Some are very obscure, like ensuring that the FOV expands horizontally for ultrawides with a locked vertical FOV, the FOV widget controls the vertical FOV, and when things like boosting in a vehicle would modify this FOV it modifies correctly (you can’t just add or subtract the FOV by a number, it’s relative to the current FOV setting). Some things are obvious, like the need for the graphics settings (though which exact settings and the range of those settings is less obvious). We’ll start off by stating the player expectation, identify all the ingredients needed, and work with all our partner teams to get them implemented and working together. ![]() A good example would be the graphics options, where graphics engineers code a feature, tech artists and content creators use the feature as an input to tune the visuals of the game, the UX/UI team builds us the widgets like sliders and text input, and the PC team is pulling all these ingredients together to have a polished player control in a menu that does the thing players expect. MR: We design, develop, test, and incorporate feedback together. It’s a real beast to make these settings achieve the goals of the artists and content developers, the performance engineers, and be exposed and intuitive to players. So, we have this confluence of design needs to support many different performance profiles over multiple generations of hardware and many different quality settings to scale to the different performance targets on those platforms, and we want to expose all of that to the PC player to tweak for their personal machine. But also, Infinite is supporting consoles with different performance profiles. Console games don’t generally have “advanced graphics settings” and of course that’s expected for PC. Also going the extra mile for customizability like with advanced graphics options, accessibility settings, and the ability to scale quality to maintain performance across many generations of hardware. Jeff is an excellent hype man, and I think this absolutely paid off. Like for that ultrawide work, we literally wanted to get people excited about the potential of that experience so we got a bunch of ultrawide monitors and gave them to the team for their dev machines so they’d work and test with them daily. MR: Definitely generating excitement around the capabilities of PC, shining light into the dark corners where we make assumptions that work for console but might need to be more robust for PC. The Infinite PC team has a huge opportunity to learn from the challenges and wins MCC has faced and we’re paying close attention. It’s important to call out that the MCC team has done fantastic work pioneering Halo on PC. Fortunately, 343 knows how to make a great Halo game. The problem with preventative problem solving though is you never see the crisis averted. Things like making sure our game plays nice with specific families of hardware or fighting hard to ensure we don’t add intrusive DRM to our game. There’s also a TON of preventative problem solving. As an example, I might need to convince someone that even though 21:9 ultrawide doesn’t exist on console, it’s a very important thing to PC players and we should design our content natively for it. This job is at times equal parts educator and PC hype man. JG: Building a native, first-class PC experience for Infinite meant convincing some brilliant console developers that these quirky features they’ve never cared about are hugely important to PC players. ![]() You can also run the game in 4:3 and at lower minimum resolutions than you would get on a TV and the UI still needs to be legible. And think of Chief’s helmet display you want the helmet wires to be seamless regardless of aspect ratio, so we design with that in mind. Then you’ve got your HUD which has to anchor to the edges of the screen. The 3D scene has to support arbitrary window sizes – that’s probably the easiest part. This is harder on performance but provides a more immersive experience. ![]() To start with there are design considerations – I explicitly wanted wider aspect ratios to allow you to see more horizontally instead of seeing less vertically. This is something that really takes the whole studio to do right, because there is so much content that has to be created with this in mind for this from the start. To go through a specific example, let’s talk about ultrawide support. ![]() MR: I think as lifelong PC gamers we have a great feel for the expectations of how a PC game should look, feel, and operate – we want a great set of options without getting in your way, rich feature support with a streamlined experience, and the confidence that the game will run on your hardware.
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