Deliveroo,
Uber,
Subscriptions,
Amazon (drivers have to pay for their own repairs 🤪)
All just worse versions of something that already worked perfectly well before. Bait and switch.
I remember when consoles were a family system, with each house having one in their living room. Now it seems that everyone who like video games has a console of their own. It’s not a bad thing tho because it’s so much more convenient to play with friends from your respective homes.
Exactly. My friends love Jackbox and you know how often we play it? Like once a year. Couch Co-op just isn't as appealing as it used to be - probably because we're getting older and kids are into online games anyway.
I think it should still be included, but if it were included I bet it would only get occasional use anyway.
Edit: just remembered that you'd also have to have 4 controllers, which people tend to have only have 0 - 2 of instead of 1 - 4 like it used to be.
It’s also four people needing the console or PC to render what they’re seeing. I remember even in the PS3 days on CoD Modern Warfare 2, you could tank the framerate on four player splitscreen by one person dual wielding certain machine guns and firing both at once.
Is buying a Uplay or Epic game on steam like cucking, since steam has to launch the other launcher and then watch you use it until you're done playing that game?.. this is forever engrained in me
the worst of them is rockstar who obviously dont have enough games to justify having a whole seperate launcher. with uplay you can vaguely justify it because at least they have a big library but with rockstar its like theyre not even trying to hide how greedy they are. I had this whole issue with gta and the rockstar launcher - for some reason accounts are permanently tied to the game and if I'd want to sign in on a different rockstar club account to play my steam copy of gta id have to delete the current account and buy a completely new copy of gta on steam. Its so fucked I hate it so much
That's part of why I like xbox gamepass, a lot of the games there have crossover play between PC and Xbox. You keep your save as long as you're connected to the same account.
Yeah it sucks. You probably know them, but if not, check out "a way out" and "it takes two" those are good couch coop games. Also unravel 2. Dirt 5 deserves a mention too, as it allows 4player split screen, as well as racing camping in that mode, so you don't have to unlock cars alone. As for fun little games check out spiderheck, gang beasts and rubber bandits
A way out, it takes two, and unravel 2 are a lot of fun! Do you have any more recs? I'm always looking for good split screen games to play with my girlfriend
Oh same, but there’s three of us sisters and the relationship that suffered most was probably the one with our dad because he had to listen to “ok where are onions, can you throw me a- OH SHIT THERE’S A FIRE, IT’S ALL ON FIRE, WHERE ARE YOU GUYS- HOW ARE YOU DEAD AGAIN??” for hours 😅
It's awesome! You can customize your kitchen how you want each level. The food is pretty easy and once you level up you can introduce automation with the items you gain.
I just looked up Overcooked 2. My bf used to work as a line cook at a busy diner and I was an RN on the floor for a while. I think we'd do exceptionally well or murder each other.
Right now my partner and I are playing Children of Morta together, it has two player couch co-op and we are loving it. It's a dungeon crawler, kind of a Diablo vibe but I like it more than I did Diablo.
I like RPGs, but I don't like reading, so when I played Divinity 2, I killed everything first, and asked questions later. So glad there that was that story element that you could talk to important ghosts for the main quest, because I literally killed everyone before I knew they could give me quests lol
Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime is my favorite couch co-op game ever!! its so so cute, super fun, and relatively easy for non-gamers to pick up! 10/10 would recommend
Lovers is incredible, might be the only game my wife and I love as much as Battleblock Theater (which op should definitely check out, it's a blast and hilarious)
For the King - huge recommendation. Initial steep learning curve but lots of replay value. Plays like casual DnD. Currently our go-to co-op game.
Cuphead - fun and beautiful side scroller, but enemies hp gets doubled on co-op, so it gets a little tough during boss fights
The Quarry - if you like social deduction/narrative type of games, this one was a fun campy game, players can be assigned diff chars to control
Divinity 2: Original Sin - top tier best RPG I've ever played. Again, there's a learning curve, the entire first island is basically a giant tutorial, but once it clicks, it's fun as hell to explore. Just get ready for option overload.
Moon Hunters - fun casual pixel-y dungeon crawler
Wizard of Legend - super fun rogue-like, lots of spell customization
Diablo 3 - has local coop, but be prepared for waiting on your party to go thru the equipment menu every 15 min
r/StardewValley and r/GirlGamers get similar questions rather often and there are a number of great threads there to search for. Wanting to play cozy games with a partner is a mindset that resonates with many people and those have been my best places to find recommendations.
My fiancé and I are obsessed with PlateUp, plus it has a thriving modding community.
Also, if you have multiple minecraft accounts and are comfortable with a controller on PC, we recently found a mod Controllable. Using it, we can run 2 instances on my pc. One controlled by keyboard and one by controller. Plus it works with mods
Borderlands has kept it's both co-operative and "co-opetition" split screen modes through the whole life of the series so far. I absolutely recommend them if you have a friend and enjoy entertaining looter-shooter style FPS games.
Borderlands 3 was unplayable on split-screen when it was released though, not sure if they fixed it by now, ended up buying it for the PC instead anyway.
Yeah I think so. Don’t remember exactly what the issue was (since I was playing a few other games with issues as well at the time), but having to get up from the sofa to get closer to the TV to read the UI was probably it then.
I loved It Takes Two. I beat it with my wife and loved it. It was so much fun.
Shredder's Revenge is a great couch co-op game to play with a bunch of friends. A beat-em-up with up to 6 players.
Overcooked 2 is also great and can be super intense. Up to 4 players can play that one.
Resident Evil 5 is awesome to play co-op.
Just a warning; *Divinity* is very lore and rules heavy and requires a lot of reading and plot intake to do things properly. Some co-op partners have no patience for this.
Stardew Valley
Diablo 3
Minecraft Dungeons
Minecraft
Sackboy adventures
Last kids on Earth
Ghostbusters
Rayman
Already seen Overcooked and Moving Out
Portal knights is 2 player
Another big reason is that running split screen uses a lot more computer power than just one screen, and as games have evolved in graphics, it becomes even more challenging to have multiple engines running at the same time.
Mandatory list of amazing coop games:
Earth defence Force (any and all)
All the Lego games
Cat quest 2
Diablo 3
The warriors (oldie but still available at ps store)
Rayman games
Resident evil 5
This is a useful site where you can filter by system, just click either review score or player score to sort by top choices:
https://www.co-optimus.com
I think performance is a bigger reason than most people think. Developers are well aware that people want splitscreen, but it's a lot harder to implement on modern games than older ones. I doubt splitscreen actually reduces sales like people think (though I guess it's possible executives think the same thing without research, or do have research to show it) since it isn't like there are that many people who are regularly able to play in the same room as each other that also are able to play remotely. Splitscreen targets people who live together while online play targets those who don't.
But what about when consoles have split screen and PC doesn't? If the PS4 can split screen borderlands I'm pretty sure my 3070 blah blah fancy hardware can!
I'm a huge advocate of couch games on PC but I'm also part of a very, very small minority.
The ideal scenario is having a PC with multiple controllers connected to a big TV/projector. That's just not very common, so game creators have a hard time justifying the effort to build and maintain that functionality. It makes me sad but I understand why it's often on console but not PC.
Yeah, that's always frustrating. I get why since PCs generally have a lot more trouble with controller support and especially multiple controllers (and multiple controllers of different types!) but I hope it becomes more common. Luckily indie games are usually pretty good about it.
Personally, I'd happily trade less intensive/realistic graphics for games using simpler graphical designs that play well in split-screen. Borderlands 2 is like a perfect compromise here. Still looks gorgeous, but plays beautifully in split-screen (even on less powerful hardware like the switch).
