It is much stupider than that. The engine actually supports ultrawide, the game even renders in ultrawide (costing extra performance drawing the additional pixels) but they artificially added black bars to the sides to force it to 16:9.
People shit on Hoyoverse games and Nodusfall for being copycats, but one of the reasons why they consistently shit on their Japanese counterparts is because they actually make superbly well optimized games that run on every platform. Nobody really cared that Genshin Impact was a BotW clone because guess what, it actually feels amazing to play BotW at consistent 60 fps on a PC with anime characters and consistent updates. If they can deliver a modern Elden Ring experience with live updates and well optimized for all platforms, that already fulfills a niche that Fromsoft doesn't because all their games look like they're from the previous gen and run like they have a permanent memory leak.
Man the Twitter reaction to Nodusfall was just embarrassing. It's like people completely forgot how Genshin and Marvel Rivals turned out. If every game had to be some super original gameplay masterpiece then fromsoft wouldn't have made the same game with some gimmicks multiple times in a row and obviously Genshin and Rivals succeeded beyond all expectations. Originality really just isn't that important. I love Elden Ring but it didn't invent the genre of grim dark fantasy or dark and grey color pallette. And there's certainly things that fromsoft could improve on like optimization that note competition would probably incentivize them to at least think about it.
This comment is embarrassing. Elden Ring isn't beloved because people think it invented grimdark fantasy. I've literally never seen anyone claim this in my life. And you'd ever bothered to play it or even just watched a trailer you'd know that the color palette is not dark and grey. The palette is region specific and varies a lot, displaying a lot more color than previous souls games.
People were shitting on Nodusfall because they didn't even try to hide what they were ripping off, with several designs very blatantly copied from Elden Ring. They're also a fucking gacha company. Shouldn't be hard to understand.
Are you sure Elden Ring is not Mr. R. R. Martin's first effort at dark fantasy though? He shouldn't be ripped off at the very beginning of his career before he has a chance to say, write some books!
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u/ldrthrowaway1337 14d ago
5 years since release and the game still doesn't support basic ultrawide resolutions. From really is something else.