Death Stranding could be the first PS5 game with ‘ultra-wide’ support

Kojima Productions has claimed that Death Stranding Director’s Cut will include “ultra-wide” support on PlayStation 5.

No game console has natively supported the 2560×1080 or 3440×1440 resolutions used by ultra-wide monitors, which is why practically no console games have ever offered an ultra-wide mode, even though the practice is now quite common with PC games.

Despite this, both a new PlayStation Blog article about the Death Stranding Director’s Cut and a Q&A video hosted by Kojima Productions head of publishing Jay Boor state that the game has ultra-wide support.

The PlayStation Blog article states: “Choose from two picture modes – Performance Mode with upscaled 4K and up to 60FPS or Fidelity Mode in native 4K – both with ultra-wide and HDR support.”

It’s not yet clear how this will achieved, given that the PS5 doesn’t support ultra-wide resolutions. One potential solution could be using a similar technique to anamorphic widescreen movies and games, where activating a widescreen mode would present a 4:3 image with a squished picture that then looks accurate when stretched out to 16:9 widescreen.

Alternatively, the game could be presented with black bars at the top and bottom (similar to Sony‘s The Order), with players then using their monitor to ‘zoom’ into the picture and essentially crop out the borders.

A number of console games have received ultra-wide support when ported to PC.

The PC version of Sony’s Days Gone features an ultra-wide mode, as does its PC port of Horizon Zero Dawn.

The same is true of numerous Xbox games, with the PC version of the upcoming Halo Infinite also supporting ultra-wide displays.