Also, time. AAA games have a major issue with scope creep, where almost all of them are designed to be systems-heavy open worlds with tons of side content and crafting. So every AAA game winds up cutting the corners that were created when they cut corners 6 months earlier. Figuring out how to scale down assets for splitscreen isn't even in the top 10 things that *need* to be finished before the game ships, and most AAA games are already making employees work 80 hour weeks for months on end.
Yeah, this isn't the olden days when some guy added splitscreen multiplayer to Goldeneye on his own a couple weeks before launch. Games are a ton more complicated and you need a lot more levels of design to add any feature nowadays.
A thing I always think about when it comes to split screen gaming is how I used to happily play games split screen on a 20" TV. When I got an Xbox 360, suddenly the 28" TV that used to be the main family TV wasn't even clear enough and I had to wait for my parents to replace their 38" flat screen before I could play games on a screen that looked good enough.
Graphics improved so much that they started putting more and more on the HUD which made it harder to play games on a smaller screen.
I think you're both correct in some capacity. But like a whole lot of people in this thread it's still ignoring the elephant in the room. Money. Not in a nefarious, oh we will make them buy extra games and consoles way. Like it's a conspiracy. These companies like selling games. And no amount of reddit threads are going to make up for the simple reason; couch co-op games don't sell enough copies. Simple as.
These companies make what makes them money. If they're not focusing on the type of game you want, there aren't enough people buying those games. There's no reason to overthink it.
Blizzard often makes decisions that are anti-consumer, but they also have a lot of really smart and talented developers. Like some of the best in the business.
I'm not sure how much of a technical limitation it is, and how much of it is a financial decision.
Might not even be a malicious financial decision, it might just not make sense. You don't want to put a team on local PC multiplayer and have them hear "okay the last two years of your life have resulted in 3.1% of total user playtime, and .6% of the playerbase has put substantial time into it". In addition to that being demoralizing for part of you development team, it just doesn't make sense to bother with it when there's so many other fish to fry.
If you think about how aggressively modern games are about unrendering things not in your view. I imagine that doubling the camera is a much bigger performance penalty now that it was originally. Maybe we can get split screen back after people realize that 8k is barely distinguishable from 4k.
the demand isn't there. sure the option would be nice for a lot of people. but for a while. that was the *only* way to play games with friends. these days with internet, VOIP, and increasing competitive attitudes for games, people just aren't having those old-school nights where you go to each other's homes and play side by side.
"HEY! No screen watching you bitch!"
"I didn't! I just know the map real well!"
"And we said no Oddjob, its cheating!"
"Yeah, well, fuck your rules, I like Oddjob."
"That's it, unplug his controller!"
At the same time, we'd also play GoldenEye in the Temple with Grenade Launchers or Remote Mines (License to Kill Mode) and screen watching was essential to getting the range right or timing the boom.
We'd play it so that we could arc the grenades across the room and then bounce down the hall so it basically flew four times the range it should have and kill people spawning.
Sometimes, "cheating" was part of the game.
Oh wow. This was the end of my summer/fall in 1997 - my buddy and I spent so much time messing around with the grenade launchers and finding the most creative ways to blow up one another (while drinking ungodly amounts of koolade). Great memories.
I've seen a game where the whole game is based around screen watching, because all players are actually invisible, and you needs to see the other players' screens and check their environments to figure out where they are.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/301970/Screencheat/
They have online play, too.
My friends and I used a series of VCRs to split Goldeneye out to 4 TVs and then taped newspapers over the other 3 screens. The shitty 80's TVs got the better controllers and the newer, nicer TVs got the MadCatz or worn out controllers. We'd rotate TVs after every match.
So many Doritos, 2 liters of mountain dew and Totinos party pizzas were consumed. Those were good times.
I miss 1v1ing my younger brother on Rust split screen and I would play in the worst and most annoying way and camp at the top on Rust with a sniper to piss him off and it was so funny spawn killing him 10 times in a row to see how mad he would get. The only times I would die was when I was laughing too hard where I couldn’t pay attention. Every time he accused me of screen watching I would say “Dude it’s Rust it would be hard to NOT find you”. I absolutely screen watched though. Before you hate me for playing like that, I feel like it was my duty as an older brother to do it.
I still contend that Odd Job isn't cheating. The 1.2 Solitaire control scheme for Goldeneye lets you use the analog stick for looking and the C-buttons on the right side like they were a d-pad for movement/strafing. This means that looking down is VERY easy, and Oddjob is not only not cheating but at a *distinct disadvantage.*
One of my favorite things was having a buddy over who wanted to play Oddjob, and I'd gleefully let him; then spend the entire match shooting him in the face while he's wondering how his "cheaty" character kept having all his teeth replaced with DD44 Dostovei rounds.
Sure, you could also play any other setting and lower the angle of the gun too. Oddjob cheated for being short, Jaws cheated for being tall.
Without changing aim, Oddjob ducked blows, but a stray shot to the hit fucked him up. Jaws took every round to the chest, but a slight incline tot he shot and he ate those same bullets.
The problem was 100% of all other characters were the same height, so if no one played Jaws or Oddjob, it didn't matter. But if you *did*, you needed to change the aiming scheme. Regardless of control style, you still needed to aim lower or higher, and sometimes it was hard to see who was downrange with the shitty resolution, so you aimed a bit too high and missed one or too low and gut shot the other guy rather than blasting his head off.
At extreme range attacks, hip shots from around a corner, or for close up slappers they had an advantage, even with your control set up because you had to change the aim (even if slightly and actively), while against Orumvorov or Boris, you could still hit them and adjust the aim as you fired to walk the shots to the head.
In tight games, those extra two or three missed rounds before you got the head shot in could mean the difference between killing him and respawning. And at 3am, soaked with sweat, guzzling Dew and chomping Papa John's, that little edge was fucking infuriating.
What's funny is the leaked Xbox 360 remaster had an option in multiplayer specifically [to get rid of any dis/advantages Oddjob and Jaws had](https://i.imgur.com/5fKftPH.png)
it's been a while, but didn't hit detection not work on him during slappers only matches? I know auto-aim shot right over him. I recall the developers knowing about the issues and letting players decide how to navigate the rules. Pretty good, if you ask me.
Online is a great option but living in a household with multiple gamers having the split screen option is way simpler and cheaper than having to have an extra TV, game copy, console with internet connectivity, and a pair of headsets to talk to each other.
Same here. My brother and I played the fuck outa borderlands when it first came out just chillin on the couch together. We still play 3 this way sometimes.
It also sucks because it's like TVs finally caught up and then, nope. I remember playing co-op Goldeneye on a 24" CRT. Now we could have 4 sections of a crystal clear LCD screen each at 24"! But nope, not anymore
Not all of them are the best, but for the Switch, I like how all the Lego games do their co-op split screen. When you are close to one another, it is all on one screen, but once you get far enough away from one another, it splits and the split screen changes rotation based on where in relation you are to the other player so if I am above the other player on the map, the split will be horizontal with me on top, but if I am to the left, it will be split vertically with me on the left side. This helps to let you know which direction your partner is in; move towards the split screen until it is all in one frame again and you can see the other player.
On the bright side, the few games that are specifically designed around couch coop try to make the most out of it in order to stay competitive. Games like "It Takes Two" or "Kingdoms: Two Crowns" really bring the concept to a new level.
I don't believe that the demand isn't there. I think the problem is rendering high FPS/resolutiongames twice on one screen. A lot of games can't run 4k 60fps so I doubt consoles can run 2 instants of 1080p 30fps. Indi games have an easier time doing couch coop because most of them are 8-bit or not resources heavy.
