Why Resident Evil Village Plays Great on Ultrawide Gaming Monitors

With an open world, bigger groups of enemies, and lovely graphics, Resident Evil Village makes a strong case for playing on a curved ultrawide gaming monitor

Nearly four and a half years after the release or Resident Evil 7 and following a surprisingly short announcement period, Capcom is ready to release Resident Evil Village. The eighth entry in the mainline Resident Evil series continues the first person perspective pioneered by RE7, and uses an upgraded version of the RE Engine to deliver improved visuals with support for ray tracing, DLSS, and other current gen features.

Resident Evil Village comes out May 7, just a few days after this article was written. In the weekend prior, we had one hour hands on with the game on PC thanks to Capcom’s public demo. And one thing that quickly caught our attention was the game’s open support for ultrawide, 21:9/32:9 resolutions. However, we noticed the lack of an adjustable field of view, at least in the demo build. This will likely change later as Capcom responds to user feedback. But for now, we’d like to look at why Resident Evil Village benefits from ultrawide, curved monitors.

Unlike RE7, RE Village takes place in a much bigger setting. The village of the title and adjoining areas offer lots of open spaces in addition to the usual Resident Evil rooms and corridors. While RE7 stuck to the haunted house formula for the most part, RE Village brings back elements from RE4/RE5 and even spiritual companion series The Evil Within. Bigger spaces are an important aspect of gameplay and obviously a sufficient reason to benefit from a wider view angle, which from what we can tell is set to 90 degrees on ultrawide screens by default. That’s quite wider than the 70 degrees offered for 16:9 screens.

For bonus points, RE Village isn’t just possibly the biggest Resident Evil ever, it’s definitely the prettiest. There’s so much going on in its atmospheric locales, you should aim to get as much of that in every frame as possible. Ultrawide displays are therefore advisable to accommodate the bigger, open, and more detailed world of RE Village.

One more thing we noticed is that RE Village has a definite leaning towards action, and against large groups of foes at that. Several previous Resident Evil titles were action-focused, especially the controversial RE6. But those were all third person, while RE Village mixes things up with the first person perspective of RE7 and the horde-ish enemies from RE5 and RE6. If all of these numbers are confusing, we apologize. Resident Evil is quite a massive franchise.

In any case, between the increased emphasis on firearms and the more numerous enemies, a wider display comes in handy for remaining aware of bad guys trying to sneak up on you. Where RE7 pitted you against one, two, or maybe three monsters at a time, RE Village appears quite happy to throw twice as many hostiles at players during dangerous encounters. And protagonist Ethan is back from RE7 and continues to be supernatural in the amount of damage he can take, plus now handles what looks like a wider range of weapons. We could be wrong because at the time of writing we only got a glimpse of the game, but RE Village seems to have quite a lot of gunplay. That’s perfect for ultrawide screens. And a curve like 1900R further augments your depth perception, a good thing to have in a game with lots of open spaces and stuff that’s not in your immediate vicinity. Gotta spot those green herbs from far off if you expect to make it.

Sure, a valid question. And it’s not like RE Village suffers from 16:9 aspect ratios, just that we think it’ll benefit from 21:9/32:9 more than any previous Resident Evil release. If you do want to get the full 4K 60Hz experience, there’s absolutely no reason not to go with a lovely IPS panel that’ll bring out the beauty of rural Romania as depicted by Capcom’s artists. We also tried RE Village on a “regular” 3840 x 2160 monitor, and it looked marvelous with everything set to ultra. If you’re OK with a narrower field of view, you’ll be fine with RE Village on a 16:9 screen.

Whichever monitor you go with, we’re pretty sure that by the time you read this you’ll be deep into enjoying Resident Evil Village and its many horrific characters, some of whom are notoriously tall. Don’t worry, there’s no need to consider playing in portrait mode!  

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