Not the best news about Halo 5, for many fans out there they may already know about this, however for people like myself this may be a surprise. 343 Industries announced that Halo 5 : Guardians won’t support split-screen ! This is a complete change from the other games in the Halo Series especially as Halo has the reputation of being one of the best couch co-op shooters around.
For me Halo has always been that multi-player option when a friend comes round, Not any more it seems. Back in January this year studio head Josh Holmes tweeted that “We plan to support both 2-player split screen play for both MP and Campaign co-op” This news meant that it was within the game design document, so what happened ?. Josh Holmes then delivered the news in June that the game no longer supports split screen by tweeting “All MP modes use full screen on dedicated servers, incl Coop Campaign, Areana and Warzone”.
This short tweet was enough to send some fans on a craze! So much so that they had started a petition on www.Change.Org “Add Split-screen Co-op to Halo 5”. This petition has gathered over 7,000 signatures and needs another 250 people to reach the goal.
Today is the first time I have heard about this news and after seeing Halo 5 : Guardians in action I think the main issue would be down to the frame rate. It really is something I didn’t expect, especially after its success with previous titles. This is probably the main reason split screen games are rare to come across now. From my personal experience I think the main issue is the amount of content, and the detail that has been implemented within the environment. This can effect the frame rate, especially when another player is added to a game as the console has to process the environment & output for both users. As this is the first major release from 343 industries I think they maybe had higher expectations of the Xbox Ones hardware.
After looking further into the issue, I found a few interesting statements.
343 Released this report about the technical reasons to why spilt screen cant be supported… “Many of our ambitious goals for Halo 5 would be compromised in a split-screen setting and the time spent optimizing and addressing split-screen-specifics issues would take focus from building other parts of the game. Game development is a balancing act of resources, time, and technology, and in this case we made the tough decision to sacrifice something that’s been near and dear to us all. “
Website KitGuru says “Split screen has been less of a focus point for developers for quire a while now. Halo was one of the last big franchises to include it but unfortunately, it looks like that will now stop, perhaps if the Xbox One had more powerful hardware, 343 industries would have been able to pull it off”.
I suppose not a lot can be done now about this issue, development director Frank O’Connor also says “If we could do it, we would do it, it what they call “nontrivial”” I think we have to take his word on this one and I believe the team over at 343 have done there best to try and implement split screen. Hopefully 343 can use this experience and work around this under laying issue surrounding split screen in the future.
Will the removal of split screen be missed ? From me yes, I suppose now it means that everyone will get the same full screen experience playing Halo 5: Guardians, but I will definitely miss the (High Five) moment after jumping into a Warthog with a friend and plummeting someone into a wall. One thing I think we can all agree on is that Halo 5 is stunning ! This may be due to 343 sacrificing split screen as less optimization would have to be done.
I think we all have to think what we want when it comes to gaming graphics, would you rather sacrifice the graphics for split screen?
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