Atomic Heart: How to Use Flawless Widescreen to Increase FOV

In FPS titles, the field of view slider (FOV) is king. Gamers need to modify their FOV to get the view that best suits them, but sometimes developers forget to implement this crucial aspect. When that happens, it’s time to turn to mods.

Russian game development studio Mundfish announced Atomic Heart in 2017 and has been hard at work polishing their debut game ever since. Yet in all that time, the developers never added an FOV

Wccftech reached out to Mundfish and learned that the company thought it didn’t need one since “Atomic Heart already features a wide FOV, higher than many other games.” On the surface, this sounds like a reasonable explanation, but for many gamers, there’s no such thing as too wide of an FOV. Gamers generally prefer to tailor their game displays to fit their personal preferences and hardware. Thankfully, some coders have already created a workaround of sorts for Atomic Heart‘s FOV woes.

That workaround is the “Flawless Widescreen” mod, which is a series of plugins designed to provide additional support for monitors that go beyond the standard 16:9 aspect ratio. This catch-all program lets users force numerous games into ultra-wide resolutions, including The Witcher 2 and Mass Effect 3. Atomic Heart is the latest game added to the list.

In order to use Flawless Widescreen with Atomic Heart, you first have to download the program and install it. Since Flawless Widescreen was written in C++, you need the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package pre-installed on your computer. If you don’t have it, don’t fret because the Flawless Widescreen website includes a handy link. Once both C++ and Flawless Widescreen are installed, boot up the app and open the “Available Plugins” section. Since the plugins are listed alphabetically, Atomic Heart should be near the top. Click on it to add its plugin, and the program will provide several options, such as which game version you want to use and whether you want to scale the game HUD. The option you’re looking for is “In-game FOV – Fine Adjustment.” Select the FOV you want, and Flawless Widescreen will automatically inject it into Atomic Heart and overwrite the game’s default settings when you boot it up. Easy peasy, polymer squeezy.

When it comes to setting up Flawless Widescreen, the program is downright idiot-proof, but in practice, the app doesn’t quite live up to its name. Many users have reported that Flawless Widescreen breaks scanning in Atomic Heart, as the areas they are supposed to scan don’t quite match up with what they actually scan. Moreover, some gamers claim that Flawless Widescreen causes their game to crash surprisingly often.

Thankfully, fans have found workarounds for the Flawless Widescreen workaround. For instance, NexusMods offers the “Custom Field of View” mod for Atomic Heart, which allegedly alters the game’s FOV without causing any scanning or crashing problems. However, even that mod isn’t perfect since it comes in several versions, each of which brute forces the game’s FOV into a different setting. Using more than one Custom Field of View mod at a time is not recommended.

Until Mundfish Games adds a dedicated FOV slider to Atomic Heart, audiences have to rely on fan-created mods, be they Flawless Widescreen or Custom Field of View.