The Walking Dead ultrawide and wider solution for Microsoft Store

Earlier this month, a WSGF user asked for a solution for The Walking Dead games specifically for Game Pass. At the time, I didn't prioritize it, because the game has been around for a while and had solutions available for the Steam and GOG version.

Yesterday, a supporter also asked for a fix for The Walking Dead on Game Pass, so this added to the earlier request and made the matter more pressing.

I'm also a big fan of Telltale and The Walking Dead games, and one of my earliest fixes ever on the old WSGF forum was a simple one for a game of this series.

It's also around that time that PhantomGamers created his Telltale patcher, followed by my feedback and a pattern contribution. I even remember talking to PhantomGamers specifically about the code of The Walking Dead. To summarize, I knew a thing or two about it.

As for the Game Pass version, unfortunately, none of the multiple patterns of the Telltale patcher were of help, and neither were the patterns from Flawless Widescreen.

I had to start from scratch and follow the game behaviors to develop a new fix. Beyond the usual tracing and following the game code through its operations, there were multiple obstacles.

For one, the game didn't appear to immediately read from its resolution-related code, requiring to switch to windowed and back.

Secondly, as publicly documented by Telltale, they built the game around 16:9 and often culled their scripts and visuals beyond that width, which was also evident even in the random UI elements populating the areas that would have been hidden by the black bars, now revealed. The resulting ugliness of some of the scenes made me question whether to proceed at all. However, seeing that people played the game despite these issues even 6 years ago convinced me to go on.

Lastly and specifically to Microsoft Store, The Walking Dead turned out to be one of the few remaining games on Microsoft Store not supporting the Advanced Management Features, preventing proper access to any of the game files or their modification. Memory hacking to the rescue again!

In light of some of the aforementioned hurdles, the way to apply the solution is somewhat convoluted and the resulting look of the game is imperfect, but, as it was said earlier, having this option is better than nothing.

Still, I'm probably going to abstain from posting about it in many places until I have had people tell me it's all tolerable. Do let me know if you try it!