Ace Combat 7 modders fix pop-in and add ultrawide monitor support

Ace Combat 7, the unflappable JRPG disguised as a jet fighter game, had some dissatisfied pilots when it came out on PC last week. The trigger-happy fly ‘em up released without support for most joysticks or HOTAS controllers, which irritated folks. And other technical foibles also inevitably annoyed people. Well, there's still no joy for the stick users. But there are some other small fixes, unofficial ones, courtesy of those rapscallions in modder squadron. One of these increases the draw distance to reduce pop-in, and the other adds support for those ultrawide monitors you never stop going on about.

First, the draw distance. I know how upset you get when you're unable to see tiny trees 3km away. You can’t manually change this in-game, but you can alter it by doing some INI file tweaking, as explained by Steam user “Speedwagon”. They’ve done a comparison shot of the before and after, and yes, you can see many more pines and model houses. They’re model houses we’re blowing up, right? Nobody dies in this game. It’s a happy game.

Getting your ultrawide monitor to work is a bit more complicated. Modder “susahamat” has come up with a tool to get the game running on 21:9 or 32:9 monitors. But it also shunts the entire HUD to the left, making the whole thing somewhat unusable if your main joy is murdering in the sky. Luckily, another modder has come up with a fix for that, which itself involves more INI tinkering. Yes, it’s definitely a PC game. If you mess this up and end up firing missiles out of your afterburners don’t come crying to me.

Ultrawide or normalwide, this videogame is good. It’s dumb as a mudskipper, but just as likeable. There’s a space elevator, there are giant roboplanes, there's an ace pilot with 14 names. At one point you are court-martialed and sent to a penal unit. Your job is to make a fake airbase look like a real one. The best way to do fake missions, reasons the warden, is to just do real missions with real planes. That way, it looks legit. Financially, I’m not sure this makes any sense. Militarily, however… No, sorry, militarily it also makes no sense. Anyway, read our Ace Combat 7 review if you want the full shakedown.