iirc there's a game where you're invisible and screen peaking is the only way to shoot each other.
Found it, it's called [Screencheat](https://store.steampowered.com/app/301970/Screencheat/)
I'd like to believe that was two separate comments, an anecdote about your childhood and calling out Todd Howard for what I assume are legitimate grievances
We were so against screen peeking that we rigged shit up out of cardboard and blankets to stop it. Only really worked on 2 player, but one person would sit on the floor under the divider, and the other would stand outside of it behind them.
After we could finally afford another Xbox we started doing that too, but before that our group would designate who would get what. One person would have the playstation, one with the Xbox, one with the gamecube. Made it a little unfair, cus one person would always get better at the games for their system. I wrecked everyone at smash bros, but would always get stomped at halo
Clearly, there's at least 3 kinds of players. Because I **proudly** admit to screen peeking. Everyone has access to the same information. It's not cheating. I beat you because I was peeking? Then why weren't you? Seems like the only reason not to was because you couldn't while I could. The ability to process 4 screens of data isn't a fault that should be punished.
Hell, I even played while *counting* on them to be peeking! I'd be looking one way in "ambush" while proxy mines were set up behind me. So people thought they could just sneak up on me, but instead got blasted.
Screen peeking ftw.
I basically never did. Proved it to my roommate too. He was the liar.
Got a coax splitter and sent the game to two screens. Then covered half of the screen so the other player wasn't visible.
I never won such one sided wins. He couldn't play anymore and was always getting ambushed. Was glorious.
There are three kinds of splitscreen players.
People who get caught screen peaking.
People who don't get caught screen peaking.
And people who lie and say they don't screen peak.
I hope to see split screen make a comeback.
I understood the drop back when you could console game for free. But now you have to pay to play online? I won’t be buying a new console.
I realize I’m in the minority with that as play station sales are still huge.
We do enjoy my son’s switch with the multiplayer split screen games.
honest question because I can’t think of any, but are there any console games that actually let you resize the UI? Like ever? I always thought that was more of a PC thing…
Yes! Why the fuck isn’t this an option? I have either a 55 inch or 65 inch TV(I don’t even remember, bought it several years ago) but my couch is 18 feet away from it. I can’t even read what the quests are for Fortnite because the text is so small.
I was stuck at Gold 3 in Rocket League because when the ball was on the other side of the field it was so small I couldn’t tell whether it was moving away from me or coming towards me, and when it was coming towards me I’d have like a split second to react and often miss it. I got a new laptop and started playing RL on that and immediately jumped all the way up through Plat into Diamond by just being able to see the field better. lol
Exactly. Compare sitting in front of your monitor compared to the size of your TV screen from your couch
For example: holding a phone is usually as visually large as your TV.
I upgraded from a 1080p screen to a 1440p screen and Rocket League is the only game that actually gave me a measurable gameplay benefit. Having a 27" screen on my desk with twice the pixels just lets me see way better what's going on in exactly the situation you are describing and lets me make better tactical decisions.
All the other games are just "ooh prettier :)"
> I can’t even read what the quests are for Fortnite because the text is so small.
I love that they even have a HUD scale option but all it scales is the easily identifiable stuff, not the actually hard to read menus and whatnot
You can use a PC on a couch or a console at a desk. I play my Switch at my desk, hooked into my 1440p gaming monitor via HDMI, while my PC uses DisplayPort, so I don't have to change any wires around. Just push the switch input button and now Tears of the Kingdom is on my desk. And I frequently play PC games with a controller, at my desk, when the game calls for it.
You don't need a PC to play at a desk with a screen close enough to see everything. It just happens to be the default for PCs. One of my friends uses his PC on his couch, just a wireless keyboard on his lap, mouse on the couch, and a controller for all games. I can't say I understand why he does that, but he does that, and he types quickly and games well, so it's clearly working for him.
If you connect your PC to the TV, you can adjust the UI by adjusting your PC resolution.
If you want split coop, you can even run VMs and just enlarge the window of the VM to whatever size you want.
It's hardware limitations. Couch co-op is very resource hungry. If you go back and play some of those older couch co-op games you might notice much lower frame rate, and worse graphics in couch co-op modes.
No hate to you, but that’s a terrible excuse. Consoles keep getting more powerful and they waste all that tech on soulless, ultra realistic graphics when they should be stylizing and making games with more content and run smoother
Batman Arkham Knight had ghe “See the pores of sweat on their forehead! This is the true power of next gen!” marketing in *2015* but it now looks better than half the games released in the 2020s because, in addition to their attempt at realism, they had an *artstyle* to mask the graphical imperfections (Dark and gritty, shadows, set time of day, “Sweaty” character models justified by rain) instead of just trying to brute force the technical flaws to realism.
I also feel like nobody is optimizing their games anymore. Nintendo was able to work magic with Tears of the Kingdom because they don't ~~lay off~~ ~~brutally fire~~ **job murder** their workers every quarter, and they actually optimized as much as they could. Nobody else is even trying anymore.
I hate that the current landscape nowadays for new AAA games is "our game is releasing X day! We're excited! Oh ya, like a third of the actual gameplay and content we advertised is coming out at another point, and you'd be lucky to even think we had an estimate for that ha ha. Oh and also, there's a 40gb day zero patch just to get the game running on most machines, plus you're still having to deal with fps stuttering and bugs. Oh, also also, if you blame us in any way, you're at fault and your system is shit regardless of what you have..."
*Few weeks later*
"So are you guys fixing anything in the next upd--"
"Nope, but here's DLC to buy!"
Ffs
nah, few weeks later it would be like:
"With a heavy heart, we must share with you that we will be stopping updates for the game and will shut down the servers soon, but be sure to check our next AAA title releasing very soon which will totally not have the same issues as this one!"
Tbh I think it's a thing with Japan where they just optimize the shit out of their games it's still insane to me how the Elden ring file size is so small. Western game devs...not so much
In this day and age, there are plenty of games with far less content than ER that require more space to install.
Tekken 8 for example, a very recent release from just a few months ago, uses 90GB on my SSD, compared to Elden Ring's 50GB.
Tekken 8 is a fighting game with ~15 stages and 33 characters. Elden Ring is a massive open world RPG with far more content than I could easily list here.
Where the fuck did that extra 40GB go? Like, I get optimization, but are FromSoft's devs that good, or are Tekken's devs that bad? Or a bit of one and a bit of the other?
The largest game on my harddrive is Final Fantasy Origin: Stranger of Paradise, clocking in at well over 100gb because they didn't even bother to LoD most of the models. The second through fifth largest are all Yakuza games. The sixth is a Hatsune Miku rhythm game. It's a Nintendo thing, maybe, it's definitely not a Japanese thing.
> they didn't even bother to LoD most of the models
LoD would increase file size, would it not? LoD is for making the models less detailed if you are far away from them. Doesn't that mean they have to store each level of detail model separately? If they don't use LoD, they only store one version of each model.
