Playing VNs in window vs fullscreen?

[PhleBuster]

We like to give games HD upgrades when circumstances allow it, but deciding on the target resolution that's most comfortable for most players is always a difficult question.

One of the factors is whether people prefer to play their VNs in windowed mode or fullscreen, as I've seen plenty of cases for both ways. That's why I made a twitter poll to get some more data on it. If you have a preference, let us know! Detailed comments are also welcome.

 

[Eclipsed]

I always thought people only played windowed mode because the full screen resolution would be blurred since most VNs would be run at a resolution lower than their device's native resolution

Even HD VNs running at 720p get blurred when having to scale up to a 1080p monitor and so window mode was the way to go

My Tablet however runs at a nice 1280x800 and so it's close enough and I can comfortably full screen 720p VNs with little / no blur.

[Vorathiel]

- Full screen all the way, even 640x480 titles. I don't care about slight blur, I can't fully immerse when the game is not the only thing at the screen.
- Even if sometimes it's nice to have a window with VN and walkthrough open in Chrome righ alongside each other, I will never say that lower resolutions for window playing are better.
- The only thing I trully hate is ratio changing. 4:3 should forever stay in 4:3 (untill it gets a full blown remake, from a scratch). No cropping, no streching [f-you, youtube VN-reading assholes].

[Yuuko]

I can't stand the blur so windowed usually.

I do play the rare 1080p games fullscreen though but then I can't shitpost on twitter or other places so it kinda sucks so I have no idea what I should do. 

[Zenophilious]

I almost always play windowed, because the blur irritates the hell out of me.  I'm more than happy to do fullscreen when it doesn't negatively impact the art, though.  I actually prefer fullscreen over windowed, in that situation.

[Norleas]

I always play windowed, but this is a habit that i have from my lol and wow times, when alt + tab is annoying in fullscreen, another thing is that i have a 4k monitor so i think that even recent vns will become blurred.

[sanahtlig]

Windowed mode to avoid scaling artifacts (blur).  For Japanese games, there's the additional reason that I need space for dictionary software.

[Barktooth]

I have a CRT monitor which doesn't need to scale resolutions and can display pretty much anything natively, so I always play Fullscreen for translated VNs.

[wyldstrykr]

windows mode to see if someone is messaging me in fb or in fuwanovel (very rarely)

Edited February 5, 2017 by wyldstrykr

[Dergonu]

5 hours ago, Vorathiel said:

- Full screen all the way, even 640x480 titles. I don't care about slight blur, I can't fully immerse when the game is not the only thing at the screen.

Pretty much this. Fullscreen gives much better immersion, making reading a lot easier and more enjoyable. The resolution doesn't really matter that much to me, though HD games are obviously prettier to look at in fullscreen.

The only times I'll go windowed is if the game is rather complicated, and I feel like I need dictionary lookups a bit more frequently. (Only for untranslated games.)

[DarkZedge]

I used to think like some of the people here that fullscreen was the best and most immersive way but once I actually started playing on windowed mode and got used to it, I noticed  that it improved my experience with many vns that tend to blur out or look pretty bad on fullscreen mode.

 

[Funyarinpa]

Literally the only reason I would ever go windowed is if I was skipping through the game while following a walkthrough step-by-step. I'm really surprised that windowed is actually winning your poll. It ruins my whole immersion if I play windowed, with all the icons and windows in the background and all that.

[Deniz]

I prefer fullscreen if i am not multitasking or skimming with a walkthrough.

[AaronIsCrunchy]

Unless there's no alternative, I'll play windowed - and normally no larger than 1024 x 768 if I can help it. I don't enjoy playing anything on fullscreen really, mainly because I'll do one thing for a few minutes, then another for another few minutes, and so on.

The attention span of these millenials eh? Tsk tsk.

[littleshogun]

Full screen, especially for the VN that I played seriously (Like my recently finished Flyable Heart). Otherwise just window mode when I'd just give a good glance at the VN. So my vote goes to full screen if I could vote at the Twitter there.

Edited February 5, 2017 by littleshogun

[ChaosRaven]

This question is very unfortunately worded. Since high resolution art is good for both windowed and full screen mode the only thing that makes sense for them to figure out is if people prefer a 4:3 over a 16:9 wide screen resolution. But since a significant part of the people that voted for windowed only seem to play that way because of scaling artifacts in case of low res titles, that more or less absurdifies the poll since those people WOULD play in full screen if the game resolution would be high enough for it.

