I know that not everyone wants them, but I'd like an option to keep them in my game - it's handy for having the interface options not on top of my view of the environment and I appreciate the movie cutscene feel while I'm playing the game.

Does anyone know how to bring them back? I am playing on a 1280x1024 screen resolution.

haha..after all the humbablo about black bars complains ^_^...

Currently the only way appears to be to keep Witcher 2 at patch 1.2 and not update the game..Else you will need to request the developers for the option, shouldn't be hard for CDPR to implement the option.

whach out wilowah there will be "hundreds" of screeming people after your blood for requesting this. Well I say hundreds cos thats what it felt like in the forums from all those you just found the game "impossible to play, rant rant rant cos of the fecking black bars rant rant"

Ha ha ha what a brilliant post, cheers.

Oh man! I don't want them to change it back! Just give me the option, please! :)

If this thread is anything to go by, the black bars still appear when you have a different aspect ratio than that of your monitor set (like 4:3 on a 16:9 monitor or something like that).

Or maybe that won't work, but it's pretty much the only thing I can think of. You can test it by editing the "viewport" attribute of your user.ini, but I've been told that any changes to the .ini that aren't available in your options get automatically changed back when you use the launcher, so you'd have to run the game directly from the .exe from then on in order for it to not change back every time you start the game.

Try this in your user.ini file..

[Viewport]
Height=720
Width=1280

and disable Display stretching on your monitor or from the drivers

(but the problem is, even the menus will have black borders.)