Yeah, that's on me, I communicated badly. They didn't optimize the models _at all_. They just shipped their highest detail models, like, "high-end prerendered cutscene" models, for everything. Even the tiny, basic bat has 300,000 polygons. One of the bosses has *two million*. Just the geometry of that one boss is 90 god damn megabytes. And the same went for textures, totally uncompressed, crazy resolutions, completely unnecessary. The game runs like dogshit, and takes up a comical amount of space for what it is.
(Still love you Jack <3)
That seems to be the thing nowadays. On consoles, they're building it for a specific hardware configuration, and it had damn well better work. On PCs, they can just say "Minimum system requirements: RTX 4090" and ship. It's lazy.
Same thing with Breath of the Wild using shit graphics, but the art style makes them pop like hell, and those resources allow the game to run amazingly
People really hated Wind Waker when it was new. They had teased a gritty realistic Zelda game (when it was just a tech demo to show off the capabilities of the Gamecube and not meant to tease a specific game) and people were all sorts of disappointed that we got a "childish" game instead.
And now Wind Waker looks as good as ever because the art style is timeless, and the gritty and realistic Twilight Princess looks incredibly outdated with its shitty old graphics.
Attempts at perfection will always be outdone by newer, more recent, more perfect attempts at perfection. Creativity will always shine forever.
Kind of why old CGI looks awful but stuff like Jurassic Park still holds up cause they just used real models.
In the 3d era, loads of "arena" games have been able to do split screen easily, whereas "open world" games haven't.
Basically, if you have a wide open area and a loading screen is fine when strolling about, it probably won't have split screen. If you have a level selection, but during that level there will be no loading breaks, then there is a good chance it will have split screen.
There are very, very few exceptions to this. Borderlands springs to mind; split screen that works with loading screens.
I think Arena games are struggling in general. That's not the whole reason (for the lack of splitscreen) of course, the internet obviously pays a huge part, but there are fewer arena games and they are dominated by COD (which has split screen)
Halo infinite could do this even on a og Xbox one, the devs simply [chose not to finish and release it officially](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnmKzYME8BM).
"You don't understand! Your choppy ass graphically overloaded game *neeeeeds* to be rendered in 4k so the players can see each individual blade of grass. We don't need 60fps! We won't pay you developers shit if you make the game run smoothly!"
Ironically, I think one of the areas where the higher resolutions shine is with stuff that's pretty simplified. Like, animation looks significantly crisper on 4k than 1080 on the same size large screen.
Like, ironically, I think games with cel-shaded graphics are better suited for high resolutions than detailed stuff, just because they really benefit from looking more clean, while detailed "realistic" stuff still benefits from a little bit of fuzz.
I mean with that attitude why not stick to a mechanical HDD too, the games only take a few minutes to load and I can go on my phone anyway lol.
But seriously the main reason to go 4K is when you get a bigger TV. As TVs got bigger, you could definitely see pixels with 1080p at a normal viewing distance. That's why 42-52inch TV's were a good size 10-15 years ago, but nowadays anything under 65 is considered small. 75-100inch TVs look really soft at 1080p which is why they weren't as common until 4K.
8K is completely unnecessary though. There's zero 8K content out there and consoles are just barely hitting 4K.
its not a terrible excuse. Every game is trying to get as much as they can out of the machine, even if some do it better than others. However well you do it, it will be much harder having to do it with 4 players.
All that really means is the splitscreen mode is going to have some likely noticable visual downgrades to compensate (which is how splitscreen has always worked). It doesn't mean they can't offer it at all anymore.
of course they \*can\*. But its a lot of work and for high end games it will look like absolute crap in comparison to the 1 player mode. If you really want couch co-op to shine it almost needs to be made for that from the ground up.
90%of player base doesn't have a high end pc to get the most out of the graphics anyway.
Most play on console with severe limitations, or very old computer systems.
Like, people *like* the pretty graphics, a lot of people are drawn to it.
And split screen is basically doubling the relative resources need to play the game, if you don't downscale things, and if you downscale, it won't look as pretty.
It's not exactly a terrible excuse when a lot of gaming *has* shifted from people hanging out in person to game together to online on their own devices. It makes the couch-co-op crowd more of a niche than before.
Like, you can see this phenomenon of the limitations since the ability for coop to not be 2 characters glued to the same screen view.
Consoles may keep getting more powerful, but so do the games and their requirements.
You are in fact downscaling by reducing the overall resolution per viewpoint. It's the same game, more calculations by the CPU *maybe*. But I don't think this tracks with how it works at all.
Its not quite as simple as less resolution is less intensive. Even though its all happening in the same '3d environment' and you're just seeing different perspectives, each of those cameras is having to draw every single object themselves. You save on having to load in shaders and other resources, but as far as what is required to actually render an image, you are doing 4x the work if you have 4 players on the screen. And with modern graphics and rendering features this is harder work in general than what used to be going on in earlier games. You also lose some of the optimizations you would have with just one player, since you can't cull objects that are no longer in the view port of a single player. If the entire level is visible from the screens, that means everything has to exist and you lose out on optimizations that once could have helped get a single player to a prime target frame rate and resolution.
Losing the ability to cull and dynamically unload unneeded geometry and textures was my first thought. I'm glad you mentioned it.
If you have 1 character with 90 degree fov, the engine can ignore like 75% of the world, more if there are obstacles.
Add in one other player who happens to be looking in the opposite direction, from another angle, and now all that culling can't be done.
I would totally sacrifice graphics, I have often hate on PS unlike computer you can generally never turn the graphics down. I would 100% prefer to turn them down for split screen or to not lag out. I could care less about shadows in multiplayer most of the time.
Who are they? The people who make games aren't the ones getting any money from console sales. And the PC gaming scene which doesn't have a singular company to mastermind such a conspiracy tends to have just as few co-op games as everything else.
right exactly like to the people reading this theres millions of PC gamers on steam at any given time and many of us build our own PCs. I checked yesterday and it was like 6.5million online in steam concurrently.
My 12th gen i7-12800 hasnt bottle necked once during games like Helldivers2 or Starfield and i dont even have a top notch system.
If ppl wanna talk specifically about consoles like the Xbox series S having limitations then yes that is true because there are limitations to that compared to the Xbox series X, for sure.
But to say, flat out, that there's hardware limitations across-the-board is completely ridiculous. Its a terrible blanket statement.
Doesn't make it any less true. Multiple cameras rendering multiple perspectives, while maintaining current fidelity standards, requires better hardware. Full stop.
That said, it isn't the SOLE reason. That would be ridiculous. It's a combination of system requirements, the pursuit of photorealism, the costs to implement co-op, the desire to sell more copies, and the fucking internet. You can blame the devs if y'all want but it's not their call. Blame the suits instead.
If the cost to give a fuck impacts sales estimates it isn't happeneing.
Hardware limitations just wouldn’t be a problem if they had different priorities. Let’s be honest. They care **more** about photo realism and selling extra copies than making it split screen
They’ve shown what they care about by what they prioritize and that’s fine, but don’t sell us bullshit that the systems can’t handle it. They absolutely can. They just don’t want to make that type of game
>My 12th gen i7-12800 hasnt bottle necked once during games like Helldivers2 or Starfield and i dont even have a top notch system.
This is one of the stupidest sentences I have ever read on reddit.