I personally always play full screen, except for Japanese titles where I need a text hooker window next to it.

[Kabu]

39 minutes ago, AaronIsCrunchy said:

Unless there's no alternative, I'll play windowed - and normally no larger than 1024 x 768 if I can help it. I don't enjoy playing anything on fullscreen really, mainly because I'll do one thing for a few minutes, then another for another few minutes, and so on.

Yeah, basically this for me too. This may sound a bit strange, but I actually enjoy myself more if I have something else going on in the background to shift my attention to every now and again.

[Fred the Barber]

Fullscreen all the way, unless the game literally won't run fullscreen. If there's one clear result from both this thread and the poll, it's that the split is pretty even and you have to do a good job with both

I do agree with @ChaosRaven that the poll and the described motivation for the poll seem only kind of loosely correlated, though...

[pual]

I prefer fullscreen even if it's blurry just so there isn't anything distracting in background. Sadly some games don't work in fullscreen even with workarounds due to display driver bugs (linux) but most do.

[Vorathiel]

4 hours ago, Kabu said:

Yeah, basically this for me too. This may sound a bit strange, but I actually enjoy myself more if I have something else going on in the background to shift my attention to every now and again.

I specially wanted to avoid that, so I put wifi 'thing' out of my laptop, to not have the urge to check anything while reading.  

[ittaku]

Full screen for immersion, as others have said. If it's a difficult Japanese VN, windowed for text hooking help but even then I resize my screen to make the window as large as possible while still having a separate window for translation aggregator, and when H scenes come along - full screen regardless for maximum perversion satisfaction.

And fuck you twitter for insisting on me getting an account just to vote, so I didn't vote.

[PhleBuster]

10 hours ago, ChaosRaven said:

This question is very unfortunately worded. Since high resolution art is good for both windowed and full screen mode the only thing that makes sense for them to figure out is if people prefer a 4:3 over a 16:9 wide screen resolution. But since a significant part of the people that voted for windowed only seem to play that way because of scaling artifacts in case of low res titles, that more or less absurdifies the poll since those people WOULD play in full screen if the game resolution would be high enough for it.

I personally always play full screen, except for Japanese titles where I need a text hooker window next to it.

Naturally, high resolution art is always good, but as people have pointed out in the replies, not playing on native resolution will always cause some loss of image quality (albeit it'll be the smaller the closer your display resolution is to the game's resolution), so target resolution does matter. On the other hand, many people have expressed a strong preference for playing fullscreen or windowed for immersion or because they alt-tab a lot. 

The replies have been very helpful so far!

[Nuka]

Full screen when it's not too blurry. And always fullscreen on my 8" tablet obviously.

And guys, I have the solotion multitasking/translating:

Spoiler

Thats my setup xD

(And yes thats also my badass pink chair and my wannabe wolf )

Edited February 6, 2017 by Nuka

[sanahtlig]

13 minutes ago, PhleBuster said:

Naturally, high resolution art is always good, but as people have pointed out in the replies, not playing on native resolution will always cause some loss of image quality (albeit it'll be the smaller the closer your display resolution is to the game's resolution), so target resolution does matter.

 The concept of 'native resolution' is unique to 2D pre-rendered 'static' art.  Many people, especially on Steam, are used to 3D games where everything is rendered dynamically in real-time by the engine, so they don't understand why VNs can't be rendered at any resolution desired without loss in visual quality.  In addition, it seems that higher resolution drastically increases production costs on detailed CG like you typically find in VNs.

[PhleBuster]

1 minute ago, sanahtlig said:

 The concept of 'native resolution' is unique to 2D pre-rendered 'static' art.  Many people, especially on Steam, are used to 3D games where everything is rendered dynamically in real-time by the engine, so they don't understand why VNs can't be rendered at any resolution desired without loss in visual quality.  In addition, it seems that higher resolution drastically increases production costs on detailed CG like you typically find in VNs.

That's true, it's distinctly a question for visual novels more than other types of games, which is why we're only getting feedback on it now that we have more visual novels in the works, despite already having done a bunch of HD upgrades for other games.