16:9 or 4:3?

Answers

• Gonz4 L Posts: 29Member

  October 2020

  What problems can using 16:9 cause?
• Sosasees Posts: 162Member

  January 13 edited January 13

  I'm speaking from the perspective of making a 2D game since I made an educated guess from your body text that this is a 2D game. This issue is much less problematic and an entirely different topic in 3D because of field-of-view.

  ---

  Summary: When in doubt, 16:9 is always a Good aspect ratio for today's games.

  ---

  I'd choose my Aspect Ratio depending on this:

  1. Is there an Artistic reason why your game needs to be in a specific aspect ratio? Then choose that Aspect Ratio.
  2. If there's No artistic reason for a specific aspect ratio, I'd choose the aspect ratio of your Target device. If you're targeting modern monitors, I'd choose 16:9 since the most-used ones are in 16:9. If you're targeting classic CRTs I'd choose 4:3 since most of them are in 4:3.
  3. When you become more experienced, you can create your game with a range of Multiple aspect ratios in mind (e.g. my game has a range of 16:9 up to 24:9, with the Target aspect ratio being 21:9). But this approach needs more effort than sticking to a Single aspect atio, so I'd first stick to a Single aspect ratio. But you don't have to support Multiple aspect ratios from the Very beginning, only soon enough. My project also started with Only 21:9 before I decided when making the Third Test Level that i really need to support 16:9 and 24:9 also.

  ---

  As long as the aspect Rratio is a Standard aspect ratio like 4:3, 16:9, 18:9, 21:9 or 24:9, it wouldn't really cause any problems. Problems only arise when you later want to switch to another Aspect Ratio but you didn't account for the differences between the viewing ranges of the different aspect ratios (e.g. shrinking from 16:9 to 4:3 to realize that critical information goes off-screen, or extending from 4:3 to 16:9 to realize that you can see objects popping in when they spawn, or backgrounds being cut-off at the edges, or secret paths becoming obvious)

  Most games today benefit from using the 16:9 aspect ratio: Compared to 4:3, you can see more but not so much more that you become distanced from the game world and character. This makes the game feel more fun as you can better see the obstacles ahead of you, but still not so much that the sense of discovery becomes lost.
  When in doubt, 16:9 is always a Good aspect ratio for modern games.