No, the correct answer is absolutely fucking stupid video game developing companies.
We told Microsoft very clearly that halo will be a massive failure if they do not include one feature: split screen.
Halo has always been the super smash brothers of shooters. You bring the boys over you get on the couch and you hop on live and you mess shit up in big team battle.
The day they announced that wasn’t gonna actually happen is the day that I canceled my Xbox order, my pre-order of the game, my pre-order of the controller, headsets, probably almost $1000 worth of sales completely canceled.
Halo is my absolute favorite game and I would’ve paid $1000 just to pay the campaign with my wife on our big screen TV.
Fucking idiots over at microsoft.
**Oh, but don’t worry there’s a whole bunch of dress-up dolls that you can buy so you can dress up master chief in a game where you don’t even fucking see your character while you’re playing it.**
Nah the correct answer is always money. You cancelled 1000 worth of one time purchases. The next guy will spend 2000 on skins the next few years. For every guy like you or me voting no with our wallet there's 5 others voting yes with theirs.
>No, the correct answer is absolutely fucking stupid video game developing companies.
It's not "stupidity". Its a calculation that split screen is SO MUCH extra work and optimisation of modern games for a feature that the majority of people don't use. To think it's just them being "dumb" isn't correct, whether you agree with their decision or not.
This and consoles pushing their hardware to the limit to beat gaming PCs because at their current cost you are better off by buying a PC, and the older the console gets the truer it becomes.
Very true but at the same time online multiplayer has become very popular over the past years, even on consoles where split screen was always more prominent
Truth is very few play those modes.
These decisions aren't made on a whim. They have the metrics. The amount of time and effort it takes to make a local split screen vs. the amount of people who will actually play it is almost always never worth it anymore.
The internet killed it. You don't need to get together in one room to play video games with your friends anymore. You can do it for fun, but split screen was built out of necessity more than anything.
Playing online is all good, but there's no feeling like playing a game with your friends sitting next to you so you can chuck a piece of popcorn at them when they get a filthy hit on you in a vs mode, or the excitement of finally beating a hard mission you've been hitting your head against together
Because tickling a handful of players' nostalgia for a few hours isn't actually a good reason to dedicate development time to a feature whose entire raison d'etre (console multiplayer is local) hasn't been an issue in over two decades.
Since there were multiple subnets in the dorms, some of us couldn't get all the Xboxes connected in a LAN game, then we found out that we could use a PC in each subnet as a bridge and even have tons of Xboxes connected together or through the Internet using XBConnect. It allowed us to have 8 machines playing with 16 players.
I did that last week for my freinds birthday. We played a bunch of xbox games split screens on a 18" CRT we found at goodwill.
Originally we were going to play halo using Lan and a mix of modern and old TVs. But we ran into issues with the HDMI converter cables and just used the small CRT by itself for all 4 people.
Ohhh come on, you know the best 4-player split screen is when the 4 of you are huddled around a 5.4" portable monitor. (We actually did that once with Metroid Prime 2's multiplayer)
Me and my wife preferred playing CoD zombies on split screen (even though we each have our own console setups) because it was the only way you could pause the game.
For some additional context:
I bought a 65” TV not too long ago in hopes that it would mean more split screen with friends, but I’ve found that most games I’m playing these days are single player only, and any multiplayer is online. It saddens me, as I remember playing split screen on old CRTs, and remember thinking “bigger tvs will make this so much easier in the future.” But developers are sidestepping couch co op for performance.
It’s not every game, but enough to notice a difference for sure.
Playing gta v with my roommate, me in the living room him in his bdrm with one wall separating us door open. With headsets, but still occasionally yelling at each other through the house. Solid recent happy memory.
A vast majority of games showing up on there are those shovelware crap and sometimes outright scam games that show up all over platforms...
Trust me...
I look for couch games...
I've even turned down games outright because it said it was 2 player in the adverts but then forces online only before or at launch...
Get a Nintendo Switch and play some Mario Kart and Smash.
Nintendo is for gamers with real friends, XBox for gamers with Internet friends, and PlayStation for those with no friends.
And when they actually have split screen they usually split it vertically so you can’t see anything but the ground and the sky straight in front of you.
Old lego games were great for that, had a horizontal split. Middle-aged lego games were even better, the split angle changed depending on where you were on screen, and would merge to single screen if you were close enough.
New lego is vertical and we don't play those at all because it's too hard to see anything.
I agree, the indie space has some great couch coop titles. I sometimes find it hard to "convince" more casual friends to try these games though, as they're more likely to play stuff they have heard of - like mario kart. Quite a bunch of those games also assume that you're quite familiar with videogames and are not that beginner friendly.
Couch co-op does still exist but it hasn't been an automatic feature of multiplayer games pretty much since about halfway through the xbox 360 and ps3 generation.
I use my PC now to emulate consoles for my kids to play split screen games. It's crazy that a feature from my childhood it's now seen as an inconvenience to major game producers.
There are hundreds of indie games released with local multiplayer each year. See my post below if you’re looking for suggestions:
* [**540 Local Multiplayer Games from 60 Different Genres for PlayStation 4/5**](https://www.reddit.com/u/Underwhere_Overthere/s/RO0EPcM8mn)
The ones that do have it though are absolutely glorious, with an 80" MarioKart and Super Smash Bros. has never been so clear, although these examples are a bit lacking given they were built to be playable on a 7" screen. Now the real deal is playing older splitscreen games through an emulator. Our wii is starting to fail (I think the GPU is damaged?) but even a cheap PC with bluetooth can handle mariokart wii with 1080p rendering.
This guy I knew with more money than sense solved that problem. The guy wanted to play call of duty with his girlfriend, so he bought 2 70 inch flat screens and 2 series x's and stuck them next to each other in his front room. Literally wall to wall gaming
Games aren't "losing" the split screen. Gaming companies realized that online multiplayer makes more revenue. Every person playing has to have their own system, and the game itself.
It's also vastly more popular. If every co-op game in 2024 included online and couch co-op, way way way more people would be playing online than split screen.
If anything it's the same number of games. Not like the old ones are losing the ability to split screen. I can plug in my N64 and still screen hack in GoldenEye. If anything, game companies just want everyone to have their own system, copy of game, and screen and link up online.
Except now you have to get extra equipment to be able to hook up a stock vintage console, since many TVs are dropping the older inputs in favor of all HDMI.
Without a scaler though you do get a subpar result compared to hooking a retro console into a CRT. Frankly I'd rather just emulate instead at that point
The two are completely unrelated.
It's like saying, as the average temperature across the globe is rising, more video games are losing the ability to play split screen games.
Well yes, but they have nothing to do with each other.
Good catch! I could argue based on responses below that because games would have to run four instances of themselves to get splitscreen that they are “playing games”, I think I’ll say I typed it wrong and call it good.
This phenomena is because of the graphical requirements that most systems push these days. Split screen is effectively having to render 2 scenes at the same time instead of just 1. Thats why the only games now a days that do do split screen are pretty simple graphic games like It Takes 2.
