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After a day of initial work, we're able to reveal some preliminary findings on the console versions of Tango Gameworks' The Evil Within. It's a curious title in many ways - possessing a distinct Japanese flair, yet built around a distinctly American rendering engine: id Tech 5. Designed from the ground up for hard-wired 60fps gameplay, the implementation of id software's technology intrigues still further bearing in mind that The Evil Within targets a locked 30fps update - a state of affairs that extends to the default setup of the PC version. We're still looking at the console and computer builds, but initial results throw up some interesting discussion points.Resolution is the first order of business: the developer opts for an extra-wide aspect ratio, presumably in order to reduce the games' rendering load - though HUD elements are displayed in this region. Based on what's rendered inside the letterbox, however, we're left with a 1920x768 resolution on PlayStation 4 and a meagre 1600x640 on Xbox One. In effect, it's the now-familiar 1080p vs 900p set-up here, but the intrusive borders serve to cut-down actual rendering resolution significantly. Only 71 per cent of the screen's real estate is actually used for gameplay - and the aspect ratio utilised is actually a higher 2.5:1 rather than the 'cinematic' 2.35:1.
On the PC side, there is a console command that enables players to remove the bars but, at the time of writing, this only serves to crop the left and right of the screen producing an even more zoomed-in image. The field of view is already very narrow as it is, so this makes the game nearly unplayable. Of course, let's not forget that Mikami and crew took this very same approach back in 2005 with Resident Evil 4 which used a 16:9 aspect ratio within a 4:3 resolution, effectively operating at 640x360 but in that case, the game used a much wider field of view that made it feel less cramped.
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