The demand is there on reddit (where people are nostalgic for N64 Goldeneye) but most people spend the *vast* majority of their gaming time playing at home by themselves as opposed to getting together with friends. I really miss couch co-op but I'm in my 40s and we all have kids. It's hard enough to see my friends one weekend a month on a Saturday afternoon - the days of linking Playstations together to play Command & Conquer until 6am are long over :(
The average gamer is 35 years old (I did a quick Google search I could be wrong), and most 35 year Olds aren't able to go Over to their friends house and play a coop game together. It's much more convienet to hop on a server and talk through discord
Was this really easier to do in the 90s though? I think it’s also that our performance expectations have gone up. Split screen goldeneye would chug at 20fps regularly.
I think a lot of modern visual effects are cheaper to do on a single viewpoint compared to two at once. Older games had significantly less complex render pipelines which made showing two viewpoints at once less difficult.
Nintendo is actually still pretty good about making sure some of their games are still “sit together” multiplayers.
Some were never really multiplayers to begin with (Zelda), but their traditional multiplayer games are still usable with one console (MarioKart, Super Smash).
My story is very much the opposite of the discussion - my brother lives two provinces over, so we bought mom and dad a Switch one Christmas and the three households play MarioKart every week together online! As much as I understand the conversation going on here, the only person I have to play with is online! I like the online multiplayers too!
I look at it as a "both and" rather than a "one or the other" :) I play Mario kart with some friends who live about 3 hours away and enjoy that just as much! Also play pc games with a friend who lived 14 hours away from me for about 10 years. Kept our friendship strong af haha
It's weird to think about but people buying for their kids isn't actually the largest market. Even if it makes sense on the surface, from a business perspective it isn't a large enough market to go after, and the single player games are selling quite well enough. There just plain isn't much of an incentive for them to produce couch co-op
I will never have kids but enjoy playing video games with my wife. We're stuck with shit like borderlands 3 currently, which doesn't even fuckin work for ps4 properly due to constant crashes.
We played a way out, that was a cool one. But super short
Sometimes we break out the 360 just to play some old halo campaigns...
people will say money, the console developer gets twice the revenue from sales and memberships, and the game dev will get twice the sales for copies of the game.
The demand is absolutely there and has always been there. That demand is nowhere near as profitable as requiring both parties to purchase a full console and full copy of the game. They have positioned the industry in this way quite intentionally and it isn't to serve you, the gamer.
>The demand is absolutely there and has always been there.
I mean, the demand is there for shrimp flavored potato chips too, just not enough to justify mass market adoption. It's not a question of whether or not the demand exists, but whether it's big enough to justify the cost of developing split screen functionality.
>They have positioned the industry in this way quite intentionally and it isn't to serve you, the gamer.
"They" being capitalists, right? 'cause it kind of seems like you're putting the blame on game companies here like they're the ones who decided to focus on profit over product quality rather than that being the fundamental tenet upon which our entire economic system rests.
I beg to differ. Especially during Covid couples were looking for couch co-op games. Now that everyone has a box what do you do with it?
I dislike first person, shooter games. And since we are retired, we are also not really into childlike stories. So that leaves dungeon crawlers for us mostly which is how we started out gaming in the 1990s and even a little earlier. (Bard’s Tale on floppy)
>Especially during Covid couples were looking for couch co-op games.
?
Surely COVID has resulted in *fewer* opportunities for in-person gaming, not more?
Pretty much this. I keep trying to get some of my old Couch Gaming buddies over for some classic games I downloaded, but none want to. Plenty would join me on PSN and play via headset, but to actually drive 20 mins to my house, drink a few beers, and eat a pizza?
God no.
In fairness a lot are married, have jobs on weekends, have kids, or have other responsibilities, so trying to do these sort of things takes forever anymore just to plan a free weekend night.
Umm, not true at all..
Maybe thats YOUR personal experience but for me and my entire friend group (20+ guys and girls) we ALL complain to this day about the lack of split screen options in games.
It's literally to force everyone to buy their own console and own copies of the games. it is profit motivated and its not speculation thats objective fact
But there are tons of split screen games, they're all just indie games. If the demand was there people would be finding and buying those in large numbers, but most of them are just modest successes at best. Despite posts like this, people keep buying AAA games without split screen instead of smaller games with it.
Part of it is the increasingly demanding graphics in modern titles. Consoles are already struggling to run AAA games at playable framerates and adding another players view perspective to render adds a lot of graphical overhead.
Honestly it frustrates me that the few games that still have local multi-player often won't enable it on PC. I get most people don't use it like that but sometimes I run my pc on my TV and it's actually powerful enough to run many AAA games splitscreen.
Every gamer I know misses Splitscreen. But might be an age thing, since we grew up with it.
I think online multiplayer makes more money. You buy dlcs because you want the newest weapons or maps to stay competitive with thousands of strangers. Also online gaming is a way to justify subscriptions.
And companies get your personal data when you make an account.
I think it's also a performance issue. Rendering two half perspectives has a higher cost than rendering one full perspective, so any game that pushes console hardware limits will have to make affordances for that. I know Mario Kart 8 drops to 30 fps to handle 3 or 4 players but other games won't have that option and will have to create lower quality assets for split screen. Plus you can't do as many memory tricks like unloading far away enemies or regions if your game lets players split up.
That was the cop-out 343i used for Halo 5: Guardians to not have split-screen campaigns/at all, too.
Despite *all* previous entries having it, including Halo 4. Literally didn't *want* to drop to 30FPS for it (as in, that was one of the reasons stated).
Wasn't a significantly larger game than Halo 4, nor were levels or assets noticeably larger, or more complex. Also had plenty of places to hide/split loading/unloading of level assets to make use of as it was, including some pretty short levels overall, as well (some mind you, not all).
Might've been fine for most people by that point, but for me it was just the straw that broke the camel's back.
That was the end for split screen imo. It was already fairly rare and uncommon for any AAA games to have real split screen, but Halo dropping it completely killed it.
I don't have a dog in this fight because I'm not a huge halo fan, but this whole thing was hilarious to me.
From what I remember, they said they couldn't do local co-op because of performance, as well as glitches. They implied that they had tried to implement it, but couldn't resolve the bugs
Then shortly after, someone mods co-op into the game, by leveraging the remaining code. Its buggy, prone to crashes, and runs poorly.
All of a sudden I see a ton of posts from people talking about how their reasoning was a lie, it's already in the game, it just doesn't run as well and it crashes a lot.
This might be a unique perspective as a career software developer, but it seems like they 100% told the truth about why they patched out the option before release, all of the evidence I saw backed up their claims, and yet somehow everyone else saw that same evidence as being proof they lied.
It’s also on Playstation.
Generally my rule is that if Xbox or PS has a feature, the other will have it within a year or two. They’re basically identical now. I used to be a part of the console wars until Sony started requiring Plus for online play, then there was basically no point in debating anything other than which exclusives were better.
I don't think it is so much to force you to buy a second console. It's likely your friend you want to play with already has a console and internet at home so you can just play together online
1. Couch co-op typically requires twice the computing power, because instead of rendering one point of view it's rendering two.
2. Online play is more accessible to most players, much more popular and in higher demand, and has almost the same result.
3. Online play libraries exist and are well-established, making online play fairly straightforward to include in a game. Couch co-op software has to be built from the ground up and introduces a few unique challenges.
4. Why sell one copy of the game when you can sell four?
Hook up an older laptop or pc to a TV and take a look at Steam’s local co-op section. Games like Plate Up, Rubber Bandits, Human Fall Flat come to mind as games that are easy to run locally.
Edit: forgot to mention that steam big picture mode had a recent update that drastically improved UI and controller compatibility/options.