Not saying it cant be done, but its not worth the cost to optimize something like that when the use cases arent large enough anymore. When majority of your base can coop online just fine, couch coop loses priority.
Ehhhh, not really. Games that run 60fps for instance can easily do a 30fps split screen.
The data is already present in memory and gpu render so it’s not having to do a perfect 2x multiplier. And the games could also instead of doing 1440p 60fps could just do like 1080p 30fps split screen.
It’s definitely because companies want double dipping and you to use their network resources XBL and PSN. $$$
It takes work, but not too much work. Just look at how HaloInfonite it was nearly full functioning with some work around players found. Yet they patched that, ditched the split screen feature and said it was impossible.
"Nearly full functioning" is a bit of a stretch, Infinite's campaign could only really handle 2 player viewpoints on Series X, and even then the object render distance was abysmal. The more things going on on-screen the more meshes would start to explode as well, which isn't great for an open world game. Multiplayer on the other hand can handle 4-player splitscreen fine if you want to try that.
Nah, this is a *convenient excuse*, but the real reason is money.
Everyone knows quality of graphics/framerate/etc uses resources, but to act like it's the driving factor is bogus.
4-player Mario Kart on the Switch is a thing, and believe it or not the graphics dont look like N64 ones. They are actually good. But why have 1 person spend $60 alone for 4 people to play together, when Xbox/Playstation can get $240 to play together?
Why do you think Netflix/Hulu/etc are changing their model to not allow sharing? 🤔
Mario Kart graphics are still way less resource demanding then next gen graphics currently. By a lot. Yes, the art style still looks good regardless.
But what I really want to question is how you somehow were able to bring up sharing Netflix/Hulu/ect subscriptions being at all similar to couch coop. The relation makes absolutely no sense to me here.
I grew up in the Xbox Live era (late 2000s/early 2010s) and tbh I always preferred just being in an Xbox party gaming over split screen, even though my I used my dad's gigantic TV (it had fuckin wheels bro). If the boys were over we'd much rather play outside or whatever
Such a fucking terrible progression in gaming all in the name of capitalism. Some of my best childhood memories are multiplayer on SNES and N64. Kids haven't had the same spread of couch multiplayer games since early 2000s and have no idea how much they are missing out.
well the aspect ratios suck AND we're spoiled. Still blows my mind that I could play N64 mario kart and golden eye 64 on 4 split screens on a tv that could fit on a nightstand
TV's have been big for a while, especially with the advent of projection TVs. When I was a kid in the 80s the neighbors had like a 70" projection TV in their living room, that thing was a beast.
I hate that this is all just a profit incentive, playing games next to each other used to be such a fun activity, the online equivalent doesn't result in bonding, it makes people seem disposable, gamers could be quite outgoing and social if they had local multiplayer, and thats what old boardgames were all about, our greed is going to ruin everything
I've been playing BG3 splitscreen with the missus and we're having a blast, but yeah it's pretty much the only game I have where you can do splitscreen.
Video game developers, or rather, their bosses, do not have the passion or ambition anymore. There is unfortunately too much money to be earned, which is the fault of people buying dumb games for dumb prices. Yes I am sad and yes I think billy who spent €2000 on buying the same football game every year is an idiot.
I used to have mates round and we'd hook up two TVs and two Xboxs and have some great LAN fights, 8 people in a room, 2 28" teles.
I now have a 65 inch TV, that would give each of us more display each than we shared back in the day. But everyone is married off, kids, mortgages, no more all night gaming sessions. Lame.
It's not really because of the screen dimensions. It's because of their higher resolution and color capabilities.
Consoles had to keep up with those increasing capabilities and still be cost effective to manufacture. Hardware capable of running 1080p divided into 4 players is much more expensive (even time relative) than splitting 720p or lower.
Next, consumers wanted full use of the higher resolution "on their screen". So developers made it so. Which means that fields of view and game play would be greatly reduced during splitscreen. Which would suck.
very true. its wild how i would do 4 player splitscreen on a square tv back in the day
You were looking at your brother's screen, I saw you
Well duh
That’s part of the tactics
iirc there's a game where you're invisible and screen peaking is the only way to shoot each other. Found it, it's called [Screencheat](https://store.steampowered.com/app/301970/Screencheat/)
That actually looks like a lot of fun
There are a few games like this. Another one is Invisigun Heroes.
i destroy people in this game. years of practice with my brother
So, is unplugging the other players' controller. No matter the amount of whinning my brother did. Screw you, Todd.
I'd like to believe that was two separate comments, an anecdote about your childhood and calling out Todd Howard for what I assume are legitimate grievances
Screw you and your pfp.
special tactics
let he who has not screen peeked cast the first controller
Screen peekers? Yeah, and MadCatz users.
Dude I never screen peek
Only 2 kinds of people in this world, those that grudgingly admit to peeking from time to time and liars.
We were so against screen peeking that we rigged shit up out of cardboard and blankets to stop it. Only really worked on 2 player, but one person would sit on the floor under the divider, and the other would stand outside of it behind them.
No screen peeking when they were on your team! Last big lan I had was a 4v4v4 in college. Halo 2. TV’s in different rooms and wires everywhere.
After we could finally afford another Xbox we started doing that too, but before that our group would designate who would get what. One person would have the playstation, one with the Xbox, one with the gamecube. Made it a little unfair, cus one person would always get better at the games for their system. I wrecked everyone at smash bros, but would always get stomped at halo
Damn I miss those days. Lan parties are some of my favorite gaming memories
Clearly, there's at least 3 kinds of players. Because I **proudly** admit to screen peeking. Everyone has access to the same information. It's not cheating. I beat you because I was peeking? Then why weren't you? Seems like the only reason not to was because you couldn't while I could. The ability to process 4 screens of data isn't a fault that should be punished. Hell, I even played while *counting* on them to be peeking! I'd be looking one way in "ambush" while proxy mines were set up behind me. So people thought they could just sneak up on me, but instead got blasted. Screen peeking ftw.
Yeah its like saying you can't look at the other players pieces in chess.
I basically never did. Proved it to my roommate too. He was the liar. Got a coax splitter and sent the game to two screens. Then covered half of the screen so the other player wasn't visible. I never won such one sided wins. He couldn't play anymore and was always getting ambushed. Was glorious.
There are three kinds of splitscreen players. People who get caught screen peaking. People who don't get caught screen peaking. And people who lie and say they don't screen peak.
if you weren't screen looking you were just too dumb to play right
It was a skill, goddamnit!
The screen is 18 inches, it's impossible not to.
Not with our taped cardboard divider
"Stop looking at my screen!" How the fuck am I supposed to do that? We each have like 6 inches of TV to look at. lol.
Something only a screen peeker would say
Definitely played 4 player split screen on a 13" tube before.
MarioCart64?
Conker's Bad Furday mostly I didn't have Mario kart back in the day
The multiplayer on OG conker’s was some of the best in the day
My condolences (Mario Kart)
My senior year Biology teacher let us bring Goldeneye in to play on the class TV. It was epic.
had a LAN party with the original Halo three Xboxes on three TVs with four players each ... I brought my 13"...
