RPG

It’s about real estate

Role playing games are an ideal platform to take advantage of extra screen real estate. No matter what RPG you play, there are always inventory screens, map overlays, spell books, journals, and dialog screens that cover up the action and force you to stop and do character maintenance while your screen is covered. Then you have your character status indicators, like health, magic, etc covering part of the screen as well. What if you could literally shove all this stuff off to the side and keep your main screen cleared at all times? Surround Gaming capability allows you to do just that.

Map and Inventory up!

Can see all across bridge

Turning into a dragon

Neverwinter Nights requires none of the config or registry tweaking that many of the current shooters require. Once the game detects the Parhelia installed, it simply gives you additional options for setting game resolution, including 2400x600, 3072x768, and even 3840x1024. On my test system, the game ran with very playable speed at both 2400 and 3072 resolutions. Things started getting a bit chuggy if more than four or five enemies popped on screen, and as spells started flying back and forth, but turning on fast grass and simple shadows kept things a lot more manageable. Otherwise, we had graphic options maxed out, including 64MB textures, and things still ran quite smoothly for the most part.

Without mincing words, Neverwinter Nights is a joy to play across three screens under surround gaming. I can leave the mini map screen up all the time, even at max size a side monitor, and the inventory screen open on the other, and still see more of the game than I could playing on one monitor. My primary screen is wide open, while most of the other two monitors show game real estate, even with a character maintenance window open in each one of them. I walk into new areas and see monsters way off to the side that I’d never have seen without the game stretched across three monitors. They’re so far away at times that I can’t cast spells on them b/c I’m not in range yet, but yet I can see them. I briefly tried switching back to the other computer to play NWN on one monitor and quickly became disgruntled at the lack of screen space.

Drop a Fire Storm

Call Lightning from way right

Dragon vs. Hill Giants

Errata

Unfortunately, in Neverwinter Nights you can’t grab the little map and inventory windows and drag them around. With three monitors, they kind of pop up randomly wherever they want to as you turn things on. The game however, always knows to load the left and the right monitors with sub windows like your map/spellbook/inventory BEFORE putting something in the center screen. So as long as you only have two things open at once, your center game screen around your party remains free and clear.

Another interesting bit is that it’s a little bit difficult to rotate the screen with so much space to navigate. With one monitor, I’d always slam the mouse cursor up against the side of the screen to rotate. This becomes difficult when your playing area is 3000 pixels wide. To deal with this, I started just using the keyboard arrow keys to rotate the screen instead of the mouse. The other bit of errata we noticed is that the cursor tends to flicker a bit with the widescreen resolutions enabled. We’ll trade that minor annoyance for the extra space, every day of the week.

Right now, Neverwinter Nights appears to be the only RPG that currently supports Surround Gaming, unless you count Deus Ex as an RPG. With the wonderful implementation we are currently enjoying on NWN, this gaming editor is hoping for more support from future RPGs, and perhaps more robust recognition of the possibilities with multiple displays.