it didn't come with the player asking for Hi-Rez to officially support their monitor type. Instead, it came with a plea of having Hi-Rez unlock the field of view restrictions, letting a user set the field of view themselves.