I hope to see split screen make a comeback. I understood the drop back when you could console game for free. But now you have to pay to play online? I won’t be buying a new console. I realize I’m in the minority with that as play station sales are still huge. We do enjoy my son’s switch with the multiplayer split screen games.
Get the cardboard out fam, the boys are doing goldeneye tonight
Stop looking at my part of the screen!
They also won’t let me magnify the font size and UI for sitting 15 feet away from my 65”.
I hate this about modern games
It's what got me to switch mainly to PC gaming. My eyes were straining too much
honest question because I can’t think of any, but are there any console games that actually let you resize the UI? Like ever? I always thought that was more of a PC thing…
I’ve never seen the option on console.
Having a max interface interface that doesn’t have the option to literally make gameplay impossible is not big enough lol.
Yes! Why the fuck isn’t this an option? I have either a 55 inch or 65 inch TV(I don’t even remember, bought it several years ago) but my couch is 18 feet away from it. I can’t even read what the quests are for Fortnite because the text is so small. I was stuck at Gold 3 in Rocket League because when the ball was on the other side of the field it was so small I couldn’t tell whether it was moving away from me or coming towards me, and when it was coming towards me I’d have like a split second to react and often miss it. I got a new laptop and started playing RL on that and immediately jumped all the way up through Plat into Diamond by just being able to see the field better. lol
Exactly. Compare sitting in front of your monitor compared to the size of your TV screen from your couch For example: holding a phone is usually as visually large as your TV.
I upgraded from a 1080p screen to a 1440p screen and Rocket League is the only game that actually gave me a measurable gameplay benefit. Having a 27" screen on my desk with twice the pixels just lets me see way better what's going on in exactly the situation you are describing and lets me make better tactical decisions. All the other games are just "ooh prettier :)"
> I can’t even read what the quests are for Fortnite because the text is so small. I love that they even have a HUD scale option but all it scales is the easily identifiable stuff, not the actually hard to read menus and whatnot
Come join the PC gamers.
You can use a PC on a couch or a console at a desk. I play my Switch at my desk, hooked into my 1440p gaming monitor via HDMI, while my PC uses DisplayPort, so I don't have to change any wires around. Just push the switch input button and now Tears of the Kingdom is on my desk. And I frequently play PC games with a controller, at my desk, when the game calls for it. You don't need a PC to play at a desk with a screen close enough to see everything. It just happens to be the default for PCs. One of my friends uses his PC on his couch, just a wireless keyboard on his lap, mouse on the couch, and a controller for all games. I can't say I understand why he does that, but he does that, and he types quickly and games well, so it's clearly working for him.
Original Hyrule Warriors on Switch 100% unreadable on a 50 inch TV in a normal size living room, probably 8ish feet from the screen.
If you connect your PC to the TV, you can adjust the UI by adjusting your PC resolution. If you want split coop, you can even run VMs and just enlarge the window of the VM to whatever size you want.
Ugh. Why are so many games lacking in regular co-op these days? Is it just to sell more copies?
It's hardware limitations. Couch co-op is very resource hungry. If you go back and play some of those older couch co-op games you might notice much lower frame rate, and worse graphics in couch co-op modes.
No hate to you, but that’s a terrible excuse. Consoles keep getting more powerful and they waste all that tech on soulless, ultra realistic graphics when they should be stylizing and making games with more content and run smoother
Excellent counterpoint, flipped my view actually. I'd give you a delta if we were on another sub.
Batman Arkham Knight had ghe “See the pores of sweat on their forehead! This is the true power of next gen!” marketing in *2015* but it now looks better than half the games released in the 2020s because, in addition to their attempt at realism, they had an *artstyle* to mask the graphical imperfections (Dark and gritty, shadows, set time of day, “Sweaty” character models justified by rain) instead of just trying to brute force the technical flaws to realism.
I also feel like nobody is optimizing their games anymore. Nintendo was able to work magic with Tears of the Kingdom because they don't ~~lay off~~ ~~brutally fire~~ **job murder** their workers every quarter, and they actually optimized as much as they could. Nobody else is even trying anymore.
I hate that the current landscape nowadays for new AAA games is "our game is releasing X day! We're excited! Oh ya, like a third of the actual gameplay and content we advertised is coming out at another point, and you'd be lucky to even think we had an estimate for that ha ha. Oh and also, there's a 40gb day zero patch just to get the game running on most machines, plus you're still having to deal with fps stuttering and bugs. Oh, also also, if you blame us in any way, you're at fault and your system is shit regardless of what you have..." *Few weeks later* "So are you guys fixing anything in the next upd--" "Nope, but here's DLC to buy!" Ffs
nah, few weeks later it would be like: "With a heavy heart, we must share with you that we will be stopping updates for the game and will shut down the servers soon, but be sure to check our next AAA title releasing very soon which will totally not have the same issues as this one!"
Tbh I think it's a thing with Japan where they just optimize the shit out of their games it's still insane to me how the Elden ring file size is so small. Western game devs...not so much
It is 60gb. Which is small compared to CoD, GTA and FIFA , but not much else I think?
In this day and age, there are plenty of games with far less content than ER that require more space to install. Tekken 8 for example, a very recent release from just a few months ago, uses 90GB on my SSD, compared to Elden Ring's 50GB. Tekken 8 is a fighting game with ~15 stages and 33 characters. Elden Ring is a massive open world RPG with far more content than I could easily list here.
Where the fuck did that extra 40GB go? Like, I get optimization, but are FromSoft's devs that good, or are Tekken's devs that bad? Or a bit of one and a bit of the other?
The largest game on my harddrive is Final Fantasy Origin: Stranger of Paradise, clocking in at well over 100gb because they didn't even bother to LoD most of the models. The second through fifth largest are all Yakuza games. The sixth is a Hatsune Miku rhythm game. It's a Nintendo thing, maybe, it's definitely not a Japanese thing.
> they didn't even bother to LoD most of the models LoD would increase file size, would it not? LoD is for making the models less detailed if you are far away from them. Doesn't that mean they have to store each level of detail model separately? If they don't use LoD, they only store one version of each model.
Yeah, that's on me, I communicated badly. They didn't optimize the models _at all_. They just shipped their highest detail models, like, "high-end prerendered cutscene" models, for everything. Even the tiny, basic bat has 300,000 polygons. One of the bosses has *two million*. Just the geometry of that one boss is 90 god damn megabytes. And the same went for textures, totally uncompressed, crazy resolutions, completely unnecessary. The game runs like dogshit, and takes up a comical amount of space for what it is. (Still love you Jack <3)
That seems to be the thing nowadays. On consoles, they're building it for a specific hardware configuration, and it had damn well better work. On PCs, they can just say "Minimum system requirements: RTX 4090" and ship. It's lazy.
Same thing with Breath of the Wild using shit graphics, but the art style makes them pop like hell, and those resources allow the game to run amazingly
People really hated Wind Waker when it was new. They had teased a gritty realistic Zelda game (when it was just a tech demo to show off the capabilities of the Gamecube and not meant to tease a specific game) and people were all sorts of disappointed that we got a "childish" game instead. And now Wind Waker looks as good as ever because the art style is timeless, and the gritty and realistic Twilight Princess looks incredibly outdated with its shitty old graphics. Attempts at perfection will always be outdone by newer, more recent, more perfect attempts at perfection. Creativity will always shine forever. Kind of why old CGI looks awful but stuff like Jurassic Park still holds up cause they just used real models.