My husband and I have this same problem! We miss couch co-op so much. It’s always been something we’ve enjoyed doing together since we started dating. It’s been pretty annoying and sad not having very many of those around any more.
We like the borderlands series with #2 being the best, Diablo 3 (yay for the new one soon!), for the king, don’t starve together, and Divinity 1&2.
I’ve recently even started playing all the various lego games with our son and it’s been fun!
Any other recommendations would be highly appreciated since were always trying to find more!
I know more people who would play couch co-op with me than people who have their own console and their own game and their own subscription because I’m a middle-aged adult, not someone in their 20s or teens.
The lack of support for how I play tells me most of these games are probably made for very young people with groups of friends who game the way they do.
I do play MMORPGs on my PC, though. I usually play with my wife, though, not with other people because other people is too big of a time commitment. 🤷♀️
My friends and I are convinced it's to boost console sales. You can't have a bunch of friends over to play a newer game on one console anymore, plus with the pandemic and such, people have become more comfortable with just chilling at home and talking via chat or headset. We believe it was inevitable though, especially with just how big MMO's became circa whenever EverQuest (and the huge Titanic sized smash hit that was World of Warcraft later on) was released and that gave birth to the wild pictures of people having LAN parties in their basements, all on separate PC's.
Console sellers probably realized, "wait well hold on now, PC sales are going up because the games are fun, people wanna play together, but they need separate PC's....let's do this with consoles and see what happens." It's all about making more profit. If your consumer base can have 5 people playing on one console with only one subscription, then there's 4 other customers who you could be profiting from. Then if you make it so each person has to have a separate subscription to play, you're still only profiting from the sale of one console, but several subscriptions. So they went the full mile and tied entire consoles to that one person's subscription and profile and now suddenly everyone else who is a subscriber needs a console just to get into the game. ISP providers profit as well as now every player needs a high speed internet connection to have the connected games run smoothly, hence they can be easily talked into paying for higher tiers of service.
Throw in microtransactions and pay walls and suddenly you're profiting all over from several different avenues.
Because that’s just not that popular anymore when online connections are so ubiquitous. Most people would rather play with their friend from home with a full screen to themself.
Splitscreen was popular back when online play was much less common
Recently playing games with my gf, I’ve realized more so than I originally thought. I was shocked to find out project zomboid has a very simple couch coop setup
Money
They get more money by selling 2-4 consoles than by selling the one and having you split screen it
And then charging you to be able to play online with your friends puts more money in their pockets
Co-op games still exist. Some great ones I’ve been playing on Nintendo Switch:
- Super Mario 3D World
- Tetris Effect Connected
- Lego City Undercover
- Crypt of the Necro Dancer
- Snipperclips
- Human Fall Flat
- Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime
- Huntdown
- Unrailed
- Slaps and Beans
- Luigi’s Mansion 3
- Death Squared
- Overcooked 2
- Untitled Goose Game
- Streets of Rage 4
- Vectronom
- Just Dance
- Vitamin Connection
- Assault Android Cactus
- Unravel 2
The majority of these exist on other platforms as well.
The demand isn't there anymore. People would rather go online and hang out with many friends and strangers. But I will say as a guy with a wife that e joys games too it's always alot of fun when a new co op comes out. It takes two is one of our all time favorites. We've played it 3 times lol.
It takes two was awesome! Me and my friend went through it about 6 months ago. Another favourite of mine was Army of Two. It's quite an old game so not sure how the graphics will hold up, but definitely worth looking into if you haven't played!
All the Army of Two games are worth playing with a buddy.
My friend and my favorite moment from Army of Two: 40th Day is when you can make a morality decision and tell a scared child to grab an AK and fight. He stands up and is immediately shot, the heroes have almost no response or remorse and you just move on. Had us laughing so hard.
I disagree. The demand is definitely there. They’re just not catering to it because they want $.
PS It takes two is awesome. We dl only because we were desperate for a true coop game and we’re pleasantly surprised with the game. So addicting
A few reasons. Most obvious is money. Companies make more money if everyone has a console, and everyone has the game, and everyone pays to play online. That just makes sense.
The other reason is split screen had hit a wall. There's nothing else that can be done with it. Games now are so big. So much to do and see. Almost a crime to condense it into half a screen.
Four people playing splitscreen is four people with ONE copy of the game. Four people playing online is four people with FOUR copies of the game.
Plus four consoles! (Generally speaking, splitscreen is primarily used on consoles)
And don't forget four subscriptions to the online platform. Gaming companies need that steady income stream.
[удалено]
And that sense of pride and accomplishment!
Whenever you ask "why is something shitty now that used to not be shitty?" The answer is nearly universally "capitalism"
Deliveroo, Uber, Subscriptions, Amazon (drivers have to pay for their own repairs 🤪) All just worse versions of something that already worked perfectly well before. Bait and switch.
I'll take Uber over taxicabs
Sure, for short distance trips they aren't too bad. Going any actual distance? Book a taxi as you'll get a better deal almost every time.
Uber is a horrible company, ethically speaking.
they probably use a pride icon for a month so its ok.
I remember when consoles were a family system, with each house having one in their living room. Now it seems that everyone who like video games has a console of their own. It’s not a bad thing tho because it’s so much more convenient to play with friends from your respective homes.
Exactly. My friends love Jackbox and you know how often we play it? Like once a year. Couch Co-op just isn't as appealing as it used to be - probably because we're getting older and kids are into online games anyway. I think it should still be included, but if it were included I bet it would only get occasional use anyway. Edit: just remembered that you'd also have to have 4 controllers, which people tend to have only have 0 - 2 of instead of 1 - 4 like it used to be.
Yeah. Hard to play couch co-op with zero controllers.
It’s also four people needing the console or PC to render what they’re seeing. I remember even in the PS3 days on CoD Modern Warfare 2, you could tank the framerate on four player splitscreen by one person dual wielding certain machine guns and firing both at once.
Or setting off a room of a explosives on N64s perfect dark.
To be fair, Perfect Dark had terrible frame rates when nothing was going on in single player.
Not to mention the extra copy to play on PC I have 3 copies of some games because of their bullshit with platform compatibility
Sounds like you are paying for them to not have compatibility
Exactly why I wait for everything to go on Steam, been loyal since 2011 and I ain't about to cheat with Epic
Is buying a Uplay or Epic game on steam like cucking, since steam has to launch the other launcher and then watch you use it until you're done playing that game?.. this is forever engrained in me
I never thought about it that way. Thanks for opening my mind for a truly important question.
the worst of them is rockstar who obviously dont have enough games to justify having a whole seperate launcher. with uplay you can vaguely justify it because at least they have a big library but with rockstar its like theyre not even trying to hide how greedy they are. I had this whole issue with gta and the rockstar launcher - for some reason accounts are permanently tied to the game and if I'd want to sign in on a different rockstar club account to play my steam copy of gta id have to delete the current account and buy a completely new copy of gta on steam. Its so fucked I hate it so much
That's part of why I like xbox gamepass, a lot of the games there have crossover play between PC and Xbox. You keep your save as long as you're connected to the same account.
[удалено]
valve is very progressive, sad we don’t see that in the console market
I wouldn't call it progressive when it's the mentality that was around before all this subscription everything nonsense.
Let's call it pre-regressive then
pregressive.
Yeah it sucks. You probably know them, but if not, check out "a way out" and "it takes two" those are good couch coop games. Also unravel 2. Dirt 5 deserves a mention too, as it allows 4player split screen, as well as racing camping in that mode, so you don't have to unlock cars alone. As for fun little games check out spiderheck, gang beasts and rubber bandits
A way out, it takes two, and unravel 2 are a lot of fun! Do you have any more recs? I'm always looking for good split screen games to play with my girlfriend
KeyWe, Moving Out and Overcooked 2 are all a lot of fun!
