I sure hope there continues to be more couch co-op games. My son and I are always looking for more games to play together.
Highly recommend “it takes two”. Love being told I’m bad at relationships by a talking book…while playing with my fiance.
But the PlayStation 5 version, released last week, introduces a third option: local, or so-called couch co-op, which allows people to play the old-fashioned way on a split screen, sitting side-by-side.
I’m pretty sure this feature also exists on the PC version.
But yes, split-screen is an endangered species at this point. Halo Infinite dropped the feature and Forza is about to launch without it. Helldivers used to have shared-screen co-op, and now it’s online-only. The Quake 2 remaster supports 8 player split-screen, which makes so much sense in the age of large HD TVs that I can’t believe no one bothers with it, but FPS games in general are also almost extinct, so maybe that comes with that territory. Hardly any game is going to have as demanding of a use case as Baldur’s Gate 3, so I’d really like to see more games sacrifice some graphical fidelity in order to support the feature, if possible. Just about any multiplayer game these days is designed to be a live service that you log into every day rather than a game that you can play through for a handful of hours with friends and have a satisfying experience. It’s money left on the table when there’s only so many of the former that the market can possibly sustain.
FPS games in general are almost extinct
Uh, huh? You living under a rock? FPS games are very much alive, unless you meant to specify.
I mean the kinds that aren’t extraction shooters or battle royales or some other kind of “live service” that pretends it’s a service so it doesn’t have to admit that it’s a bad product. Something more substantial than the crop of “boomer shooters”, with co-op and/or friendly deathmatch; something with objective design and a story that’s interesting to follow. Basically what we used to get between the late 90s up through the middle of the last decade; what Halo used to be before they decided it had to be both open world and a live service.
Such a scum bag move by Sony that I have to buy another DS5 to play this with my daughter on PS5 when I have several perfectly good DS4s whose only purpose at this point is to occupy a landfill it seems.
I love couch co-op, but BG3 has all manner of bugs in co-op on PS5.
Your PSN name and a “mute” icon is overlaid at all times in the top corner of the screen where your rolls and character approval/disapproval information should appear.
From about halfway through Act 1, swapping characters (which you do all the time) triggers multi second pauses for both players.
Cut scene bugs, like invisible characters, no lip sync, no voice acting, voice acting only on alternate lines, one cut scene didn’t actually load at all, just leaving me with the text and a screen full of fog.
We also had no tutorials, but this does appear to be rectified now via a patch released yesterday.
Not sure what happened to the horn-fest other players got, but I suspect that co-op players aren’t getting full “reputation” with NPCs, as this appears to be tracked individually.
That’s pretty interesting considering that problems getting co-op working “properly” on Series S is the reason we’ve been given thus far for a lack of XBOX release.
I know it’s been described as a performance and optimization issue since Microsoft demands feature parity between Series X and S but to hear that the mode preventing an XBOX release doesn’t even actually work properly on PS5 is… amusing… And disappointing but mostly amusing.
Series S performance with it like this would have been something to behold.
I’m not sure why “performance mode” is disabled in co-op either. In single player it runs at a decent pace. It’s just as soon as player two joins that it starts to feel like a PS3 game.
I mean, it’s still fun, the underlying game is clearly good, and occasionally the hitching stops for a few minutes and it’s less frustrating, but it soon comes back again. It’s like it’s doing something daft like reloading the zone between characters.
I personally believe couch co-op is so much better than online, so I hope it does. My biggest gripe with online co-op is that there will be times when your Internet can drop, or your game/voice chat program might decide to crash on you, or something equally as annoying like your friend (or you) lagging up a storm and making it hard to play.
At least with couch co-op I can be more sure that I ain’t gonna have any of those problems causing as much issues (besides the game crashing). And I also get the enjoyment of being in the same room with a friend.