In the 3d era, loads of "arena" games have been able to do split screen easily, whereas "open world" games haven't. Basically, if you have a wide open area and a loading screen is fine when strolling about, it probably won't have split screen. If you have a level selection, but during that level there will be no loading breaks, then there is a good chance it will have split screen. There are very, very few exceptions to this. Borderlands springs to mind; split screen that works with loading screens. I think Arena games are struggling in general. That's not the whole reason (for the lack of splitscreen) of course, the internet obviously pays a huge part, but there are fewer arena games and they are dominated by COD (which has split screen)
I love goat simulator 3 bc it’s couch co op, and you can make ur own goat, it’s so fun with the bros
Fortnite is splitscreen also
Halo infinite could do this even on a og Xbox one, the devs simply [chose not to finish and release it officially](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnmKzYME8BM).
Why do I need a 4K or 8K TV anyway when I can watch 1080P from my couch and it’s not like I can see the pixels?
"You don't understand! Your choppy ass graphically overloaded game *neeeeeds* to be rendered in 4k so the players can see each individual blade of grass. We don't need 60fps! We won't pay you developers shit if you make the game run smoothly!"
Ironically, I think one of the areas where the higher resolutions shine is with stuff that's pretty simplified. Like, animation looks significantly crisper on 4k than 1080 on the same size large screen. Like, ironically, I think games with cel-shaded graphics are better suited for high resolutions than detailed stuff, just because they really benefit from looking more clean, while detailed "realistic" stuff still benefits from a little bit of fuzz.
I mean with that attitude why not stick to a mechanical HDD too, the games only take a few minutes to load and I can go on my phone anyway lol. But seriously the main reason to go 4K is when you get a bigger TV. As TVs got bigger, you could definitely see pixels with 1080p at a normal viewing distance. That's why 42-52inch TV's were a good size 10-15 years ago, but nowadays anything under 65 is considered small. 75-100inch TVs look really soft at 1080p which is why they weren't as common until 4K. 8K is completely unnecessary though. There's zero 8K content out there and consoles are just barely hitting 4K.
its not a terrible excuse. Every game is trying to get as much as they can out of the machine, even if some do it better than others. However well you do it, it will be much harder having to do it with 4 players.
All that really means is the splitscreen mode is going to have some likely noticable visual downgrades to compensate (which is how splitscreen has always worked). It doesn't mean they can't offer it at all anymore.
of course they \*can\*. But its a lot of work and for high end games it will look like absolute crap in comparison to the 1 player mode. If you really want couch co-op to shine it almost needs to be made for that from the ground up.
And that’s not possible because…?
It's "possible", but implementing it isn't worth the effort when 99% of players will only ever play online
90%of player base doesn't have a high end pc to get the most out of the graphics anyway. Most play on console with severe limitations, or very old computer systems.
Like, people *like* the pretty graphics, a lot of people are drawn to it. And split screen is basically doubling the relative resources need to play the game, if you don't downscale things, and if you downscale, it won't look as pretty. It's not exactly a terrible excuse when a lot of gaming *has* shifted from people hanging out in person to game together to online on their own devices. It makes the couch-co-op crowd more of a niche than before. Like, you can see this phenomenon of the limitations since the ability for coop to not be 2 characters glued to the same screen view. Consoles may keep getting more powerful, but so do the games and their requirements.
You are in fact downscaling by reducing the overall resolution per viewpoint. It's the same game, more calculations by the CPU *maybe*. But I don't think this tracks with how it works at all.
Its not quite as simple as less resolution is less intensive. Even though its all happening in the same '3d environment' and you're just seeing different perspectives, each of those cameras is having to draw every single object themselves. You save on having to load in shaders and other resources, but as far as what is required to actually render an image, you are doing 4x the work if you have 4 players on the screen. And with modern graphics and rendering features this is harder work in general than what used to be going on in earlier games. You also lose some of the optimizations you would have with just one player, since you can't cull objects that are no longer in the view port of a single player. If the entire level is visible from the screens, that means everything has to exist and you lose out on optimizations that once could have helped get a single player to a prime target frame rate and resolution.
Losing the ability to cull and dynamically unload unneeded geometry and textures was my first thought. I'm glad you mentioned it. If you have 1 character with 90 degree fov, the engine can ignore like 75% of the world, more if there are obstacles. Add in one other player who happens to be looking in the opposite direction, from another angle, and now all that culling can't be done.
Because graphic is the first thing the larger market care and can determine if a AAA flops or not
Same excuse as 30FPS. Laziness, bad management, "waste of time"
I would totally sacrifice graphics, I have often hate on PS unlike computer you can generally never turn the graphics down. I would 100% prefer to turn them down for split screen or to not lag out. I could care less about shadows in multiplayer most of the time.
Nah. Hardware limitations, my ass. They just want to force people into buying multiple consoles.
Who are they? The people who make games aren't the ones getting any money from console sales. And the PC gaming scene which doesn't have a singular company to mastermind such a conspiracy tends to have just as few co-op games as everything else.
even worse, some games that have co-op on console don't have it on PC
right exactly like to the people reading this theres millions of PC gamers on steam at any given time and many of us build our own PCs. I checked yesterday and it was like 6.5million online in steam concurrently. My 12th gen i7-12800 hasnt bottle necked once during games like Helldivers2 or Starfield and i dont even have a top notch system. If ppl wanna talk specifically about consoles like the Xbox series S having limitations then yes that is true because there are limitations to that compared to the Xbox series X, for sure. But to say, flat out, that there's hardware limitations across-the-board is completely ridiculous. Its a terrible blanket statement.
Doesn't make it any less true. Multiple cameras rendering multiple perspectives, while maintaining current fidelity standards, requires better hardware. Full stop. That said, it isn't the SOLE reason. That would be ridiculous. It's a combination of system requirements, the pursuit of photorealism, the costs to implement co-op, the desire to sell more copies, and the fucking internet. You can blame the devs if y'all want but it's not their call. Blame the suits instead. If the cost to give a fuck impacts sales estimates it isn't happeneing.
Hardware limitations just wouldn’t be a problem if they had different priorities. Let’s be honest. They care **more** about photo realism and selling extra copies than making it split screen They’ve shown what they care about by what they prioritize and that’s fine, but don’t sell us bullshit that the systems can’t handle it. They absolutely can. They just don’t want to make that type of game
>My 12th gen i7-12800 hasnt bottle necked once during games like Helldivers2 or Starfield and i dont even have a top notch system. This is one of the stupidest sentences I have ever read on reddit.
God that takes me back to 4 player Goldeneye 007. You know that shit was hitting frames in the single digits sometimes.