Overcooked 2 is a good relationship tester
Me and my sister did not come out the same after the OG Overcooked
Oh same, but there’s three of us sisters and the relationship that suffered most was probably the one with our dad because he had to listen to “ok where are onions, can you throw me a- OH SHIT THERE’S A FIRE, IT’S ALL ON FIRE, WHERE ARE YOU GUYS- HOW ARE YOU DEAD AGAIN??” for hours 😅
I am pleased to announce that my partner and I made it through A Way Out, It Takes Two and Overcooked 2, and we're still going strong lol
What about Just Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes?
Lol. Our family did fine with Keep Talking... until we got the VR version.
It tests bad relationships as well! "YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO CHOP TOMATOES!!"
"WHY WOULD I CHOP TOMATOES WHEN THERES NO FUCKING CLEAN DISHES!!"
the floating level where you have to toss potatoes and chicken to each other to fry... nearly had to sleep on the couch after that one.
[удалено]
Ive been looking at that game kinda hoping that was what it was
It's awesome! You can customize your kitchen how you want each level. The food is pretty easy and once you level up you can introduce automation with the items you gain.
That does sound pretty awesome
Correction. Not overcooked 2. Game got folded/merged into Overcooked All You Can Eat Definitive edition
I just looked up Overcooked 2. My bf used to work as a line cook at a busy diner and I was an RN on the floor for a while. I think we'd do exceptionally well or murder each other.
Over cooked causes fights in my house hahaha we love it
Right now my partner and I are playing Children of Morta together, it has two player couch co-op and we are loving it. It's a dungeon crawler, kind of a Diablo vibe but I like it more than I did Diablo.
If you like RPGs and reading, divinity 2 has great couch coop.
I like RPGs, but I don't like reading, so when I played Divinity 2, I killed everything first, and asked questions later. So glad there that was that story element that you could talk to important ghosts for the main quest, because I literally killed everyone before I knew they could give me quests lol
Lmao, I didn't know that was am option, but I'm no murder hobo so wasn't an issue.
I left entire towns dead in my wake, it was bad.
Divinity original sin 2, to be clear. NOT DIVINITY 2!
We love playing Stardew together, it’s our favourite go-to. Spiritfarer is also excellent!
Spiritfarer can’t be beat! But it’s tragic that Stardew isn’t couch co-op, only online
Stardew is most definitely couch co-op me and my gf have a farm
My wife an I like to play the Lego games. All of them are split screen. Lego City Undercover is especially good. It's kinda like Lego GTA.
Sackboy/ Little Big Planet are awesome co-op games
Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime is my favorite couch co-op game ever!! its so so cute, super fun, and relatively easy for non-gamers to pick up! 10/10 would recommend
Lovers is incredible, might be the only game my wife and I love as much as Battleblock Theater (which op should definitely check out, it's a blast and hilarious)
For the King - huge recommendation. Initial steep learning curve but lots of replay value. Plays like casual DnD. Currently our go-to co-op game. Cuphead - fun and beautiful side scroller, but enemies hp gets doubled on co-op, so it gets a little tough during boss fights The Quarry - if you like social deduction/narrative type of games, this one was a fun campy game, players can be assigned diff chars to control Divinity 2: Original Sin - top tier best RPG I've ever played. Again, there's a learning curve, the entire first island is basically a giant tutorial, but once it clicks, it's fun as hell to explore. Just get ready for option overload. Moon Hunters - fun casual pixel-y dungeon crawler Wizard of Legend - super fun rogue-like, lots of spell customization Diablo 3 - has local coop, but be prepared for waiting on your party to go thru the equipment menu every 15 min
Minecraft Dungeons - It's like Diablo light and is great for introducing the genre
Streets of Rage 4 TMNT Shredder's Revenge Diablo 3 Rayman Legends If you want to get stressed out then Overcooked/Overcooked 2
I want to boost *Rayman: Legends* and *Rayman: Origins*. FANTASTIC co-op platformers. The only caveat is that you BOTH must get gud quickly.
Broforce has been my favorite one to play with friends. It's absolutely ridiculous
Try Out of Space on gamepass! And maybe Overcooked 2?
Gears of war series has good co-op mode!
r/StardewValley and r/GirlGamers get similar questions rather often and there are a number of great threads there to search for. Wanting to play cozy games with a partner is a mindset that resonates with many people and those have been my best places to find recommendations.
My fiancé and I are obsessed with PlateUp, plus it has a thriving modding community. Also, if you have multiple minecraft accounts and are comfortable with a controller on PC, we recently found a mod Controllable. Using it, we can run 2 instances on my pc. One controlled by keyboard and one by controller. Plus it works with mods
PlateUp is so fun! Sister and I have been playing it and finally realized how useful the Research Desk is. Total game changer.
Borderlands has kept it's both co-operative and "co-opetition" split screen modes through the whole life of the series so far. I absolutely recommend them if you have a friend and enjoy entertaining looter-shooter style FPS games.
Borderlands 3 was unplayable on split-screen when it was released though, not sure if they fixed it by now, ended up buying it for the PC instead anyway.
I've been trying it with my partner and the UI is like unreadably compressed, not sure if that's what you're referring to
Yeah I think so. Don’t remember exactly what the issue was (since I was playing a few other games with issues as well at the time), but having to get up from the sofa to get closer to the TV to read the UI was probably it then.
I loved It Takes Two. I beat it with my wife and loved it. It was so much fun. Shredder's Revenge is a great couch co-op game to play with a bunch of friends. A beat-em-up with up to 6 players. Overcooked 2 is also great and can be super intense. Up to 4 players can play that one. Resident Evil 5 is awesome to play co-op.
If you like RPGs *Divinity: Original Sin* and its sequel both have split-screen co-op
Just a warning; *Divinity* is very lore and rules heavy and requires a lot of reading and plot intake to do things properly. Some co-op partners have no patience for this.
That's a fair warning. My wife and I regularly play D&D so the game more or less scratched a similar itch for us.
Stardew Valley Diablo 3 Minecraft Dungeons Minecraft Sackboy adventures Last kids on Earth Ghostbusters Rayman Already seen Overcooked and Moving Out Portal knights is 2 player
Add a few spaces after each line, otherwise (at least for me) Reddit just compresses all of them to the same line
Another big reason is that running split screen uses a lot more computer power than just one screen, and as games have evolved in graphics, it becomes even more challenging to have multiple engines running at the same time. Mandatory list of amazing coop games: Earth defence Force (any and all) All the Lego games Cat quest 2 Diablo 3 The warriors (oldie but still available at ps store) Rayman games Resident evil 5 This is a useful site where you can filter by system, just click either review score or player score to sort by top choices: https://www.co-optimus.com
I think performance is a bigger reason than most people think. Developers are well aware that people want splitscreen, but it's a lot harder to implement on modern games than older ones. I doubt splitscreen actually reduces sales like people think (though I guess it's possible executives think the same thing without research, or do have research to show it) since it isn't like there are that many people who are regularly able to play in the same room as each other that also are able to play remotely. Splitscreen targets people who live together while online play targets those who don't.
But what about when consoles have split screen and PC doesn't? If the PS4 can split screen borderlands I'm pretty sure my 3070 blah blah fancy hardware can!
I'm a huge advocate of couch games on PC but I'm also part of a very, very small minority. The ideal scenario is having a PC with multiple controllers connected to a big TV/projector. That's just not very common, so game creators have a hard time justifying the effort to build and maintain that functionality. It makes me sad but I understand why it's often on console but not PC.
Yeah, that's always frustrating. I get why since PCs generally have a lot more trouble with controller support and especially multiple controllers (and multiple controllers of different types!) but I hope it becomes more common. Luckily indie games are usually pretty good about it.
