Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons Remake ultrawide and wider solution

When I was tagged by a WSGF user and asked about the possibility of a fix for the Brothers Remake, my immediate response was that there would be no value in buying the game, as I had completed the original years ago.

Seeing the lack of solutions and a patron making another request got me to change my mind just for the sake of the community.

I didn't know much about the game's scaling behaviors going into it, but right after its first launch, I could see its dire state in ultrawide. For one, as reported, it did not allow to select ultrawide resolutions at all. Thankfully, this was easily fixed by switching to Borderless. Secondly, with that done, the main menu was already giving away the things to come at the cutscenes: windowboxing, just like The Quarry.

Though removing the side black bars and correcting the FOV is something I've been doing for a while for Unreal Engine games, the added letterboxing was a problem seen in only a few. The latest example from the past was Remnant 2, in which I decided to just keep the letterboxing as intended by the developer and not waste any time. For Brothers, I thought I'd take it a step further.

After removing the pillarboxing and correcting the FOV, I found a temporary way of removing the letterboxing, but making it stick was a problem. It was essentially an overlay / UI element - whatever you want to call it - so targeting it reliably was not easy.

Once that was finally solved, the outstanding problem was that by removing the letterboxing, the vertical framing was no longer matching the original, as the parts behind the black bars were now exposed. You might have seen this in my fix for Red Dead Redemption 2.

I looked into re-framing, but there were a few obstacles:

1. I can't just match the vertical FOV of the original 21:9 cutscenes by changing the global FOV, as that would also mean vertically reducing the gameplay view compared to 16:9.
2. Changing the FOV depending on whether it's a cutscene or a gameplay view is a more viable solution, but it would require tying the logic to an existing check for whether it's a cutscene or not. This would be problematic, as there are cases when the view is letterboxed even outside the cutscenes (like the intro, when you are taught how to move).
3. Tying the FOV adjustment specifically to the letterboxing would be the best solution in theory, but it would require digging much deeper to find code that executes only during the letterboxing. Even when located, the FOV transition from no letterboxing to the would-be letterboxing would feel jumpy, as I don't have the developer level of control of the camera or tools to make it gradual and smooth.

Having weighed in on the issues, I settled on merely removing the letterboxing. What this means to the player is that, at the gameplay, the vertical view will match the original 1:1, while at the cutscenes, no vertical FOV will be lost, but there will be more to see in the areas previously taken up by the horizontal black bars (as seen in the attached screenshots). Publicly downloadable here.

As a little bonus for you all, I'm including a version with the letterboxing preserved (side bars still removed). This is truer to the devs' vision but comes at the cost of seeing the horizontal black bars (which is not quite the point of ultrawide, right?).