Wait, what? The "fixed" pics are just zoomed out, which is why you seemingly have more horizontal viewing space.

Of course black bars don't give you a wider FOV. Pulling the camera back does. I'm surprised you found this to be a revelation XD

Had the black bars not been there, perhaps the camera would've been closer to the character.

In any case, The Evil Within used the id Tech engine and had serious issues, that's probably the reason. Also, the black bars take more space than in The Order. More spance than movies do, so it's a weird aspect ratio. In this case and cases like Dragon's Dogma, it seems it's done for performance.

If you look at The Order's concept art, it already had black bars, so in that particular case it was there by design, like with Beyond Two Souls. I personally don't mind them.

I remember plugging my NES into a 13 inch TV back in the day and thinking it was awesome. I think I can deal with this.

The continued pussification of gamers is an interesting phenomenon to watch.

I think guys at Ready at Dawn know what they're doing, I don't mind black bars in films at all, why should I care if It's in a game or not?

Since when was taking screen space away ever a good thing? Of course it results in less FOV. It's done to keep the framerate stable.

Wait does increasing the FOV hinder performance even if both examples are the same? like if both are fullscreen but 1 has smaller FOV, the other larger (no bars on both)

Less screen means seeing less, period. By their logic you could make the image a tiny strip across the screen and you'd be able to see EVERYWHERE! They're probably doing it for stylistic reasons or this is a sneaky industry way to have to render less game and still give a high-resolution image.

I did not realize this :( i thought it all had to do with aspect ratios and pulling the camera back would just make it further away without adding horizontal or vertical pixels

I didn't realize how much better the evil within looks on PC than my Xbox One.  Wow. 

BTW realy effed up game (in a good way).  It's like playing a nightmare so far.

I think if you do that tho, it cuts off horizontal pixels