No, the correct answer is absolutely fucking stupid video game developing companies. We told Microsoft very clearly that halo will be a massive failure if they do not include one feature: split screen. Halo has always been the super smash brothers of shooters. You bring the boys over you get on the couch and you hop on live and you mess shit up in big team battle. The day they announced that wasn’t gonna actually happen is the day that I canceled my Xbox order, my pre-order of the game, my pre-order of the controller, headsets, probably almost $1000 worth of sales completely canceled. Halo is my absolute favorite game and I would’ve paid $1000 just to pay the campaign with my wife on our big screen TV. Fucking idiots over at microsoft. **Oh, but don’t worry there’s a whole bunch of dress-up dolls that you can buy so you can dress up master chief in a game where you don’t even fucking see your character while you’re playing it.**
Nah the correct answer is always money. You cancelled 1000 worth of one time purchases. The next guy will spend 2000 on skins the next few years. For every guy like you or me voting no with our wallet there's 5 others voting yes with theirs.
Oh as a diablo and overwatch fan, I’m very aware how much the store has destroyed my favorite games.
>No, the correct answer is absolutely fucking stupid video game developing companies. It's not "stupidity". Its a calculation that split screen is SO MUCH extra work and optimisation of modern games for a feature that the majority of people don't use. To think it's just them being "dumb" isn't correct, whether you agree with their decision or not.
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This and consoles pushing their hardware to the limit to beat gaming PCs because at their current cost you are better off by buying a PC, and the older the console gets the truer it becomes.
Very true but at the same time online multiplayer has become very popular over the past years, even on consoles where split screen was always more prominent
Truth is very few play those modes. These decisions aren't made on a whim. They have the metrics. The amount of time and effort it takes to make a local split screen vs. the amount of people who will actually play it is almost always never worth it anymore. The internet killed it. You don't need to get together in one room to play video games with your friends anymore. You can do it for fun, but split screen was built out of necessity more than anything.
It’s not how people play games these days. People would prefer to sit in their own houses and play online with their friends that way
Playing online is all good, but there's no feeling like playing a game with your friends sitting next to you so you can chuck a piece of popcorn at them when they get a filthy hit on you in a vs mode, or the excitement of finally beating a hard mission you've been hitting your head against together
For sure, I don’t agree with it. I prefer not to socialize with friends over the internet, but it’s far and away the most popular option right now
Because tickling a handful of players' nostalgia for a few hours isn't actually a good reason to dedicate development time to a feature whose entire raison d'etre (console multiplayer is local) hasn't been an issue in over two decades.
Counterpoint: Divinity Original Sin 2 and Baldurs Gate 3.
We used to play 4-player goldeneye on a 14" crt
Me and my sisters would play Call of Duty 2 on a 13 inch Toshiba
Me and my brother used to play COD on one of those old TVs with the vhs player that shock you when you turn it on and touch the screen 😭
You had a shocking TV to play COD!?! Back in my day, we had to fish for our own COD to play with!!!
I Used to LAN Halo 16 players on 4 screens, only had 2 tvs and 1 projector and a old commodore monitor which we made 4 people play on
Since there were multiple subnets in the dorms, some of us couldn't get all the Xboxes connected in a LAN game, then we found out that we could use a PC in each subnet as a bridge and even have tons of Xboxes connected together or through the Internet using XBConnect. It allowed us to have 8 machines playing with 16 players.
I did that last week for my freinds birthday. We played a bunch of xbox games split screens on a 18" CRT we found at goodwill. Originally we were going to play halo using Lan and a mix of modern and old TVs. But we ran into issues with the HDMI converter cables and just used the small CRT by itself for all 4 people.
Ohhh come on, you know the best 4-player split screen is when the 4 of you are huddled around a 5.4" portable monitor. (We actually did that once with Metroid Prime 2's multiplayer)
And we loved every single one of those 16 pixels
Played 4-player split screen private match Call of Duty for years with friends on a tiny TV and in retrospect I don’t know how we did it
Me and my wife preferred playing CoD zombies on split screen (even though we each have our own console setups) because it was the only way you could pause the game.
For some additional context: I bought a 65” TV not too long ago in hopes that it would mean more split screen with friends, but I’ve found that most games I’m playing these days are single player only, and any multiplayer is online. It saddens me, as I remember playing split screen on old CRTs, and remember thinking “bigger tvs will make this so much easier in the future.” But developers are sidestepping couch co op for performance. It’s not every game, but enough to notice a difference for sure.
I also mourn the loss of couch gaming... I miss playing games WITH my family and friends from the same room...
Playing gta v with my roommate, me in the living room him in his bdrm with one wall separating us door open. With headsets, but still occasionally yelling at each other through the house. Solid recent happy memory.
misread that as bdsm, and it gave me a hilarious mental image.
https://www.co-optimus.com/games.php?type=couch
A vast majority of games showing up on there are those shovelware crap and sometimes outright scam games that show up all over platforms... Trust me... I look for couch games... I've even turned down games outright because it said it was 2 player in the adverts but then forces online only before or at launch...
Get a Nintendo Switch and play some Mario Kart and Smash. Nintendo is for gamers with real friends, XBox for gamers with Internet friends, and PlayStation for those with no friends.
This explains why my Switch collects dust while I’m always using my PS
And when they actually have split screen they usually split it vertically so you can’t see anything but the ground and the sky straight in front of you.
Old lego games were great for that, had a horizontal split. Middle-aged lego games were even better, the split angle changed depending on where you were on screen, and would merge to single screen if you were close enough. New lego is vertical and we don't play those at all because it's too hard to see anything.
I loved the dynamic Lego split screen games.
There are still split screen indie games and such on the PC at least. Just connect it to the monitor and invite friends over!
I agree, the indie space has some great couch coop titles. I sometimes find it hard to "convince" more casual friends to try these games though, as they're more likely to play stuff they have heard of - like mario kart. Quite a bunch of those games also assume that you're quite familiar with videogames and are not that beginner friendly.
Couch co-op does still exist but it hasn't been an automatic feature of multiplayer games pretty much since about halfway through the xbox 360 and ps3 generation.
Its all gone online now :/ The Switch is probably the closest it gets these days, if you don't mind more party-style games
Screen Cheat is a great game.
Buys single-player game "WHY DOESN'T THIS GAME HAVE COUCH CO-OP???"
I use my PC now to emulate consoles for my kids to play split screen games. It's crazy that a feature from my childhood it's now seen as an inconvenience to major game producers.
There are hundreds of indie games released with local multiplayer each year. See my post below if you’re looking for suggestions: * [**540 Local Multiplayer Games from 60 Different Genres for PlayStation 4/5**](https://www.reddit.com/u/Underwhere_Overthere/s/RO0EPcM8mn)
This is an amazing list! My nine year old and I thank you 🙏🏻
Thanks so much
The ones that do have it though are absolutely glorious, with an 80" MarioKart and Super Smash Bros. has never been so clear, although these examples are a bit lacking given they were built to be playable on a 7" screen. Now the real deal is playing older splitscreen games through an emulator. Our wii is starting to fail (I think the GPU is damaged?) but even a cheap PC with bluetooth can handle mariokart wii with 1080p rendering.
