The options are there because some people still prefer to play on a u-wide screen. They'd rather deal with a little interface wonkiness than chop the edges off. Just like trying to run
any title that is not officially supported. That's up to the player.
Identifying the reality of ultrawide resolution support is not "childish" -- it's identifying a pretty common misconception. Ultrawide support has been limited since the monitors came out. It remains limited to this day. The same was true when 16:9 monitors were first released, for years and years.
Here's a list of games that do support it. Only the green ticks are native. The golden asterisk means that only some u-wide resolutions are supported. The wrench means it is possible to mod or tweak the game to get it working, but mileage may vary:
www.pcgamingwiki.com
Where's the GTA series?
How about Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2?
League of Legends?
Dark Souls 1, 2, or 3?
Battlefront 2?
Where are all the Tomb Raiders?
No Halo? It's been remastered, like...
twice.
How many Call of Duty titles don't officially support it?
How many times has Skyrim been released...and they never added u-wide support?
This should be a sign that there's more to the story. That there may be something that players who like widescreen are
assuming that simply isn't true. Like: "Adding widescreen support is easy, and all studios should just use it!" And let's move right on to a reality check.
Ultrawide resolutions are a problem for several reasons. Here are a few:
- 2D elements need to be completely rebuilt for every desired u-wide aspect ratio. Every icon. Every button. Every menu. Every font used in every message that ever appears in-game. Every character portrait. Every little marker that may appear. Everything. 21:9 -- need to do everything again. 32:9 -- need to do everything again. 64:9 -- need to do everything again. (This is also why many games don't support 4:3 resolutions anymore, either.)
- Widening the game means that more assets will need to be loaded on-screen at once. Games -- especially games that are open-world and "seamless" aren't really. That's an illusion. Games use a graphical process called "culling". This means that 3D objects not presently on-screen are not being processed and rendered. This helps to increase FPS. Thus, if you were to freeze the process during gameplay and turn the camera to view what is off-screen, a huge amount of the world would be missing. That's partially why games can be so detailed and still run so well. Culling ensures the GPU doesn't do more work than is necessary, and more detail can be packed into on-screen frames. If I widen the frame, it may wreak havoc with the engine, cause graphical glitching, or make the FPS plummet.
- Triggers become problematic. Many games use what is presently on-screen to make other things in the game happen. Very easy to accidentally trigger something before it's supposed to happen and break a quest, fail to throw subsequent flags, create a looping effect, etc. This isn't so common anymore, I don't think, but it can still work this way in games.
Thus, the vast majority of all games do not officially support it. That doesn't mean that players can't get it working well enough on their own. It doesn't even mean that there are guaranteed issues. It simply means that studios may opt not to open Pandora's Box with u-wide support. It's a ton of work, won't really see much of a return (if any), and can potentially lead to a lot of extra issues and expenses in the future.
Not liking the reality doesn't change the reality.
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And, I am going to clarify that I am not answering for CDPR. I am speaking for myself. I have no idea what the reason was that CP2077 didn't offer native ultrawide. You'll have to ask CDPR. I am speaking about what I understand from my experience. For all I know, they may very well include at some point. And that would be cool.
But I am also clarifying that I can find absolutely no official announcements of u-wide support. Anywhere. That would be speculation and assumption on the part of people that didn't actually have that information. I recommend not doing that or listening to it.