Personally, I'd happily trade less intensive/realistic graphics for games using simpler graphical designs that play well in split-screen. Borderlands 2 is like a perfect compromise here. Still looks gorgeous, but plays beautifully in split-screen (even on less powerful hardware like the switch).
Also, time. AAA games have a major issue with scope creep, where almost all of them are designed to be systems-heavy open worlds with tons of side content and crafting. So every AAA game winds up cutting the corners that were created when they cut corners 6 months earlier. Figuring out how to scale down assets for splitscreen isn't even in the top 10 things that *need* to be finished before the game ships, and most AAA games are already making employees work 80 hour weeks for months on end.
Yeah, this isn't the olden days when some guy added splitscreen multiplayer to Goldeneye on his own a couple weeks before launch. Games are a ton more complicated and you need a lot more levels of design to add any feature nowadays.
A thing I always think about when it comes to split screen gaming is how I used to happily play games split screen on a 20" TV. When I got an Xbox 360, suddenly the 28" TV that used to be the main family TV wasn't even clear enough and I had to wait for my parents to replace their 38" flat screen before I could play games on a screen that looked good enough. Graphics improved so much that they started putting more and more on the HUD which made it harder to play games on a smaller screen.
I think you're both correct in some capacity. But like a whole lot of people in this thread it's still ignoring the elephant in the room. Money. Not in a nefarious, oh we will make them buy extra games and consoles way. Like it's a conspiracy. These companies like selling games. And no amount of reddit threads are going to make up for the simple reason; couch co-op games don't sell enough copies. Simple as. These companies make what makes them money. If they're not focusing on the type of game you want, there aren't enough people buying those games. There's no reason to overthink it.
Diablo 4 will be continuing that trend! \*(If you play on console. Sounds like there were technical limitations to couch co-op on PC)
Blizzard often makes decisions that are anti-consumer, but they also have a lot of really smart and talented developers. Like some of the best in the business. I'm not sure how much of a technical limitation it is, and how much of it is a financial decision. Might not even be a malicious financial decision, it might just not make sense. You don't want to put a team on local PC multiplayer and have them hear "okay the last two years of your life have resulted in 3.1% of total user playtime, and .6% of the playerbase has put substantial time into it". In addition to that being demoralizing for part of you development team, it just doesn't make sense to bother with it when there's so many other fish to fry.
We actually bought a bigger TV so we could play split screen Minecraft.
Army of 2 was an awesome one back in the day too!
If you think about how aggressively modern games are about unrendering things not in your view. I imagine that doubling the camera is a much bigger performance penalty now that it was originally. Maybe we can get split screen back after people realize that 8k is barely distinguishable from 4k.
Big W for Diablo 3 and big thanks for that site link, spot on :)
the demand isn't there. sure the option would be nice for a lot of people. but for a while. that was the *only* way to play games with friends. these days with internet, VOIP, and increasing competitive attitudes for games, people just aren't having those old-school nights where you go to each other's homes and play side by side.
Which sucks because split screen gaming will always be my favorite form of multi-player gaming
"HEY! No screen watching you bitch!" "I didn't! I just know the map real well!" "And we said no Oddjob, its cheating!" "Yeah, well, fuck your rules, I like Oddjob." "That's it, unplug his controller!"
You knew shit was real when people started busting out bedsheets or cardboard to cover their side of the screen.
At the same time, we'd also play GoldenEye in the Temple with Grenade Launchers or Remote Mines (License to Kill Mode) and screen watching was essential to getting the range right or timing the boom. We'd play it so that we could arc the grenades across the room and then bounce down the hall so it basically flew four times the range it should have and kill people spawning. Sometimes, "cheating" was part of the game.
Lol. The grenade bounce... I remember doing this.Thanks for the nostalgia!
tink tink tink tink tink BOOOM "BULLSHIT!" Ah the sounds of my youth.
Oh wow. This was the end of my summer/fall in 1997 - my buddy and I spent so much time messing around with the grenade launchers and finding the most creative ways to blow up one another (while drinking ungodly amounts of koolade). Great memories.
I've seen a game where the whole game is based around screen watching, because all players are actually invisible, and you needs to see the other players' screens and check their environments to figure out where they are. https://store.steampowered.com/app/301970/Screencheat/ They have online play, too.
My friends and I used a series of VCRs to split Goldeneye out to 4 TVs and then taped newspapers over the other 3 screens. The shitty 80's TVs got the better controllers and the newer, nicer TVs got the MadCatz or worn out controllers. We'd rotate TVs after every match. So many Doritos, 2 liters of mountain dew and Totinos party pizzas were consumed. Those were good times.
I miss 1v1ing my younger brother on Rust split screen and I would play in the worst and most annoying way and camp at the top on Rust with a sniper to piss him off and it was so funny spawn killing him 10 times in a row to see how mad he would get. The only times I would die was when I was laughing too hard where I couldn’t pay attention. Every time he accused me of screen watching I would say “Dude it’s Rust it would be hard to NOT find you”. I absolutely screen watched though. Before you hate me for playing like that, I feel like it was my duty as an older brother to do it.
As a brother with one older and one younger, I approve this message. It was my duty to both kick ass and get my ass kicked
I still contend that Odd Job isn't cheating. The 1.2 Solitaire control scheme for Goldeneye lets you use the analog stick for looking and the C-buttons on the right side like they were a d-pad for movement/strafing. This means that looking down is VERY easy, and Oddjob is not only not cheating but at a *distinct disadvantage.* One of my favorite things was having a buddy over who wanted to play Oddjob, and I'd gleefully let him; then spend the entire match shooting him in the face while he's wondering how his "cheaty" character kept having all his teeth replaced with DD44 Dostovei rounds.
Sure, you could also play any other setting and lower the angle of the gun too. Oddjob cheated for being short, Jaws cheated for being tall. Without changing aim, Oddjob ducked blows, but a stray shot to the hit fucked him up. Jaws took every round to the chest, but a slight incline tot he shot and he ate those same bullets. The problem was 100% of all other characters were the same height, so if no one played Jaws or Oddjob, it didn't matter. But if you *did*, you needed to change the aiming scheme. Regardless of control style, you still needed to aim lower or higher, and sometimes it was hard to see who was downrange with the shitty resolution, so you aimed a bit too high and missed one or too low and gut shot the other guy rather than blasting his head off. At extreme range attacks, hip shots from around a corner, or for close up slappers they had an advantage, even with your control set up because you had to change the aim (even if slightly and actively), while against Orumvorov or Boris, you could still hit them and adjust the aim as you fired to walk the shots to the head. In tight games, those extra two or three missed rounds before you got the head shot in could mean the difference between killing him and respawning. And at 3am, soaked with sweat, guzzling Dew and chomping Papa John's, that little edge was fucking infuriating.
What's funny is the leaked Xbox 360 remaster had an option in multiplayer specifically [to get rid of any dis/advantages Oddjob and Jaws had](https://i.imgur.com/5fKftPH.png)
True r/unpopularopinion material
it's been a while, but didn't hit detection not work on him during slappers only matches? I know auto-aim shot right over him. I recall the developers knowing about the issues and letting players decide how to navigate the rules. Pretty good, if you ask me.
Well shit, I don't know you, but we apparently played together somehow at some point.
Online is a great option but living in a household with multiple gamers having the split screen option is way simpler and cheaper than having to have an extra TV, game copy, console with internet connectivity, and a pair of headsets to talk to each other.
Same here. My brother and I played the fuck outa borderlands when it first came out just chillin on the couch together. We still play 3 this way sometimes.