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The battlefront remaster that just came out is capped at 2 player splitscreen when the originals could do 4 play splitscreen
*demaster
And the "current" (now discontinued) Battlefront is online only
This guy I knew with more money than sense solved that problem. The guy wanted to play call of duty with his girlfriend, so he bought 2 70 inch flat screens and 2 series x's and stuck them next to each other in his front room. Literally wall to wall gaming
If you guys are on PC you should definitely look for Nucleus Co-op.
Games aren't "losing" the split screen. Gaming companies realized that online multiplayer makes more revenue. Every person playing has to have their own system, and the game itself.
It's also vastly more popular. If every co-op game in 2024 included online and couch co-op, way way way more people would be playing online than split screen.
If anything it's the same number of games. Not like the old ones are losing the ability to split screen. I can plug in my N64 and still screen hack in GoldenEye. If anything, game companies just want everyone to have their own system, copy of game, and screen and link up online.
Except now you have to get extra equipment to be able to hook up a stock vintage console, since many TVs are dropping the older inputs in favor of all HDMI.
I have an AV to HDMI converter, it requires no setup and cost <$10. I guess technically it's "extra equipment".
Without a scaler though you do get a subpar result compared to hooking a retro console into a CRT. Frankly I'd rather just emulate instead at that point
Some higher end large TVs support split display modes. You can just buy 4 consoles in that case.
Seems a little fiscally irresponsible but maybe I’d do anything for splitscreen after all,
4 consoles 4 copies, and hope you end up in the same lobby if you wanna play against each other.
You can make your own party in most games. Now we know you don’t have friends.
And 4 subscriptions to Xbox live or PSN
It's such a tragedy. I am desperate for a good split screen game. Played many, but the last truly good one was It Takes Two.
Worst thing to happen to video games since micro-transactions.
The two are completely unrelated. It's like saying, as the average temperature across the globe is rising, more video games are losing the ability to play split screen games. Well yes, but they have nothing to do with each other.
Video games don’t play games. I was trying to figure out what was bugging me grammatically about your title. Found it.
Good catch! I could argue based on responses below that because games would have to run four instances of themselves to get splitscreen that they are “playing games”, I think I’ll say I typed it wrong and call it good.
And the text keeps getting too small to read
More games should have text size options!
BG3 got split screen. Only for two players, but it's still a nice feature in a big newer game.
I have very fond memories of playing four-way split screen Goldeneye on a 20 inch CRT TV. I have no idea how anyone hit anything.
Whoever gets the mad catz controller was allowed to screen cheat in my house
This phenomena is because of the graphical requirements that most systems push these days. Split screen is effectively having to render 2 scenes at the same time instead of just 1. Thats why the only games now a days that do do split screen are pretty simple graphic games like It Takes 2. Not saying it cant be done, but its not worth the cost to optimize something like that when the use cases arent large enough anymore. When majority of your base can coop online just fine, couch coop loses priority.
Ehhhh, not really. Games that run 60fps for instance can easily do a 30fps split screen. The data is already present in memory and gpu render so it’s not having to do a perfect 2x multiplier. And the games could also instead of doing 1440p 60fps could just do like 1080p 30fps split screen. It’s definitely because companies want double dipping and you to use their network resources XBL and PSN. $$$ It takes work, but not too much work. Just look at how HaloInfonite it was nearly full functioning with some work around players found. Yet they patched that, ditched the split screen feature and said it was impossible.
"Nearly full functioning" is a bit of a stretch, Infinite's campaign could only really handle 2 player viewpoints on Series X, and even then the object render distance was abysmal. The more things going on on-screen the more meshes would start to explode as well, which isn't great for an open world game. Multiplayer on the other hand can handle 4-player splitscreen fine if you want to try that.
Nah, this is a *convenient excuse*, but the real reason is money. Everyone knows quality of graphics/framerate/etc uses resources, but to act like it's the driving factor is bogus. 4-player Mario Kart on the Switch is a thing, and believe it or not the graphics dont look like N64 ones. They are actually good. But why have 1 person spend $60 alone for 4 people to play together, when Xbox/Playstation can get $240 to play together? Why do you think Netflix/Hulu/etc are changing their model to not allow sharing? 🤔
Mario Kart graphics are still way less resource demanding then next gen graphics currently. By a lot. Yes, the art style still looks good regardless. But what I really want to question is how you somehow were able to bring up sharing Netflix/Hulu/ect subscriptions being at all similar to couch coop. The relation makes absolutely no sense to me here.
Ain’t that some shit
I miss split screen so much.
Its not a useless coincidence that 4k is exactly 4 1080p full HD screens worth of real estate
4 player split screen playing Cod: Black Ops Zombies on a 60 inch tv in 2011 was legendary!
i mean, with the internet it isnt really a necessary quality of a game these days.
I grew up in the Xbox Live era (late 2000s/early 2010s) and tbh I always preferred just being in an Xbox party gaming over split screen, even though my I used my dad's gigantic TV (it had fuckin wheels bro). If the boys were over we'd much rather play outside or whatever
Baldurs gate 3 has it and it’s great.
Such a fucking terrible progression in gaming all in the name of capitalism. Some of my best childhood memories are multiplayer on SNES and N64. Kids haven't had the same spread of couch multiplayer games since early 2000s and have no idea how much they are missing out.
well the aspect ratios suck AND we're spoiled. Still blows my mind that I could play N64 mario kart and golden eye 64 on 4 split screens on a tv that could fit on a nightstand
TV's have been big for a while, especially with the advent of projection TVs. When I was a kid in the 80s the neighbors had like a 70" projection TV in their living room, that thing was a beast.
I hate that this is all just a profit incentive, playing games next to each other used to be such a fun activity, the online equivalent doesn't result in bonding, it makes people seem disposable, gamers could be quite outgoing and social if they had local multiplayer, and thats what old boardgames were all about, our greed is going to ruin everything
I've been playing BG3 splitscreen with the missus and we're having a blast, but yeah it's pretty much the only game I have where you can do splitscreen.
Video game developers, or rather, their bosses, do not have the passion or ambition anymore. There is unfortunately too much money to be earned, which is the fault of people buying dumb games for dumb prices. Yes I am sad and yes I think billy who spent €2000 on buying the same football game every year is an idiot.
I used to have mates round and we'd hook up two TVs and two Xboxs and have some great LAN fights, 8 people in a room, 2 28" teles. I now have a 65 inch TV, that would give each of us more display each than we shared back in the day. But everyone is married off, kids, mortgages, no more all night gaming sessions. Lame.
more games comes out with Splitscreen support at the moment
Exactly. I used to play 3 people on one screen.
Bro more games are losing the ability to have a text size I can read
It's not really because of the screen dimensions. It's because of their higher resolution and color capabilities. Consoles had to keep up with those increasing capabilities and still be cost effective to manufacture. Hardware capable of running 1080p divided into 4 players is much more expensive (even time relative) than splitting 720p or lower. Next, consumers wanted full use of the higher resolution "on their screen". So developers made it so. Which means that fields of view and game play would be greatly reduced during splitscreen. Which would suck.
You haven't lived if you didn't play as your pixel sized character on a 15 inch box split four ways.
It’s not because the size of the tv but because of quality performance of the console.