Ultrawide monitor issues

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
1

Hi,

I have an LG 34" Ultrawide monitor with a resolution 3440x1440. While this is great for work (aligning two windows side by side etc) and certain games, it seems more of a curse when playing AOE4 (and indeed any AOE game, as I come from AOE3).

The launch screen and lobby only occupy the middle part of the screen. The left and right side is black (just black bars). But once the game launches, it occupies the entire screen. At first I thought this was pretty cool. However, I ran into two issues:

  1. I would have to physically turn my neck to the right to glance at the minimap since the screen is so big, as an eye glance wouldn’t work
  2. Because of the super high resolution, the already small and cluttered minimap appears even more smaller and cluttered.

I’ve tried playing with the settings to get to a point where the game itself does not use the entire screen and uses the same real estate as the lobby. But I haven’t found a solution. Boderless fullscreen does not seem to support any other resolution other than 3440x1440. When I select Exclusive Fullscreen with 2560x1440, it just streches the entire screen (even the lobby) and everything looks awful. There are no options to select the aspect ratio.

I don’t know whether this is a bug or not. Has anyone encountered this issue and maybe have a potential solution?

Thanks.

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I also have an ultrawide monitor, and know exactly what you mean by having to turn your neck to look into the bottom right and left. I’ve gotten used to it in AOE4, but not other games like Path of Exile.

My fix for those types of games is to ‘give up’ on Ultrawide and have Windows itself force a 16:9 ratio. You can do this by right clicking your desktop, choosing Display, and then changing it to something like 25460x1440 or 1920x1080. This means your overall Windows OS experience is also 16:9, and you need to do this manually before and after every game session, so that kinda sucks, but it does work.

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Thank you. That works. It is cumbersome but it does help by making the minimap and its contents a bit bigger. Luckily switching resolutions doesn’t take up too much time. I wish there was this option in game so that we don’t have to manually trigger this for the entire OS everytime we want to play a game.