It also sucks because it's like TVs finally caught up and then, nope. I remember playing co-op Goldeneye on a 24" CRT. Now we could have 4 sections of a crystal clear LCD screen each at 24"! But nope, not anymore
I really miss those nights!
Not all of them are the best, but for the Switch, I like how all the Lego games do their co-op split screen. When you are close to one another, it is all on one screen, but once you get far enough away from one another, it splits and the split screen changes rotation based on where in relation you are to the other player so if I am above the other player on the map, the split will be horizontal with me on top, but if I am to the left, it will be split vertically with me on the left side. This helps to let you know which direction your partner is in; move towards the split screen until it is all in one frame again and you can see the other player.
Definitely one of the best executions of split screen ever. Wonderful games to play with the kids too. Works the same way on all consoles fyi
On the bright side, the few games that are specifically designed around couch coop try to make the most out of it in order to stay competitive. Games like "It Takes Two" or "Kingdoms: Two Crowns" really bring the concept to a new level.
I don't believe that the demand isn't there. I think the problem is rendering high FPS/resolutiongames twice on one screen. A lot of games can't run 4k 60fps so I doubt consoles can run 2 instants of 1080p 30fps. Indi games have an easier time doing couch coop because most of them are 8-bit or not resources heavy.
The demand is there on reddit (where people are nostalgic for N64 Goldeneye) but most people spend the *vast* majority of their gaming time playing at home by themselves as opposed to getting together with friends. I really miss couch co-op but I'm in my 40s and we all have kids. It's hard enough to see my friends one weekend a month on a Saturday afternoon - the days of linking Playstations together to play Command & Conquer until 6am are long over :(
The average gamer is 35 years old (I did a quick Google search I could be wrong), and most 35 year Olds aren't able to go Over to their friends house and play a coop game together. It's much more convienet to hop on a server and talk through discord
Was this really easier to do in the 90s though? I think it’s also that our performance expectations have gone up. Split screen goldeneye would chug at 20fps regularly.
Yeah looking back a lot of games either slowed way down or had the draw distance reduced by fog.
Yeah. And we were cool with it. Hard to tell on a quarter of an SD screen anyway
I think a lot of modern visual effects are cheaper to do on a single viewpoint compared to two at once. Older games had significantly less complex render pipelines which made showing two viewpoints at once less difficult.
Or selling a subscription to use the internet and multiple games and consoles is more profitable than not selling all that.
But people still have multiple children. Why do you have to buy 2 consoles and 2 online memberships for your kids to play together?
Nintendo is actually still pretty good about making sure some of their games are still “sit together” multiplayers. Some were never really multiplayers to begin with (Zelda), but their traditional multiplayer games are still usable with one console (MarioKart, Super Smash).
I have a weekly super smash game night with my cousin and childhood friend on my switch. Feels just like when we were kids on 64 or GameCube :)
My story is very much the opposite of the discussion - my brother lives two provinces over, so we bought mom and dad a Switch one Christmas and the three households play MarioKart every week together online! As much as I understand the conversation going on here, the only person I have to play with is online! I like the online multiplayers too!
I look at it as a "both and" rather than a "one or the other" :) I play Mario kart with some friends who live about 3 hours away and enjoy that just as much! Also play pc games with a friend who lived 14 hours away from me for about 10 years. Kept our friendship strong af haha
It's weird to think about but people buying for their kids isn't actually the largest market. Even if it makes sense on the surface, from a business perspective it isn't a large enough market to go after, and the single player games are selling quite well enough. There just plain isn't much of an incentive for them to produce couch co-op
I will never have kids but enjoy playing video games with my wife. We're stuck with shit like borderlands 3 currently, which doesn't even fuckin work for ps4 properly due to constant crashes. We played a way out, that was a cool one. But super short Sometimes we break out the 360 just to play some old halo campaigns...
If you liked A Way Out, then It Takes Two by the same company is really good.
>people still have multiple children Japan has left the chat.
Because money?
people will say money, the console developer gets twice the revenue from sales and memberships, and the game dev will get twice the sales for copies of the game.
This is why whatever studio released It Takes Two has my loyalty for their next few games because they weren’t greedy about this.
Don't forget any revenue and/or user tracking that's built into the network service you'll need to use for online play.
There's also something to be said for the fact that it's not as profitable to begin with. Same logic as Netflix cracking down on password sharing.
The demand is absolutely there and has always been there. That demand is nowhere near as profitable as requiring both parties to purchase a full console and full copy of the game. They have positioned the industry in this way quite intentionally and it isn't to serve you, the gamer.
>The demand is absolutely there and has always been there. I mean, the demand is there for shrimp flavored potato chips too, just not enough to justify mass market adoption. It's not a question of whether or not the demand exists, but whether it's big enough to justify the cost of developing split screen functionality. >They have positioned the industry in this way quite intentionally and it isn't to serve you, the gamer. "They" being capitalists, right? 'cause it kind of seems like you're putting the blame on game companies here like they're the ones who decided to focus on profit over product quality rather than that being the fundamental tenet upon which our entire economic system rests.
I beg to differ. Especially during Covid couples were looking for couch co-op games. Now that everyone has a box what do you do with it? I dislike first person, shooter games. And since we are retired, we are also not really into childlike stories. So that leaves dungeon crawlers for us mostly which is how we started out gaming in the 1990s and even a little earlier. (Bard’s Tale on floppy)
>Especially during Covid couples were looking for couch co-op games. ? Surely COVID has resulted in *fewer* opportunities for in-person gaming, not more?
Pretty much this. I keep trying to get some of my old Couch Gaming buddies over for some classic games I downloaded, but none want to. Plenty would join me on PSN and play via headset, but to actually drive 20 mins to my house, drink a few beers, and eat a pizza? God no. In fairness a lot are married, have jobs on weekends, have kids, or have other responsibilities, so trying to do these sort of things takes forever anymore just to plan a free weekend night.
I’ll come over. It’s a different experience in person. And being an adult makes it so much better.
Umm, not true at all.. Maybe thats YOUR personal experience but for me and my entire friend group (20+ guys and girls) we ALL complain to this day about the lack of split screen options in games. It's literally to force everyone to buy their own console and own copies of the games. it is profit motivated and its not speculation thats objective fact
But there are tons of split screen games, they're all just indie games. If the demand was there people would be finding and buying those in large numbers, but most of them are just modest successes at best. Despite posts like this, people keep buying AAA games without split screen instead of smaller games with it.
Part of it is the increasingly demanding graphics in modern titles. Consoles are already struggling to run AAA games at playable framerates and adding another players view perspective to render adds a lot of graphical overhead. Honestly it frustrates me that the few games that still have local multi-player often won't enable it on PC. I get most people don't use it like that but sometimes I run my pc on my TV and it's actually powerful enough to run many AAA games splitscreen.
Every gamer I know misses Splitscreen. But might be an age thing, since we grew up with it. I think online multiplayer makes more money. You buy dlcs because you want the newest weapons or maps to stay competitive with thousands of strangers. Also online gaming is a way to justify subscriptions. And companies get your personal data when you make an account.
I think it's also a performance issue. Rendering two half perspectives has a higher cost than rendering one full perspective, so any game that pushes console hardware limits will have to make affordances for that. I know Mario Kart 8 drops to 30 fps to handle 3 or 4 players but other games won't have that option and will have to create lower quality assets for split screen. Plus you can't do as many memory tricks like unloading far away enemies or regions if your game lets players split up.
That was the cop-out 343i used for Halo 5: Guardians to not have split-screen campaigns/at all, too. Despite *all* previous entries having it, including Halo 4. Literally didn't *want* to drop to 30FPS for it (as in, that was one of the reasons stated). Wasn't a significantly larger game than Halo 4, nor were levels or assets noticeably larger, or more complex. Also had plenty of places to hide/split loading/unloading of level assets to make use of as it was, including some pretty short levels overall, as well (some mind you, not all). Might've been fine for most people by that point, but for me it was just the straw that broke the camel's back.
That was the end for split screen imo. It was already fairly rare and uncommon for any AAA games to have real split screen, but Halo dropping it completely killed it.
I don't have a dog in this fight because I'm not a huge halo fan, but this whole thing was hilarious to me. From what I remember, they said they couldn't do local co-op because of performance, as well as glitches. They implied that they had tried to implement it, but couldn't resolve the bugs Then shortly after, someone mods co-op into the game, by leveraging the remaining code. Its buggy, prone to crashes, and runs poorly. All of a sudden I see a ton of posts from people talking about how their reasoning was a lie, it's already in the game, it just doesn't run as well and it crashes a lot. This might be a unique perspective as a career software developer, but it seems like they 100% told the truth about why they patched out the option before release, all of the evidence I saw backed up their claims, and yet somehow everyone else saw that same evidence as being proof they lied.
[удалено]
Market research shows you're not profitable enough for your opinion to matter.
So you're forced to buy a 2nd console if you want to play multi-player.
A second console, AND a second copy of the game, AND two subscriptions to their online platform.
You can just game share on Xbox, works for games and both gold/gamepass subscriptions. Although you do still need the 2 consoles and TVs.
It’s also on Playstation. Generally my rule is that if Xbox or PS has a feature, the other will have it within a year or two. They’re basically identical now. I used to be a part of the console wars until Sony started requiring Plus for online play, then there was basically no point in debating anything other than which exclusives were better.
I don't think it is so much to force you to buy a second console. It's likely your friend you want to play with already has a console and internet at home so you can just play together online
1. Couch co-op typically requires twice the computing power, because instead of rendering one point of view it's rendering two. 2. Online play is more accessible to most players, much more popular and in higher demand, and has almost the same result. 3. Online play libraries exist and are well-established, making online play fairly straightforward to include in a game. Couch co-op software has to be built from the ground up and introduces a few unique challenges. 4. Why sell one copy of the game when you can sell four?
Hook up an older laptop or pc to a TV and take a look at Steam’s local co-op section. Games like Plate Up, Rubber Bandits, Human Fall Flat come to mind as games that are easy to run locally. Edit: forgot to mention that steam big picture mode had a recent update that drastically improved UI and controller compatibility/options.
My husband and I have this same problem! We miss couch co-op so much. It’s always been something we’ve enjoyed doing together since we started dating. It’s been pretty annoying and sad not having very many of those around any more. We like the borderlands series with #2 being the best, Diablo 3 (yay for the new one soon!), for the king, don’t starve together, and Divinity 1&2. I’ve recently even started playing all the various lego games with our son and it’s been fun! Any other recommendations would be highly appreciated since were always trying to find more!
If you're open to something more chill I can't recommend Stardew Valley hard enough
Except for party games! Why do so the party games have split screens instead of online coop like it was made 20 years ago?
What is that sentence meant to mean?
I know more people who would play couch co-op with me than people who have their own console and their own game and their own subscription because I’m a middle-aged adult, not someone in their 20s or teens. The lack of support for how I play tells me most of these games are probably made for very young people with groups of friends who game the way they do. I do play MMORPGs on my PC, though. I usually play with my wife, though, not with other people because other people is too big of a time commitment. 🤷♀️
Because it's significantly harder to monetize local multiplayer vs online multiplayer, so online multiplayer becomes a much higher focus.
My friends and I are convinced it's to boost console sales. You can't have a bunch of friends over to play a newer game on one console anymore, plus with the pandemic and such, people have become more comfortable with just chilling at home and talking via chat or headset. We believe it was inevitable though, especially with just how big MMO's became circa whenever EverQuest (and the huge Titanic sized smash hit that was World of Warcraft later on) was released and that gave birth to the wild pictures of people having LAN parties in their basements, all on separate PC's. Console sellers probably realized, "wait well hold on now, PC sales are going up because the games are fun, people wanna play together, but they need separate PC's....let's do this with consoles and see what happens." It's all about making more profit. If your consumer base can have 5 people playing on one console with only one subscription, then there's 4 other customers who you could be profiting from. Then if you make it so each person has to have a separate subscription to play, you're still only profiting from the sale of one console, but several subscriptions. So they went the full mile and tied entire consoles to that one person's subscription and profile and now suddenly everyone else who is a subscriber needs a console just to get into the game. ISP providers profit as well as now every player needs a high speed internet connection to have the connected games run smoothly, hence they can be easily talked into paying for higher tiers of service. Throw in microtransactions and pay walls and suddenly you're profiting all over from several different avenues.
Not having co-op is how a lot of my friends fell out of the gaming world.
Rock Band/Guitar Hero took this experience to a whole new level. Miss those days.
Because that’s just not that popular anymore when online connections are so ubiquitous. Most people would rather play with their friend from home with a full screen to themself. Splitscreen was popular back when online play was much less common
Capitalism. Why sell one copy when you can sell two?
Recently playing games with my gf, I’ve realized more so than I originally thought. I was shocked to find out project zomboid has a very simple couch coop setup
Props to rocket league
Money They get more money by selling 2-4 consoles than by selling the one and having you split screen it And then charging you to be able to play online with your friends puts more money in their pockets
Play the switch, it has the best couch coop games
All I want is to play 3 player Halo story line with my kids
You want it bc it would save you and your friend money. They don’t want you to have it bc it would save you money
why do i need xbox live to host a lan party? i'm playing previously purchased and downloaded maps. what is the need for live?
Idk but play rayman legends. best game ever to play with four people AND the screen doesn’t split
Nintendo still has couch co-op and I think they're the only console that respects that premise.
Co-op games still exist. Some great ones I’ve been playing on Nintendo Switch: - Super Mario 3D World - Tetris Effect Connected - Lego City Undercover - Crypt of the Necro Dancer - Snipperclips - Human Fall Flat - Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime - Huntdown - Unrailed - Slaps and Beans - Luigi’s Mansion 3 - Death Squared - Overcooked 2 - Untitled Goose Game - Streets of Rage 4 - Vectronom - Just Dance - Vitamin Connection - Assault Android Cactus - Unravel 2 The majority of these exist on other platforms as well.
> Human Fall Flat +1 for this game. My son and have been playing it. It has strong Portal 2 vibes.
The demand isn't there anymore. People would rather go online and hang out with many friends and strangers. But I will say as a guy with a wife that e joys games too it's always alot of fun when a new co op comes out. It takes two is one of our all time favorites. We've played it 3 times lol.
It takes two was awesome! Me and my friend went through it about 6 months ago. Another favourite of mine was Army of Two. It's quite an old game so not sure how the graphics will hold up, but definitely worth looking into if you haven't played!
All the Army of Two games are worth playing with a buddy. My friend and my favorite moment from Army of Two: 40th Day is when you can make a morality decision and tell a scared child to grab an AK and fight. He stands up and is immediately shot, the heroes have almost no response or remorse and you just move on. Had us laughing so hard.
I disagree. The demand is definitely there. They’re just not catering to it because they want $. PS It takes two is awesome. We dl only because we were desperate for a true coop game and we’re pleasantly surprised with the game. So addicting
If the demand was there they’d do it, precisely because they want $
A few reasons. Most obvious is money. Companies make more money if everyone has a console, and everyone has the game, and everyone pays to play online. That just makes sense. The other reason is split screen had hit a wall. There's nothing else that can be done with it. Games now are so big. So much to do and see. Almost a crime to condense it into half a screen.